Anthropologydocshare02.docshare.tips/files/11680/116801103.pdf · 7. Witchcraft, Sorcery, Divination, and Magic 280 Text 280 8. Ghosts, Souls, and Ancestors: Power of the Dead 332

Anthropology

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Text: Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural, Eighth EditionMoro−Myers−Lehmann

Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion8th Edition

Moro−Myers

McGraw-Hill��

Anthropology

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Anthropology

Contents

Moro−Myers−Lehmann • Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural, Eighth Edition

Front Matter 1

Preface 1

1. The Anthropological Study of Religion 5

Text 5

2. Myth, Symbolism, and Taboo 46

Text 46

3. Ritual 87

Text 87

4. Shamans, Priests, and Prophets 143

Text 143

5. Altered States of Consciousness and the Religious Use of Drugs 188

Text 188

6. Ethnomedicine: Religion and Healing 240

Text 240

7. Witchcraft, Sorcery, Divination, and Magic 280

Text 280

8. Ghosts, Souls, and Ancestors: Power of the Dead 332

Text 332

9. Old and New Religions: The Changing Spiritual Landscape 360

Text 360

10. Religion as Global Culture: Migration, Media, and Other Transnational Forces 412

Text 412

Back Matter 459

Glossary 459Bibliography 465

iii

Index 503

iv

Moro−Myers−Lehmann: Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion, Eighth Edition

Front Matter Preface 1© The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2010

ix

Preface

The Story of This Book

This volume was initially inspired by our desire to as-semble a book of readings that would captivate andengage students in undergraduate courses on the an-thropology of religion. At the time of the first edition,the other available texts—though of high scholarlystandards—failed to communicate the excitement ofanthropology in a form accessible to undergraduatestudents with relatively little background in the field.In our view, the cross-cultural study of religion andthe supernatural is one of the most compelling sub-fields of anthropology, a topic guaranteed to motivatestudents if presented in the right manner. The titleMagic, Witchcraft, and Religion: A Reader in the Anthro-pology of Religion was selected to highlight the broadrealm of religious expression addressed by anthro-pologists, far beyond what many students mightinitially think of as “religion” or “church.”

Informed by our own experiences as classroomteachers, we continue to feel that the best way toteach this subject is to present a range of scholarlyvoices in anthology format, from both classic andcontemporary authors, with ethnographic materialsfrom North America as well as the rest of the world.The original co-editors—Arthur Lehmann and JamesMyers—held decades of experience teaching at astate university with students of widely varyingmotivations and academic backgrounds, at gra-duate and undergraduate levels. Co-editor PamelaMoro’s teaching experience has been at liberal artscolleges, where instructors are likely to emphasizeclassroom discussion and the critical reading of texts.

Together we share the goal of conveying our ex-citement about anthropology and providing studentswith a solid grounding in the issues, theories, andfundamental ethnographic content of the discipline.We want to help students apply anthropological per-spectives to issues that are relevant both in their ownlives and in the world at large.

The Approach of the Text

As editors, our thinking about the content and scopeof this book has also, of course, been shaped by ourown experiences as ethnographers. One of the origi-nal editors, Arthur Lehmann, held a career-long fasci-nation with religion, medicine, and healing in CentralAfrica and the Caribbean, as his numerous trips tothe field attested. James’s research in the UnitedStates, initially with Native American communitiesin California and later on nonmainstream forms ofbody modification, led him to issues of identity, resis-tance, and, perhaps most simply, what it’s like to bea minority in a complex, rapidly changing society.Pamela’s research on music in Thailand has broughther to consider the interplay of music, ritual, festival,and the sacred worldview associated with Buddhism.Long hours watching dance processions at temples innorthern Thailand, sitting with musicians at crema-tion services in Bangkok, and observing altars honor-ing the deities associated with music have inspiredher consideration of religion as an integral part ofhuman experience. Much of the thinking behind therecent editions of this book springs from these expe-riences as well as our observations of changes within


Front Matter Preface2 © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2010

the anthropological study of religion itself. Our inclu-sion of a chapter on globalization is a response to theinescapable fact of global change and its preeminentplace in current anthropological scholarship. Ourcombined research experiences on three continentsleave us profoundly aware of the significance of reli-gious change in our world today.

The study of religion is historically significantwithin the discipline of anthropology. Some of theearliest questions asked by 19th-century anthropolo-gists had to do with the development of religion andthe pan-human concern with the ultimate. Through-out the 20th century, all major anthropological theo-rists addressed religion in one way or another. In themore recent eras of feminist, postmodern, and criticalanthropology, religion and the supernatural have re-mained key concerns—grounds for experimentalethnographic writing and grist for new ways ofthinking about culture. The study of religion has beenamenable to the four-fields approach of anthropol-ogy, most evident in studies of altered states of con-sciousness (including the religious use of drugs), eth-nomedicine, and questions about the relationshipbetween science and religion. Inquiry into this subjectbrings us to many of the issues facing humanitytoday—such as ethnic, political, and economic con-flicts expressed in terms of religion; controversies re-garding religious autonomy versus state authority, inthe United States and elsewhere; religion as a forcefor emancipation as well as a way to maintain the sta-tus quo, for local agency and globalization. In ourown multicultural society, religion is one of the mostsalient features of difference, and, for many of us,brushing up against individuals of different faiths isone of the main ways we encounter cultural contraston a local level. We sincerely feel that the anthropo-logical approach to understanding religion (assistedby contributions from related fields, such as religiousstudies, sociology, and psychology) offers soundhope for a just and tolerant humanity.

Content and Organization

As in earlier editions of this book, in our selection ofcontent we have chosen not to emphasize any partic-ular ideological angle within the anthropology of re-ligion. The multiple authors included in each chapterrepresent a range of interests, geographic foci, andways of looking at each subject. Discipline-based

vocabulary and style of scholarly writing varies fromauthor to author, often reflecting the time period ofeach article’s original publication. Our hope is thatthe contrasts and continuities among the various arti-cles within each chapter will help readers begin tocompare and evaluate not only content but also theapproaches of different anthropologists.

The book is divided into ten chapters, beginningwith a broad view of anthropological ways of lookingat religion and moving on to some of the core topicswithin the subject, such as myth, ritual, and the vari-ous types of religious specialists. Although instruc-tors may choose to utilize articles in any order theywish, there is a loose continuity to the chapters:thinking about certain types of specialists (for exam-ple, shamans) leads us to consider altered states ofconsciousness, which in turn takes us to religion andhealing and then to the related topics of magic, div-ination, and witchcraft. The scope of the book widensagain in the concluding chapters, as we present mate-rials on religious change, from small-scale move-ments of protest to contemporary flows of culture,transcending the boundaries of nations.

Key Features

• Chapter-Opening Essays: These succinct,informative essays introduce the reader to thecentral concepts that unify each chapter.

• Article Introductions: Each article is prefaced witha brief introduction, drawing attention to the keythemes and arguments of the work. In somecases, we have used these article introductions tomake connections between selections in thevolume or to recommend related scholarlyworks. Students may wish to use these shorteditorial introductions not only as preparationfor reading each article but also as a review.

• Breadth of Coverage: As in previous editions,we have retained our commitment to integratingthe analysis of religion in the West withethnographic studies of less familiar examples.In most chapters, one or two articles dealspecifically with contemporary North America.

• Classic and Modern Selections: Although themajority of the articles are contemporary pieces,we have also included classic readings by MaryDouglas, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Clifford Geertz,

x | PREFACE


Front Matter Preface 3© The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2010

Horace Miner, Bronislaw Malinowski, VictorTurner, Anthony F. C. Wallace, and Eric Wolf.

Features of the Eighth Edition

• Chapter 5 is significantly widened to addressforms of altered consciousness, including tranceand possession, while retaining fascinatingarticles on the religious use of drugs.

• Continue commitment to classicalanthropological literature by including worksfrom the mid 20th century by Claude Lévi-Strauss, John Beattie, Eric R. Wolf, BarbaraMyerhoff, Roy Rappaport, and GerardoReichel-Dolmatoff.

• Increased attention to charismatic, evangelical,and fundamentalist Christianity in articles byThomas J. Csordas and Susan Friend Harding.

• Coverage of anthropological approaches isbroadened to include embodiment theory andthe analysis of language and culture.

• New articles on Islam, Buddhism, andShamanism offer accessible introductions toworld religions as studied by anthropologists.

• Timely issues are addressed in new articles on abortion rituals, raves, terror and violence,Santeria, and Hmong shamanism in America.

• A list of suggested readings concludes eachchapter. These lists may be of assistance to theinstructor, but they are also intended to providea foundation for students pursuing independentresearch on topics related to the chapter.

• A comprehensive glossary, with terms new tothe present edition, as well as an extensive indexof subjects, authors, and titles and a bibliographyof references from the volume’s articles, offerstudents further help.

Supplements

Visit our companion Web site at www.mhhe.com/moro8 for instructor resources. (The password-protected instructor center contains an indispensableinstructor’s manual and comprehensive test bank.)

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our thanks to the scholars,teachers, and students who have shaped our under-standing of anthropology and inspired our thinkingabout the anthropology of religion. We acknowledgewith thanks the following reviewers, whose sugges-tions and comments guided our preparation of theeighth edition: Hex Kleinmartin, Buffalo State Uni-versity; Derek Milne, Pasadena City College; WendyFonarow, Glendale College; Joseph Eisenlauer, PierceCollege; Susan Johnston, George Washington Univer-sity; Jacque Swartout, Cypress College; Vance Geiger,University of Central Florida; Tamara Cheshire,California State University, Sacramento; DavidKnowlton, Utah Valley State College. We also thankPam’s students at Willamette University for theircritical evaluation of articles and their inspiring enthusiasm for anthropology. Pam owes thanks tocolleagues Rebecca Dobkins, Joyce Millen, and PeterWogan for their friendly support and bibliographictips, as well as to Saad Moro for assistance with thehands-on aspects of manuscript preparation. We aregrateful to Elaine Cha for her studious preparationof the instructional supplements. We extend a veryspecial thank you to Sandra Booth for her cheerfuland capable work on copyright permissions, in-cluding extensive correspondence with publishers.Finally, we would like to thank our families andfriends for their patience and good humor through-out this project.

P.A.M.J.E.M.

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1. The Anthropological Study of Religion

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1

CHAPTER ONE

TheAnthropologicalStudy of Religion

Anthropologists have always been interested in the origins of religion, although the lack ofboth written records and archaeological evidence has made the subject speculative. It is rea-sonable to assume, however, that religion, like material culture, has a prehistory. Surely, un-certainty and change have always existed, exposing people in all ages to real and imaginedthreats and anxieties. The human animal alone senses a pattern behind the facts of existenceand worries about life here and in the hereafter. We are born, we live, and we die. And al-though this is true of other animals, only humans are aware of the precariousness of life andthe inevitability of death. As William Howells has observed, “Man’s life is hard, very hard.And he knows it, poor soul; that is the vital thing. He knows that he is forever confrontedwith the Four Horsemen—death, famine, disease, and the malice of other men” (1962: 16).

Paleoanthropological evidence shows that Neanderthals buried their dead, often in aflexed position. Such deliberate burials, many feel, indicate the beginnings of religion andthe conception of an afterlife. Interpretations of other items at Neanderthal sites, such asflower pollen, bear skulls, and red and black pigments, are more controversial. Such itemsmay tell us something about the origins of religious behavior, but they may also simply bepresent accidentally.

In contrast, the era of Homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans in the biological sense)yields tremendous evidence of religious beliefs—more elaborate burials, carved figurines(“Venuses”), and magnificent cave art. And during the Neolithic period, which began aboutten thousand years ago, burials indicate a deep respect for the power of the dead. It is likelythat during this period, which is marked by the cultivation of crops and the domesticationof animals, cycles of nature became an important feature of magic and religious beliefs.Drought, storms, and other natural perils of the farmer could have created a growing de-pendence on supernatural powers.

The antiquity of religion indirectly testifies to its utility; however, the usefulness of super-naturalism to contemporary societies is a clearer, more provable demonstration of its func-tions. The many forms of adversity facing individuals and groups require explanation andaction; we are unwilling to let challenges to health, safety, and salvation go unchecked. Just

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as adversity is universal, so, too, is the use of religion as an explanation for and solution toadversity. Although the form religion takes is as diverse as its practitioners, all religionsseek to answer questions that cannot be explained in terms of objective knowledge—topermit people reasonable explanations for often unreasonable events and phenomena bydemonstrating a cause-and-effect relationship between the supernatural and the humancondition. This may be its most important function.

In his article “Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation” (1966: 109–17), MelfordE. Spiro has distinguished three sets of basic desires (cognitive, substantive, and expressive),each of which is satisfied by a corresponding function of religion (adjustive, adaptive, and in-tegrative). Spiro’s first and second functions are basically those of explanation and solution:the adjustive function of religion, as he defines it, is to satisfy the cognitive desires we experi-ence as we attempt to understand what goes on around us (illness, natural phenomena); theadaptive function seeks to satisfy substantive desires (the desire for rain or for victory inwar). In his third category, however, Spiro moves to different territory: the often unconscious,expressive desires made up of what Spiro calls painful drives and painful motives.

According to Spiro, painful drives are anxieties concerning infantile and primitivefears (fears of destruction or of one’s own destructiveness). Painful motives are culturallyforbidden—for example, types of aggressive or sexual behavior that result in feelings ofshame, inadequacy, and moral anxiety. Because of the pain they create in an individual,these drives and motives are usually relegated to the unconscious, where, “in the absence ofother, or of more efficient means,” religion becomes the vehicle “by which, symbolically,they can be handled and expressed.” Thus, in what Spiro calls the integrative function ofsupernaturalism, “religious belief and ritual provide the content for culturally constitutedprojective mechanisms by which unconscious fears and anxieties may be reduced and re-pressed motives may be satisfied” (1966: 115).

Over the years, scholars have taken several approaches in their attempts to understandthe reasons for the existence of religious behavior. The most prominent of these approachesare psychological, sociological, and anthropological. Spiro’s belief that religious behaviorreduces unconscious fears typifies the psychological approach, which, briefly stated, seesreligion as functioning to reduce anxiety. For example, the famous British social anthropol-ogist Bronislaw Malinowski held that the proper use of religious rites reduced anxietiesbrought on by crisis. (Like all theorists who apply the psychological approach, Freud alsobelieved that religion and ritual functioned to reduce anxieties, but, unlike others, he sawreligion as a neurotic need that humans would eventually outgrow.) In contrast, the socio-logical viewpoint stresses the societal origins of religion. The French sociologist EmileDurkheim, for example, viewed religion as a manifestation of social solidarity and collec-tive beliefs. According to Durkheim, members of society create religious objects, rituals, be-liefs, and symbols in order to integrate their cultures. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, a British socialanthropologist, agreed with Durkheim that participation in annual religious rites func-tioned to increase social solidarity.

Although their functional analyses of religious behavior and phenomena do explain, inpart, the universality of religion, neither the psychological nor the sociological theorists ad-equately provide answers to the origin of religion. Both approaches are too limited in focus,centered as they are on human emotions and social structure respectively; neither exploresthe wide variety of cultural expressions of religion. Because religious experience, whereverit is observed, displays such great variation of cognitive and phenomenal expression, any-thing less than a wide-ranging holistic approach would not allow true comparisons; as a re-sult, generalizations about the nature of religious systems would be incomplete as well asinaccurate.

2 | THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY OF RELIGION




The third, the anthropological approach to the study of religion, is by its very natureholistic, combining not only sociological and psychological but historical, semantic, andevolutionary perspectives as well. Anthropologists today attempt to go beyond the observ-able to the analysis of symbolic forms. In order to make generalizations on pan-human reli-gious behavior, symbology, and ideology, however, anthropologists must work from thecommon basis of a definition of religion. Without an acceptable and accurate definition, an-thropologists would be unable to establish a common basis for comparison of religionscross-culturally.

Many definitions of religion have been generated by anthropologists. Edward B. Tylor,the father of modern anthropology, described religion as the belief in spiritual beings, whathe called “animism,” the most primitive form of religion. At the opposite extreme fromTylor’s open-ended definition, which set no limits as to what the study of spiritual beingswould embrace, are a majority of contemporary anthropologists who, like Spiro, define re-ligion more narrowly as “an institution consisting of culturally postulated superhuman be-ings” (1966: 96). At first glance, Tylor’s and Spiro’s definitions appear similar, but Spiro’suse of the term superhuman, unlike Tylor’s spiritual beings, emphasizes an aura of omnipo-tence unknown to the living. Further, Spiro’s position that religion is an institution places itin the realm of phenomena that can be empirically studied, as any other cultural institutioncan be. Still, similarities in Tylor’s and Spiro’s definitions are apparent: both show, for ex-ample, that religion is the study of the nature of the unnatural. Spirits are not of this world,nor are superhumans; indeed, both are “supernatural,” which has been defined by the an-thropologist Edward Norbeck “to include all that is not natural, that which is regarded asextraordinary, not of the ordinary world, mysterious or unexplainable in ordinary terms”(1961: 11).

Expanding the definition of religion beyond spiritual and superhuman beings to includethe extraordinary, the mysterious, and unexplainable allows a more comprehensive view ofreligious behaviors among the peoples of the world and permits the anthropological investi-gation of phenomena such as magic, sorcery, curses, and other practices that hold meaningfor both preliterate and literate societies. For this reason, this book focuses on the concept ofthe supernatural and incorporates a wide variety of contemporary examples of religiousbeliefs and practices that demonstrate the breadth of human ideology.

Through their comparative research, anthropologists have shown that religious prac-tices and beliefs vary in part as a result of the level of social structure in a given society.In The Birth of the Gods (1960), Guy Swanson applied a statistical approach to support the argument that religious forms are related to social development, and in Religion: AnAnthropological View (1966: 84–101), Anthony F. C. Wallace presented a provocative typologyof religious behavior based on the concept of the cult institution—“a set of rituals all havingthe same general goal, all explicitly rationalized by a set of similar or related beliefs, and allsupported by the same social group” (p. 75). Ranging from the simplest to the most com-plex, Wallace describes individualistic, shamanic, communal, and ecclesiastical cult institu-tions. Each succeeding or more complex level contains all components of those preceding it.The ecclesiastical, for example, contains all the elements of the less complex individualistic,shamanistic, and communal cult institutions.

According to Wallace, in the simplest, individualistic cult institution, each person functionsas his or her own specialist without need for such intermediaries as shamans or priests. Ex-amples occur in both modern and primitive societies (the dream cult among the Iroquois,sealing magic among the Trobriand Islanders, and various cults among the Americans). Thenext level, the shamanic, also found in cultures around the world, marks the beginning of areligious division of labor. Individual part-time practitioners are designated by experience,

INTRODUCTION | 3




birth, or training to help lay clients enlist the aid of the supernatural. The communal cult in-stitution is even more complex, with laypeople handling important religious rituals for peo-ple in such special categories as secret societies, kinship groups, and age groups. (Examplesinclude the ancestor ceremonies of the Chinese and some African tribal groups, Iroquoisagricultural rituals, and Australian puberty rituals.) Although specialists such as shamans,skilled speakers, and dancers may participate, the lay group assumes the primary responsi-bility for conducting the sacred performance; an extensive religious hierarchy is still not inevidence. It is in the fourth, ecclesiastical cult institution that a professional religious clergyis formally elected or appointed and the division of labor is sharply drawn, with thelaypeople usually passive participants instead of active performers. Ecclesiastical cult insti-tutions have characteristically worshipped either an Olympian pantheon of gods (as amongthe ancient Greeks and Romans) or a monotheistic deity (as among the Judeo-Christian andMuslim religions).

The differences between religious behavior and belief in so-called primitive and moderncultures has been of great interest to anthropologists over the years. Howells (1962: 5) ob-served several characteristics that he believed distinguished the major world religions fromthe belief systems of more primitive cultures. First, the “great faiths” are messianic, theirorigins stemming from such charismatic figures as Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad.Second, they have a rigid ethical form. Third, each has a missionary, imperialistic aspect,seeing itself as the one and only religion. Finally, each displays an exclusiveness in its beliefsystem to the degree of being intolerant of other faiths. Howells is quick to point out that hehas been generalizing, reminding the reader that the varied nature and heterogeneity of na-tive cults may make an understanding of their nature arduous, especially for anyone awareonly of the differences among Christian sects (1962: 6). His concluding remark is importantto an understanding of all the articles in this book; referring to the “perfect legitimacy” ofnative cults, he states that the

primitive devotees are not people of another planet, but are essentially exactly like us, andare engaged with precisely the same kind of religious appetite as the civilized. And thatappetite is fed and stilled by their own religions. This is very important; it is why we aretaking those religions seriously. They are not toys. They are what we might be doing our-selves; and they are what most of our ancestors were indeed doing, two thousand years agotoday. (1962: 7)

Tomes have been written on the universality and tenacity of religion, even when theywere faced with harsh repression by governments, modernization, and economic global-ization. Vernon Reynolds and Ralph Tanner maintain that

there is more to life, it seems, than the secular state can encompass. People want religion andfaith; many of them could hardly imagine life without these things. . . . Religions are alsodown to earth, and we believe that it is this contact with the material world that explains thecontinued existence of religions in all countries, why they have survived and multipliedduring history, and why they are a real force in the world today. (1995: 4, 9)

The five articles in this chapter have been selected to provide a basic understanding of theanthropological approach to the study of the supernatural. Each stresses the use of the com-parative method, the very anchor for anthropological thought.

In the first article, Clifford Geertz demonstrates the importance of a historical, psycho-logical, sociological, and semantic approach to the study of religion.

Next, Marvin Harris discusses the fascinating possibility of religion among nonhumanspecies. In addition, he advances the notion that spiritual beings are found also in the reli-gions of prestate societies.





In the third article, Dorothy Lee shows how religion is part and parcel of a preliteratepeople’s total way of life. Lee tells us about preliterate societies in which ceremonies andtheir preparation occupy most of a year.

In the fourth selection, Claude E. Stipe suggests possible explanations of why anthro-pologists traditionally have regarded missionaries as “the enemy.”

Finally, in an article written for the present volume, Pamela Moro considers how an-thropological concerns have shaped the study of Buddhism in Southeast Asia. The articleincludes an extended look at the recent popularity of amulets in Thailand, during a time ofsocial unease.

References

Howells, William1962 The Heathens: Primitive Man and His Religions. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Norbeck, Edward1961 Religion in Primitive Society. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Reynolds, Vernon, and Ralph Tanner 1995 The Social Ecology of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Spiro, Melford E.1966 “Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation.” In Michael Banton, ed.,

Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, pp. 85–126. London: TavistockPublications Limited for the Association of Social Anthropologists of theCommonwealth.

Swanson, Guy1960 The Birth of the Gods: The Origin of Primitive Beliefs. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press.

Wallace, Anthony F. C.1966 Religion: An Anthropological View. New York: Random House.

INTRODUCTION | 5




6

The anthropological study of religion has beenhighly sensitive to changes in the general intellectualand moral climate of the day; at the same time, it hasbeen a powerful factor in the creation of that climate.Since the early discussion by Edward Tylor, interestin the beliefs and rituals of distant, ancient, or sim-pler peoples has been shaped by an awareness ofcontemporary issues. The questions that anthropolo-gists have pursued among exotic religions havearisen from the workings—or the misworkings—ofmodern Western society, and particularly from itsrestless quest for self-discovery. In turn, their find-ings have profoundly affected the course that questhas taken and the perspective at which it has arrived.

Perhaps the chief reason for the rather special roleof comparative religious studies is that issues which,when raised within the context of Western culture,led to extreme social resistance and personal turmoilcould be freely and even comfortably handled interms of bizarre, presumably primitive, and thus—also presumably—fanciful materials from long agoor far away. The study of “primitive religions” couldpass as the study of superstition, supposedly unre-lated to the serious religious and moral concerns ofadvanced civilization, at best either a sort of vagueforeshadowing of them or a grotesque parody uponthem. This made it possible to approach all sorts oftouchy subjects, such as polytheism, value rela-tivism, possession, and faith healing, from a frankand detached point of view. One could ask searchingquestions about the historicity of myth amongPolynesians; when asked in relation to Christianity,these same questions were, until quite recently,deeply threatening. One could discuss the projec-

1

ReligionClifford Geertz

In his classic work “Religion as a Cultural System” (1966), Clifford Geertz argued for a broadenedanalysis of religion. This argument, aimed primarily at the narrowness of the British sociological ap-proach to the study of comparative religion, was accepted by American ethnologists and reflected intheir contemporary research. In the following article, Geertz pursues his goal, demonstrating the im-portance of his historical, psychological, sociological, and semantic approaches to the study of religionand concluding that a mature theory of religion will integrate these approaches into a conceptual sys-tem whose exact form remains to be discovered. Geertz also explores the view of scholars who regard“primitive thought” as a distinctive mode of reasoning and/or a special body of knowledge, notingthat their work persists as a minor but important theme in anthropological studies of religion.

Geertz’s own work epitomizes the symbolic and interpretive approaches within anthropology. Themost acclaimed response to Geertz, questioning the entire category of “religion” and urging alterna-tives to the symbolic approach, comes from Talal Asad, in his 1983 article, “The Construction of Re-ligion as an Anthropological Category” (reprinted in Asad’s Geneaologies of Religion. Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Throughout his long and influential career, CliffordGeertz carried out fieldwork in Java, Bali, and Morocco. He passed away in 2006.

Reprinted by permission of the publisher from INTERNATIONALENCYCLOPEDIAOF THE SOCIALSCIENCES, David L. Sills,Editor. Vol. 13, pp. 398–406. Copyright 1972 by Crowell Collierand Macmillan.




tion of erotic wishes found in the “totemic” rites ofAustralian aborigines, the social roots and functionsof African “ancestor worship,” or the protoscientificquality of Melanesian “magical thought,” withoutinvolving oneself in polemical debate and emo-tional distress. The application of the comparativemethod—the essence of anthropological thought—to religion permitted the growth of a resolutelyscientific approach to the spiritual dimensions ofhuman life.

Through the thin disguise of comparative methodthe revolutionary implications of the work of suchmen as Tylor, Durkheim, Robertson Smith, Freud,Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown soon becameapparent—at first mainly to philosophers, theolo-gians, and literary figures, but eventually to the edu-cated public in general. The meticulous descriptionsof tribal curiosities such as soul loss, shamanism,circumcision, blood sacrifice, sorcery, tree burial,garden magic, symbolic cannibalism, and animalworship have been caught up in some of the granderintellectual battles of the last hundred years—fromthose over evolutionism and historicism in the latenineteenth century to those over positivism and exis-tentialism today. Psychoanalysts and phenomenolo-gists, Marxists and Kantians, racists and egalitarians,absolutists and relativists, empiricists and rational-ists, believers and skeptics have all had recourse tothe record—partial, inconsistent, and shot throughwith simple error as it is—of the spiritual life of tribalpeoples to support their positions and belabor thoseof their opponents. If interest in “primitive religion”among savants of all sorts has been remarkably high,consensus concerning its nature and significancehas not.

At least three major intellectual developmentshave exercised a critical influence on the anthropo-logical study of religion: (1) the emergence, in the lat-ter half of the nineteenth century, of history as thesovereign science of man; (2) the positivist reactionagainst this sovereignty in the first decades of thetwentieth century and the radical split of the socialsciences into resolutely psychological approaches,on the one hand, and resolutely sociological ones, onthe other; and (3) the growth, in the interwar period,of a concern with the role of ideational factors in theregulation of social life. With the first of these camean emphasis on the nature of primitive reasoningand the stages of its evolution into civilized thought.

With the second came an investigation of the emo-tional basis of religious ritual and belief and the sep-arate examination of the role of ritual and belief insocial integration. The concern with value systemsand other features of the ideational realm led to anexploration of the philosophical dimensions of reli-gious ideas, particularly the symbolic vehicles interms of which those ideas are expressed.

Evolutionism and Its Enemies

Like so much else in anthropology, the study of thereligious notions of primitive peoples arose withinthe context of evolutionary theory. In the nineteenthcentury, to think systematically about human affairswas to think historically—to seek out survivals of themost elementary forms and to trace the steps bywhich these forms subsequently developed. Andthough, in fact, Tylor, Morgan, Frazer, and the restdrew more on the synthetic social-stage theories ofsuch men as Comte and Hegel than on the analyticrandom-variation and natural-selection ideas ofDarwin, the grand concept of evolution was sharedby both streams of thought: namely, that the com-plex, heterogeneous present has arisen, more or lessgradually, out of a simpler, more uniform past. Therelics of this past are still to be found scattered, likeGalápagos turtles, in out-of-the-way places aroundus. Tylor, an armchair scholar, made no “voyage ofthe Beagle.” But in combing and organizing thereports of missionaries, soldiers, and explorers, heproceeded from the same general premise as didDarwin, and indeed most of the leading minds of theday. For them a comprehensive, historically orientedcomparison of all forms of a phenomenon, from themost primitive to the most advanced, was the royalroad to understanding the nature of the phenome-non itself.

In Tylor’s view, the elementary form out of whichall else developed was spirit worship—animism. Theminimal definition of religion was “a belief in spiri-tual beings.” The understanding of religion thuscame down to an understanding of the basis uponwhich such a belief arose at its most primitive level.Tylor’s theory was intellectualistic. Belief in spiritsbegan as an uncritical but nonetheless rational effortto explain such puzzling empirical phenomena asdeath, dreams, and possession. The notion of a sepa-rable soul rendered these phenomena intelligible in

GEERTZ • RELIGION | 7




terms of soul departure, soul wandering, and soulinvasion. Tylor believed that the idea of a soul wasused to explain more and more remote and hithertoinexplicable natural occurrences, until virtuallyevery tree and rock was haunted by some sort of gos-samer presence. The higher, more developed formsof “belief in spiritual beings,” first polytheism, ulti-mately monotheism, were founded upon this ani-mistic basis, the urphilosophy of all mankind, andwere refined through a process of critical question-ing by more advanced thinkers. For this earnestQuaker the religious history of the world was a his-tory of progressive, even inevitable, enlightenment.

This intellectualistic, “up from darkness” strainhas run through most evolutionist thought about re-ligion. For Frazer, a nineteenth-century figure wholived for forty years into the twentieth century with-out finding it necessary to alter either his views orhis methods, the mental progress involved was frommagic to religion to science. Magic was the primor-dial form of human thought; it consisted in mistak-ing either spatiotemporal connection (“sympatheticmagic,” as when drinking the blood of an ox trans-fers its strength to the drinker) or phenomenal simi-larity (“imitative magic,” as when the sound ofdrumming induces thunderheads to form) for truescientific causality. For Durkheim, evolutionary ad-vance consisted in the emergence of specific, ana-lytic, profane ideas about “cause” or “category” or“relationship” from diffuse, global, sacred images.These “collective representations,” as he called them,of the social order and its moral force included suchsacra as “mana,” “totem,” and “god.” For MaxWeber, the process was one of “rationalization”: theprogressive organization of religious concern intocertain more precisely defined, more specifically fo-cused, and more systematically conceived culturalforms. The level of sophistication of such theories(and, hence, their present relevance) varies verywidely. But, like Tylor’s, they all conceive of theevolution of religion as a process of cultural differen-tiation: the diffuse, all-embracing, but rather unsys-tematic and uncritical religious practices of primitivepeoples are transformed into the more specificallyfocused, more regularized, less comprehensivelyauthoritative practices of the more advanced civi-lizations. Weber, in whom both intellectualism andoptimism were rather severely tempered by a chronicapprehensiveness, called this transformation the“disenchantment (Entzauberung) of the world.”

On the heels of evolutionism came, of course,anti-evolutionism. This took two quite differentforms. On one side there was a defense, mainly byRoman Catholic scholars, of the so-called degrada-tion theory. According to this theory, the original rev-elation of a high god to primitive peoples was latercorrupted by human frailty into the idol worship ofpresent-day tribal peoples. On the other side therewas an attack, mainly by American scholars of theBoas school, upon the “armchair speculation” ofevolutionary thinkers and a call for its replacementby more phenomenological approaches to the studyof tribal custom.

The first of these reactions led, logically enough, toa search among the most primitive of existing peoplesfor traces of belief in a supreme being. The resultingdispute, protracted, often bitter, and stubbornly in-conclusive as to the existence of such “primitivemonotheism,” turned out to be unproductive—asidefrom some interesting discussions by Lang (1898)concerning culture heroes and by Eliade (1949) con-cerning sky gods—and both the issue and the the-ory that gave rise to it have now receded from thecenter of scholarly attention. The second reactionhas had a longer life and great impact on ethno-graphic methodology, but it too is now in partialeclipse. Its main contributions—aside from somedevastating empirical demolitions of evolutionistgeneralization—came in the field of cultural diffu-sion. Leslie Spier’s study of the spread of the SunDance through the Great Plains and A. L. Kroeber’sapplication of the age-area approach to aboriginalreligion in California are good examples of produc-tive diffusion studies. However, apart from theirimportance for culture history, the contribution ofsuch distributional studies to our understanding ofreligious ideas, attitudes, and practices as such hasnot been great, and few students now pursue thesestudies. The call of the Boas school for thorough fieldresearch and disciplined inductive analysis has beenheeded; but its fruits, insofar as religious studies areconcerned, have been reaped by others less inhibitedtheoretically.

Psychological Approaches

The major reaction against the intellectual traditionof the cultural evolutionists took place not within an-thropology, however, but in the general context of thepositivist revolt against the domination of historicist





modes of thought in the social sciences. In theyears before World War I the rise of the systematicpsychologism of psychoanalysis and of the equallysystematic sociologism of the Année sociologiqueforced evolutionist theorizing into the background,even though the leaders of both movements—Freudand Durkheim—were themselves still very stronglyinfluenced by it. Perhaps even more relevant, it in-troduced a sharp split into anthropological studiesof religion which has resolved into the militantlypsychodynamic and the militantly social-structuralapproaches.

Freud’s major work in this field is, of course,Totem and Taboo, a book anthropologists in generalhave had great difficulty in evaluating—as Kroeber’stwo reviews of it, the first facilely negative, the sec-ond, two decades later, ambivalently positive,demonstrate. The source of the difficulty has been aninability or an unwillingness to disentangle Freud’sbasic thesis—that religious rituals and beliefs arehomologous with neurotic symptoms—from thechimerical ethnology and obsolete biology withinwhich he insisted upon setting it. Thus, the easy de-molition of what Kroeber called Freud’s “just sostory” concerning primal incest, parricide, and guiltwithin some protohuman horde (“in the beginningwas the deed”) was all too often mistaken for totalrejection of the rather more penetrating propositionthat the obsessions, dreams, and fantasies of collec-tive life spring from the same intrapsychic sources asdo those of the isolated individual.

For those who read further in Freud’s writings,however—especially in “Mourning and Melancholia”and “Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices”—itbecame apparent that what was at issue was the ap-plicability of theories concerning the forms andcauses of individual psychopathology to the expla-nation of the forms and causes of public myth andgroup ritual. Róheim (1950) analyzed Australian cir-cumcision rites against the background of orthodoxFreudian theories of psychosexual development, es-pecially those clustered around the Oedipal predica-ment. However, he explicitly avoided recourse tospeculations about buried memories of primordialoccurrences. Bettelheim (1954) adopted a similar,though more systematic and less orthodox, approachto initiation practices generally, seeing them as so-cially instituted symbolic mechanisms for the defini-tion and stabilization of sexual identity. Kardiner(1945), taking a neo-Freudian position, sought to

demonstrate that the religious institutions of tribalpeoples were projections of a “basic personalitystructure,” formed not by the action of an un-consciously remembered historical trauma but bythe more observable traumas produced by child-training practices, an approach later extended andcast into quantitative form by Whiting (Whiting andChild 1953). Erikson (1950), drawing upon develop-ments in ego psychology which conceived the emer-gence of the adult personality to be a joint product ofpsychobiological maturation, cultural context, andhistorical experience, interpreted the religious no-tions of the Yurok and the Sioux in terms of certainbasic modes of relating to the world. These relation-ships gradually developed during the whole courseof childhood and adolescence. Others—notablyDevereux (1951)—have attempted to use the autobio-graphical, case-history approach to determine the re-lations between personality dynamics and religiousorientation in particular individuals; still others—notably Hallowell (1937–1954)—have employedprojective tests, questionnaires, reports of dreams, orsystematic interviews toward similar ends.

In all such studies, even when individual authorshave dissented from many of Freud’s specific views,the basic premise has been Freudian: that religiouspractices can be usefully interpreted as expressions ofunconscious psychological forces—and this has be-come, amid much polemic, an established traditionof inquiry. In recent years, however, responsiblework of this type has come to question the degree towhich one is justified in subjecting historically cre-ated and socially institutionalized cultural forms to asystem of analysis founded on the treatment of themental illnesses of individuals. For this reason,the future of this approach depends perhaps moreupon developments within psychoanalysis, now in asomewhat uncertain state, than within anthropol-ogy. So far, perhaps only Kluckhohn’s pioneeringNavaho Witchcraft (1944) has attempted to systemati-cally relate psychological factors to social and cul-tural aspects of primitive religion. The great majorityof psychoanalytic studies of tribal beliefs and ritesremain willfully parochial.

In any case, not all psychological approaches toreligion have been Freudian. Jungian influenceshave had a certain impact, especially on studies ofmyth. Campbell (1949), for example, has stressed thecontinuity of certain themes both cross-culturallyand temporally. These themes have been interpreted





as expressions of transpersonal constancies in un-conscious mental functioning which are at the sametime expressions of fundamental cosmic realities.

Simple emotionalist theories have also been ex-tremely popular. There have been two main varietiesof these: awe theories and confidence theories. Awetheories have been based on some usually rathervague notion of “religious thrill” experienced byhuman beings when brought face to face with cosmicforces. A wide range of ethnologists, from MaxMüller through Lang and Marett to Lowie andGoldenweiser, have accepted such theories in oneform or another. However, awe theories remainmere notations of the obvious—that religious experi-ence is, in the nature of the case, touched with in-tense feelings of the grandeur of the universe inrelation to the self and of the vulnerability of the selfin relation to the universe. This is not explanation,but circular reasoning.

Confidence theories also begin with a notion ofman’s inward sense of weakness, and especially ofhis fears—of disease, of death, of ill fortune of allkinds—and they see religious practices as designedto quiet such fears, either by explaining them away,as in doctrines of the afterlife, or by claiming to linkthe individual to external sources of strength, as inprayer. The best-known confidence theory was thatset forth by Malinowski. He regarded magic asenabling man to pursue uncertain but essential en-deavors by assuring him of their ultimate success.Confidence, or anxiety-reduction, theories, like awetheories, clearly have empirical foundation but donot adequately explore the complex relationshipbetween fear and religious activity. They are notrooted in any systematic conceptualization of men-tal functioning and so merely point to mattersdesperately in need of clarification, without in factclarifying them.

Sociological Approaches

The sociological approach to the analysis of the reli-gions of nonliterate peoples proceeded independentof, and even at variance with, the psychoanalyticapproach, but it shared a concern with the samephenomenon: the peculiar “otherness,” the extraor-dinary, momentous, “set apart” quality of sacred (or“taboo”) acts and objects, as contrasted with the pro-fane. The intense aura of high seriousness was traced

by Freud to the projection of unacceptable wishesrepressed from consciousness onto external objects.The dramatic ambivalence of the sacred—its para-doxical unification of the commanded and the for-bidden, the pure and the polluted, the salutary andthe dangerous—was a symbolic expression of theunderlying ambivalence of human desires. ForDurkheim, too, the extraordinary atmosphere sur-rounding sacred acts and objects was symbolic of ahidden reality, but a social, not a psychological one:the moral force of the human community.

Durkheim believed that the integrity of the socialorder was the primary requisite for human survival,and the means by which that integrity supersededindividual egocentricity was the primary problem ofsociological analysis. He saw Australian totemism(which he, like Freud, made the empirical focus ofhis work) as a mechanism to this end. For example,the collective rituals involving the emblems of thetotemic beings—the so-called bull roarers—arousedthe heightened emotions of mass behavior andevoked a deep sense of moral identification amongthe participants. The creation of social solidarity wasthe result of the common public veneration, byspecific groups of persons, of certain carefully desig-nated symbolic objects. These objects had no intrin-sic value except as perceptible representations of thesocial identity of the individuals. Collective worshipof consecrated bits of painted wood or stone createda moral community, a “church,” upon which restedthe viability of the major social units. These sancti-fied objects thus represented the system of rights andobligations implicit in the social order and the indi-vidual’s unformulated sense of its overriding signif-icance in his life. All sacred objects, beliefs, and acts,and the extraordinary emotions attending them,were outward expressions of inward social necessi-ties, and, in a famous phrase, God was the “symbolof society.” Few anthropologists have been able toswallow Durkheim’s thesis whole, when put thisbaldly. But the more moderate proposition thatreligious rituals and beliefs both reflect and act tosupport the moral framework underlying socialarrangements (and are in turn animated by it) hasgiven rise to what has become perhaps the mostpopular form of analysis in the anthropologicalstudy of religion. Usually called “functionalism”—or sometimes, to distinguish it from certain variantsdeemed objectionable, “structuralism”—this approach





found its champion in Radcliffe-Brown and its majordevelopment in Great Britain, though its influencehas now spread very much more widely.

Radcliffe-Brown (1952) agreed with Durkheim’spostulate that the main role (or “function”) of reli-gion was to celebrate and sustain the norms uponwhich the integration of society depends. But unlikeDurkheim (and like Freud), Radcliffe-Brown wasconcerned with the content of sacred symbols, andparticularly with the reasons why one object ratherthan another was absorbed into rite or woven intomyth. Why here stones, there water holes, here campcircles, there personified winds?

Durkheim had held this to be an arbitrary matter,contingent upon historical accident or psychologicalproclivity, beyond the reach of and irrelevant to soci-ological analysis. Radcliffe-Brown considered, how-ever, that man’s need for a concrete expression ofsocial solidarity was not sufficient explanation of thestructure of a people’s religious system. Somethingwas needed to tie the particular objects awarded sa-cred status (or, in his terminology, “ritual value”) tothe particular social interests they presumablyserved and reflected. Radcliffe-Brown, resolute em-piricist that he was, chose a solution Durkheim hadalready magisterially demolished: the utilitarian.The objects selected for religious veneration by agiven people were either directly or indirectly con-nected to factors critical to their collective well-being. Things that had real, that is, practical, “socialvalue” were elevated to having spiritual, or sym-bolic, “ritual value,” thus fusing the social and thenatural into one overarching order. For primitives atleast (and Radcliffe-Brown attempted to establish histheory with regard to the sanctified turtles and palmleaves of the pre-agricultural Andaman Islandersand, later on, with regard to Australian totemism),there is no discontinuity, no difference even, betweenmoral and physical, spiritual and practical relation-ships and processes. These people regard both menand things as parts of a single normative system.Within that system those elements which are criticalto its effective functioning (or, sometimes, phenom-ena empirically associated with such elements, suchas the Andaman cicada cycle and the shifting mon-soons) are made the objects of that special sort ofrespect and attention which we call religious butwhich the people themselves regard as merelyprudential.

Radcliffe-Brown focused upon the content ofsacred symbols and emphasized the relation be-tween conceptions of the moral order of existenceand conceptions of its natural order. However, theclaim that the sanctity of religious objects derivesfrom their practical social importance is one of thosetheories which works when it works and doesn’twhen it doesn’t. Not only has it proved impossible tofind even an indirect practical significance in most ofthe enormous variety of things tribal peoples haveregarded as sacred (certain Australian tribes worshipvomit), but the view that religious concerns are mereritualizations of real-life concerns leaves the phe-nomenon of sacredness itself—its aura of mystery,power, fascination—totally unexplained.

More recent structuralist studies have tended toevade both these questions and to concentrate on therole played by religion in maintaining social equilib-rium. They attempt to show how given sets of reli-gious practices (ancestor worship, animal sacrifice,witchcraft and sorcery, regeneration rites) do in factexpress and reinforce the moral values underlyingcrucial processes (lineage segmentation, marriage,conflict adjudication, political succession) in the par-ticular society under investigation. Arnold vanGennep’s study of crisis rites was perhaps the mostimportant forerunner of the many analyses of thistype. Although valuable in their own right asethnography and as sociology, these structural for-mulations have been severely limited by their rigidavoidance on the one side, of the kind of psycholog-ical considerations that could account for the pecu-liar emotions which permeate religious belief andpractice, and, on the other, of the philosophical con-siderations that could render their equally peculiarcontent intelligible.

The Analysis of Symbolic Forms

In contrast to other approaches—evolutionary, psy-chological, sociological—the field of what we mayloosely call “semantic studies” of religion is ex-tremely jumbled. There is, as yet, no well-establishedcentral trend to analysis, no central figure aroundwhom to order debate, and no readily apparent sys-tem of interconnections relating the various compet-ing trends to one another.

Perhaps the most straightforward strategy—certainly the most disarming—is merely to accept the





epistemological considerations. This has produced along series of studies that view “primitive thought”as a distinctive mode of reasoning and/or a specialbody of knowledge. From Lévy-Bruhl throughLévi-Strauss, and with important contributions frommembers of the evolutionary, psychoanalytic, andsociological schools as well, this line of explorationhas persisted as a minor theme in anthropologicalstudies of religion. With the recent advances inlinguistics, information theory, the analysis of cogni-tion, semantic philosophy, modern logic, and certainsorts of literary investigation, the systematic study ofsymbolic activity bids fair to become, in a rather thor-oughly revised form, the major theme for investiga-tion. The “new key” Susanne K. Langer heard beingstruck in philosophy in the early 1940s—“the concernwith the concept of meaning in all its forms”—has,like the historicist and positivist “keys” before it,begun to have its echo in the anthropological study ofreligion. Anthropologists are increasingly interestedin ideational expression, increasingly concerned withthe vehicles, processes, and practical applications ofhuman conceptualization.

The development of this approach has come in twofairly distinct phases, one before and one after WorldWar II. In the first phase there was a concern with “themind of primitive man” and in particular with itscapacity for rational thought. In a sense, this concernrepresented the evolutionists’ interest in primitivereasoning processes detached from the historicistcontext. In the second phase, which is still in process,there has been a move away from, and in part a reac-tion against, the subjectivist emphasis of the earlierwork. Ideational expression is thought of as a publicactivity, rather like speech, and the structure of thesymbolic materials, the “language,” in whose termsthe activity is conducted becomes the subject ofinvestigation.

The first, subjectivist, phase was animated by aprotracted wrangle between those who used the reli-gious beliefs and practices of tribal peoples as evi-dence to prove that there was a qualitative differencebetween the thought processes of primitives andthose of civilized men and the anthropologists whoconsidered such religious activity as evidence for thelack of any such differences. The great protagonist ofthe first school was the French philosopher Lévy-Bruhlwhose theories of “prelogical mentality” were ascontroversial within anthropology as they were

myriad expressions of the sacred in primitive soci-eties, to consider them as actual ingressions of thedivine into the world, and to trace the forms theseexpressions have taken across the earth and throughtime. The result would be a sort of natural historyof revelation, whose aim would be to isolate themajor classes of religious phenomena consideredas authentic manifestations of the sacred—whatEliade, the chief proponent of this approach, callshierophanies—and to trace the rise, dominance, de-cline, and disappearance of these classes within thechanging contexts of human life. The meaning ofreligious activity, the burden of its content, is discov-ered through a meticulous, wholly inductive investi-gation of the natural modalities of such behavior(sun worship, water symbolism, fertility cults, re-newal myths, etc.) and of the vicissitudes thesemodalities undergo when projected, like the Son ofGod himself, into the flux of history.

Metaphysical questions (here uncommonly obtru-sive) aside, the weaknesses of this approach derivefrom the same source as its strengths: a drastic limit-ing of the interpretations of religion to the sort that aresolutely Baconian methodology can produce. Onthe one hand, this approach has led, especially in thecase of a scholar as erudite and indefatigable asEliade, to the uncovering of some highly suggestiveclusterings of certain religious patterns with particu-lar historical conditions—for example, the frequentassociation of sun worship, activist conceptions ofdivine power, cultic veneration of deified heroes,elitist doctrines of political sovereignty, and imperi-alist ideologies of national expansion. But, onthe other hand, it has placed beyond the range ofscientific analysis everything but the history andmorphology of the phenomenal forms of religiousexpression. The study of tribal beliefs and practicesis reduced to a kind of cultural paleontology whosesole aim is the reconstruction, from scattered andcorrupted fragments, of the “mental universe of ar-chaic man.”

Primitive Thought

Other scholars who are interested in the meaning-ful content of primitive religion but who are inca-pable of so thoroughgoing a suspension of disbeliefas Eliade, or are repelled by the cultic overtones ofthis somewhat mystagogic line of thought, have di-rected their attention instead toward logical and





popular outside it. According to Lévy-Bruhl, thethought of primitives, as reflected in their reli-gious ideas, is not governed by the immanent laws ofAristotelian logical reasoning, but by affectivity—by the vagrant flow of emotion and the dialecticalprinciples of “mystical participation” and “mysticalexclusion.”

The two most effective antagonists of Lévy-Bruhl’s theories concerning primitive religion wereRadin and Malinowski. Radin, influenced by Boas’smore general attacks on theories of “primitive men-tality,” sought to demonstrate that primitive religiousthought reaches, on occasion, very high levels of log-ical articulation and philosophical sophistication andthat tribal society contains, alongside the commonrun of unreflective doers (“men of action”), contem-plative intellectuals (“men of thought”) of boldness,subtlety, and originality. Malinowski attackedthe problem on an even broader front. Using hisethnographic knowledge of the Trobriand Islanders,Malinowski argued that alongside their religiousand magical notions (which he, too, regarded asmainly emotionally determined) the “savages” alsohad a rather well-developed and, as far as it went,accurate empirical knowledge of gardening, naviga-tion, housebuilding, canoe construction, and otheruseful arts. He further claimed that they were ab-solutely clear as to the distinction between these twosorts of reasoning, between mystical-magical andempirical-pragmatic thinking, and never confusedthem in actual practice. Of these two arguments, theformer seems to be today nearly universally ac-cepted and was perhaps never in fact really ques-tioned. But with respect to the latter, serious doubtshave arisen concerning whether the lines between“science,” “magic,” and “religion” are as simple andclear-cut in the minds of tribal peoples (or any peo-ples) as Malinowski, never one for shaded judg-ments, portrayed them. Nevertheless, betweenthem, Radin and Malinowski rather definitivelydemolished the notion of a radical qualitative gapbetween the thought processes of primitive and civi-lized men. Indeed, toward the end of his life evenLévy-Bruhl admitted that his arguments had beenbadly cast and might better have been phrased interms of different modes of thinking common to allmen. (In fact, Freud, with his contrast between pri-mary and secondary thinking processes, had alreadymade this distinction.)

Thus, the debate about what does or does not goon in the heads of savages exhausted itself in gener-alities, and recent writers have turned to a concernwith the symbolic forms, the conceptual resources, interms of which primitives (and nonprimitives) think.The major figure in this work has been Claude Lévi-Strauss, although this line of attack dates back toDurkheim and Mauss’s influential 1903 essay in so-ciological Kantianism, Primitive Classification. Thewritings of E. E. Evans-Pritchard on Zande witch-craft, Benjamin Whorf on Hopi semantics, andGregory Bateson on Iatmul ritual and, among non-anthropologists, works by Granet, Cassirer, andPiaget have directed attention to the study of sym-bolic formulation.

Symbolic Systems

Lévi-Strauss, whose rather highly wrought workis still very much in progress, is concerned with thesystems of classification, the “homemade” tax-onomies, employed by tribal peoples to order theobjects and events of their world (see Lévi-Strauss1958; 1962). In this, he follows in the footsteps ofDurkheim and Mauss. But rather than looking, asthey did, to social forms for the origins and expla-nations of such categorical systems, he looks to thesymbolic structures in terms of which they are for-mulated, expressed, and applied. Myth and, in aslightly different way, rite are systems of signs thatfix and organize abstract conceptual relationshipsin terms of concrete images and thus make specula-tive thought possible. They permit the constructionof a “science of the concrete”—the intellectual com-prehension of the sensible world in terms of sensi-ble phenomena—which is no less rational, no lesslogical, no more affect-driven than the abstract sci-ence of the modern world. The objects rendered sa-cred are selected not because of their utilitarianqualities, nor because they are projections of re-pressed emotions, nor yet because they reflect themoral force of social organization ritualisticallyimpressed upon the mind. Rather, they are selectedbecause they permit the embodiment of generalideas in terms of the immediately perceptiblerealities—the turtles, trees, springs, and caves—ofeveryday experience; not, as Lévi-Strauss says,apropos of Radcliffe-Brown’s view of totems, becausethey are “good to eat,” but because they are “goodto think.”





This “goodness” exists inherently in sacred ob-jects because they provide the raw materials for ana-logical reasoning. The relationships perceivedamong certain classes of natural objects or events canbe analogized, taken as models of relationships—physical, social, psychological, or moral—obtainingbetween persons, groups, or other natural objectsand events. Thus, for example, the natural distinc-tions perceived among totemic beings, their speciesdifferentiation, can serve as a conceptual frameworkfor the comprehension, expression, and communica-tion of social distinctions among exogamous clans—their structural differentiation. Thus, the sharpcontrast between the wet and dry seasons (and theradical zoological and botanical changes associatedwith it) in certain regions of Australia is employed inthe mythology of the native peoples. They havewoven an elaborate origin myth around this naturalphenomenon, one that involves a rainmakingpython who drowned some incestuous sisters andtheir children because the women polluted his waterhole with menstrual blood. This model expressesand economizes the contrasts between moral purityand impurity, maleness and femaleness, social supe-riority and inferiority, fertilizing agent (rain) andthat which is fertilized (land), and even the distinc-tion between “high” (initiate) and “low” (noniniti-ate) levels of cultural achievement.

Lévi-Strauss contends that primitive religioussystems are, like all symbolic systems, fundamen-tally communications systems. They are carriers ofinformation in the technical Shannon-Weaver sense,and as such, the theory of information can be appliedto them with the same validity as when applied toany physical systems, mechanical or biological, inwhich the transfer of information plays a centralregulative role. Primitives, as all men, are quintes-sentially multichanneled emitters and receivers ofmessages. It is merely in the nature of the code theyemploy—one resting on analogies between “nat-ural” and “cultural” distinctions and relationships—that they differ from ourselves. Where there is adistinguishing difference, it lies in the technicallyspecialized codes of modern abstract thought, inwhich semantic properties are radically and deliber-ately severed from physical ones. Religion, primitiveor modern, can be understood only as an integratedsystem of thought, logically sound, epistemologi-cally valid, and as flourishing in France as in Tahiti.

It is far too early to evaluate Lévi-Strauss’s workwith any assurance. It is frankly incomplete andexplorative, and some parts of it (the celebration ofinformation theory, for example) are wholly pro-grammatic. But in focusing on symbol systems asconceptual models of social or other sorts of reality,he has clearly introduced into the anthropology ofreligion a line of inquiry which, having already be-come common in modern thought generally, canhardly fail to be productive when applied to tribalmyth and ritual.

Whether his own particular formulation of thisapproach will prove to be the most enduring re-mains, however, rather more of a question. His rejec-tion of emotional considerations and his neglect ofnormative or social factors in favor of an extreme in-tellectualism which cerebralizes religion and tendsto reduce it yet again to a kind of undeveloped (or, ashe puts it, “undomesticated”) science are question-able. His nearly exclusive stress on those intellectualprocesses involved in classification, i.e., on taxo-nomic modes of thought (a reflex of his equally greatreliance on totemic ideas as type cases of primitivebeliefs), at the expense of other, perhaps more com-mon, and certainly more powerful styles of reason-ing, is also doubtful. His conception of the criticalprocess of symbolic formulation itself remains al-most entirely undeveloped—hardly more than a sortof associationism dressed up with some conceptsfrom modern linguistics. Partly as a result of thisweakness and partly as a result of a tendency toconsider symbol systems as entities functioningindependently of the contextual factor, many of hisspecific interpretations of particular myths and ritesseem as strained, arbitrary, and oversystematized asthose of the most undisciplined psychoanalyst.

But, for all this, Lévi-Strauss has without doubtopened a vast territory for research and begun to ex-plore it with theoretical brilliance and profoundscholarship. And he is not alone. As the recent work ofsuch diverse students as Evans-Pritchard, R. G.Lienhardt, W. E. H. Stanner, Victor W. Turner,Germaine Dieterlen, Meyer Fortes, Edmund R. Leach,Charles O. Frake, Rodney Needham, and SusanneK. Langer demonstrates, the analysis of symbolicforms is becoming a major tradition in the study ofprimitive religion—in fact, of religion in general.Each of these writers has a somewhat different ap-proach. But all seem to share the conviction that an





attempt must be made to approach primitive reli-gions for what they are: systems of ideas about theultimate shape and substance of reality.

Whatever else religion does, it relates a view of theultimate nature of reality to a set of ideas of how manis well advised, even obligated, to live. Religion tuneshuman actions to a view of the cosmic order and pro-jects images of cosmic order onto the plane of humanexistence. In religious belief and practice a people’sstyle of life, what Clyde Kluckhohn called their designfor living, is rendered intellectually reasonable; it isshown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to theworld “as it ‘really’ (‘fundamentally,’ ‘ultimately’)is.” At the same time, the supposed basic structure ofreality is rendered emotionally convincing because it

is presented as an actual state of affairs uniquely ac-commodated to such a way of life and permitting it toflourish. Thus do received beliefs, essentially meta-physical, and established norms, essentially moral,confirm and support one another.

It is this mutual confirmation that religious sym-bols express and celebrate and that any scientificanalysis of religion must somehow contrive to ex-plain and clarify. In the development of such ananalysis historical, psychological, sociological, andwhat has been called here semantic considerationsare all necessary, but none is sufficient. A mature the-ory of religion will consist of an integration of themall into a conceptual system whose exact form re-mains to be discovered.





16

Human social life cannot be understood apart fromthe deeply held beliefs and values that in the shortrun, at least, motivate and mobilize our transactionswith each other and the world of nature. So let me . . .confront certain questions concerning our kind’s re-ligious beliefs and behavior.

First, are there any precedents for religion innonhuman species? The answer is yes, only if one

accepts a definition of religion broad enough to in-clude “superstitious” responses. Behavioral psy-chologists have long been familiar with the fact thatanimals can acquire responses that are falsely asso-ciated with rewards. For example, a pigeon is placedin a cage into which food pellets are dropped by amechanical feeder at irregular intervals. If the re-ward is delivered by chance while the bird isscratching, it begins to scratch faster. If the reward isdelivered while a bird happens to be flapping itswings, it keeps flapping them as if wing-flappingcontrols the feeder. Among humans, one can findanalogous superstitions in the little rituals that

2

WhyWeBecameReligiousandThe Evolution of the Spirit WorldMarvin Harris

The following selection by anthropologist Marvin Harris originally appeared as two separate essays,one entitled “Why We Became Religious,” the other “The Evolution of the Spirit World.” In the firstessay, Harris comments on the fascinating possibility of religion among nonhuman species. He alsodiscusses the concept of mana (an inherent force or power), noting that, although the concepts of su-perstition, luck, and charisma in Western cultures closely resemble mana, they are not really reli-gious concepts. Rather, according to Harris, the basis of all religious thought is animism, the univer-sal belief that we humans share the world with various extracorporeal, mostly invisible beings. Harriscloses the first essay with some thoughts on the concept of an inner being—a soul—pointing out thatin many cultures people believe a person may have more than one.

In “The Evolution of the Spirit World,” Harris advances the notion that spiritual beings found inmodern religions are also found in the religions of prestate societies. Thus, he briefly examines reli-gious thought and behavior pertaining to ancestor worship at varying levels of societal complexity,starting with band-and-village societies, the earliest of human cultures. Next, Harris notes the im-portance of recently deceased relatives in the religions of more complexly developed societies, such asthose based on gardening and fishing. Chiefdoms represent an even higher level of development, onein which greater specialization arose, including a religious practitioner who paid special attention tothe chief’s ancestors. Finally, Harris observes that, with the development of early states and empires,dead ancestors assumed a place of great prominence alongside the gods.

Pages 397–407 from OUR KIND by Marvin Harris. Copyright © 1989 by Marvin Harris. Reprinted by permissionof HarperCollins Publishers.




baseball players engage in as they come up to bat,such as touching their caps, spitting, or rubbingtheir hands. None of this has any real connectionwith getting a hit, although constant repetition as-sures that every time batters get hits, they have per-formed the ritual. Some minor phobic behavioramong humans also might be attributed to associa-tions based on coincidental rather than contingentcircumstances. I know a heart surgeon who toleratesonly popular music piped into his operating roomever since he lost a patient while classical composi-tions were being played.

Superstition raises the issue of causality. Just howdo the activities and objects that are connected insuperstitious beliefs influence one another? A rea-sonable, if evasive, answer is to say that the causalactivity or object has an inherent force or power toachieve the observed effects. Abstracted and gener-alized, this inherent force or power can provide theexplanation for many extraordinary events and forsuccess or failure in life’s endeavors. In Melanesia,people call it mana. Fishhooks that catch big fish,tools that make intricate carvings, canoes that sailsafely through storm, or warriors who kill many en-emies, all have mana in concentrated quantities. InWestern cultures, the concepts of luck and charismaclosely resemble the idea of mana. A horseshoe pos-sesses a concentrated power that brings good luck. Acharismatic leader is one who is suffused with greatpowers of persuasion.

But are superstitions, mana, luck, and charismareligious concepts? I think not. Because, if we de-fine religion as a belief in any indwelling forces andpowers, we shall soon find it difficult to separate re-ligion from physics. After all, gravity and electricityare also unseen forces that are associated with ob-servable effects. While it is true that physicistsknow much more about gravity than about mana,they cannot claim to have a complete understand-ing of how gravity achieves its results. At the sametime, couldn’t one argue that superstitions, mana,luck, and charisma are also merely theories ofcausality involving physical forces and powersabout which we happen to have incomplete under-standing as yet?

True, more scientific testing has gone into thestudy of gravity than into the study of mana, but thedegree of scientific testing to which a theory hasbeen subjected cannot make the difference between

whether it is a religious or a scientific belief. If it did,then every untested or inadequately tested theoryin science would be a religious belief (as well asevery scientific theory that has been shown to befalse during the time when scientists believed it tobe true!). Some astronomers theorize that at thecenter of each galaxy there is a black hole. Shall wesay that this is a religious belief because other as-tronomers reject such a theory or regard it as inade-quately tested?

It is not the quality of belief that distinguishes re-ligion from science. Rather, as Sir Edward Tylor wasthe first to propose, the basis of all that is distinctlyreligious in human thought is animism, the beliefthat humans share the world with a population ofextraordinary, extracorporeal, and mostly invisiblebeings, ranging from souls and ghosts to saints andfairies, angels and cherubim, demons, jinni, devils,and gods.

Wherever people believe in the existence of oneor more of these beings, that is where religion exists.Tylor claimed that animistic beliefs were to be foundin every society, and a century of ethnological re-search has yet to turn up a single exception. Themost problematic case is that of Buddhism, whichTylor’s critics portrayed as a world religion thatlacked belief in gods or souls. But ordinary believersoutside of Buddhist monasteries never accepted theatheistic implications of Gautama’s teachings. Main-stream Buddhism, even in the monasteries, quicklyenvisioned the Buddha as a supreme deity who hadbeen successively reincarnated and who held swayover a pantheon of lower gods and demons. And itwas as fully animistic creeds that the several vari-eties of Buddhism spread from India to Tibet, South-east Asia, China, and Japan.

Why is animism universal? Tylor pondered thequestion at length. He reasoned that if a belief re-curred again and again in virtually all times andplaces, it could not be a product of mere fantasy.Rather, it must have grounding in evidence and inexperiences that were equally recurrent and univer-sal. What were these experiences? Tylor pointed todreams, trances, visions, shadows, reflections, anddeath. During dreams, the body stays in bed; yet an-other part of us gets up, talks to people, and travels todistant lands. Trances and drug-induced visions alsobring vivid evidence of another self, distinct and sep-arate from one’s body. Shadows and mirror images

HARRIS • WHY WE BECAME RELIGIOUS AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRIT WORLD | 17




reflected in still water point to the same conclusion,even in the full light of normal wakefulness. Theconcept of an inner being—a soul—makes sense ofall this. It is the soul that wanders off when we sleep,that lies in the shadows, and that peers back at usfrom the surface of the pond. Most of all, the soul ex-plains the mystery of death: a lifeless body is a bodypermanently deprived of its soul.

Incidentally, there is nothing in the concept ofsoul per se that constrains us to believe each personhas only one. The ancient Egyptians had two, andso do many West African societies in which both pa-trilineal and matrilineal ancestors determine an in-dividual’s identity. The Jívaro of Ecuador have threesouls. The first soul—the mekas—gives life to thebody. The second soul—the arutam—has to be cap-tured through a drug-induced visionary experienceat a sacred waterfall. It confers bravery and immu-nity in battle to the possessor. The third soul—themusiak—forms inside the head of a dying warriorand attempts to avenge his death. The Dahomey saythat women have three souls; men have four. Bothsexes have an ancestor soul, a personal soul, and amawn soul. The ancestor soul gives protection dur-ing life, the personal soul is accountable for whatpeople do with their lives, the mawn soul is a bit ofthe creator god, Mawn, that supplies divine guid-ance. The exclusively male fourth soul guides mento positions of leadership in their households andlineages. But the record for plural souls seems to be-long to the Fang of Gabon. They have seven: asound inside the brain, a heart soul, a name soul,a life force soul, a body soul, a shadow soul, and aghost soul.

Why do Westerners have only one soul? I cannotanswer that. Perhaps the question is unanswerable. Iaccept the possibility that many details of religiousbeliefs and practices may arise from historically spe-cific events and individual choices made only onceand only in one culture and that have no discerniblecost-benefit advantages or disadvantages. While abelief in souls does conform to the general principlesof cultural selection, belief in one rather than two ormore souls may not be comprehensible in terms ofsuch principles. But let us not be too eager to declareany puzzling feature of human life forever beyondthe pale of practical reason. For has it not been ourexperience that more research often leads to answersthat were once thought unattainable?

The Evolution of the Spirit World

All varieties of spirit beings found in modern reli-gions have their analogues or exact prototypes in thereligions of prestate societies. Changes in animisticbeliefs since Neolithic times involve matters of em-phasis and elaboration. For example, band-and-village people widely believed in gods who lived ontop of mountains or in the sky itself and who servedas the models for later notions of supreme beings aswell as other powerful sky gods. In AboriginalAustralia, the sky god created the earth and its nat-ural features, showed humans how to hunt and makefire, gave people their social laws, and showed themhow to make adults out of children by performingrites of initiation. The names of their quasi-supremebeings—Baiame, Daramulum, Nurunderi—couldnot be uttered by the uninitiated. Similarly, the Selk’-nam of Tierra del Fuego believed in “the one who isup there.” The Yaruro of Venezuela spoke of a “greatmother” who created the world. The Maidu ofCalifornia believed in a great “slayer in the sky.”Among the Semang of Malaysia, Kedah createdeverything, including the god who created the earthand humankind. The Andaman Islanders hadPuluga whose house is the sky, and the Winnebagohad “earthmaker.”

Although prestate peoples occasionally prayed tothese great spirits or even visited them duringtrances, the focus of animistic beliefs generally layelsewhere. In fact, most of the early creator gods ab-stained from contact with human beings. Havingcreated the universe, they withdraw from worldlyaffairs and let other lesser deities, animistic beings,and humans work out their own destinies. Ritually,the most important category of animistic beings wasthe ancestors of the band, village, and clan or otherkinship groups whose members believed they werebonded by common descent.

People in band-and-village societies tend to haveshort memories concerning specific individuals whohave died. Rather than honor the recent dead, orseek favors from them, egalitarian cultures oftenplace a ban on the use of the dead person’s name andtry to banish or evade his or her ghost. Among theWasho, a native American foraging people wholived along the border of California and Nevada,souls of the dead were angry about being deprivedof their bodies. They were dangerous and had to be





avoided. So the Washo burned the dead person’shut, clothing, and other personal property andstealthily moved their camp to a place where theyhoped the dead person’s soul could not find them.The Dusun of North Borneo curse a dead person’ssoul and warn it to stay away from the village. Re-luctantly, the soul gathers up belongings left at itsgrave site and sets off for the land of the dead.

But this distrust of the recent dead does not ex-tend to the most ancient dead, not to the generalityof ancestor spirits. In keeping with the ideology ofdescent, band-and-village people often memorializeand propitiate their communal ancestral spirits.Much of what is known as totemism is a form of dif-fuse ancestor worship. Taking the name of an animalsuch as kangaroo or beaver or a natural phenome-non such as clouds or rain in conformity with pre-vailing rules of descent, people express a communalobligation to the founders of their kinship group.Often this obligation includes rituals intended tonourish, protect, or assure the increase of the animaland natural totems and with it the health and well-being of their human counterparts. AboriginalAustralians, for example, believed that they were de-scended from animal ancestors who traveled aroundthe country during the dream-time at the beginningof the world, leaving mementos of their journeystrewn about before turning into people. Annually,the descendants of a particular totemic ancestor re-traced the dream-time journey. As they walked fromspot to spot, they sang, danced, and examined sacredstones, stored in secret hiding places along the pathtaken by the first kangaroo or the first witchetty grub.Returning to camp, they decorated themselves in thelikeness of their totem and imitated its behavior. TheArunta witchetty-grub men, for instance, decoratedthemselves with strings, nose bones, rattails, andfeathers, painted their bodies with the sacred designof the witchetty grub, and constructed a brush hutin the shape of the witchetty-grub chrysalis. They en-tered the hut and sang of the journey they had made.Then the head men came shuffling and gliding out,followed by all the rest, in imitation of adult witch-etty grubs emerging from a chrysalis.

In most village societies an undifferentiated com-munity of ancestral spirits keep a close watch on theirdescendants, ready to punish them if they commit in-cest or if they break the taboos against eating certainfoods. Important endeavors—hunting, gardening,

pregnancy, warfare—need the blessings of a group’sancestors to be successful, and such blessings areusually obtained by holding feasts in the ancestors’honor according to the principle that a well-fed an-cestor is a well-intentioned ancestor. Throughouthighland New Guinea, for example, people believethat the ancestral spirits enjoy eating pork as much asliving persons enjoy eating it. To please the ancestors,people slaughter whole herds of pigs before going towar or when celebrating important events in an indi-vidual’s life such as marriage and death. But in keep-ing with a big-man redistributive level of politicalorganization, no one claims that his or her ancestorsmerit special treatment.

Under conditions of increasing population,greater wealth to be inherited, and intrasocietal com-petition between different kin groups, people tend topay more attention to specific and recently deceasedrelatives in order to validate claims to the inheritanceof land and other resources. The Dobuans, SouthPacific yam gardeners and fishermen of theAdmiraltyIslands, have what seems to be an incipient phase ofa particularized ancestor religion. When the leader ofa Dobuan household died, his children cleaned hisskull, hung it from the rafters of their house, and pro-vided it with food and drink. Addressing it as “SirGhost,” they solicited protection against disease andmisfortune, and through oracles, asked him for ad-vice. If Sir Ghost did not cooperate, his heirs threat-ened to get rid of him. Actually, Sir Ghost could neverwin. The death of his children finally proved that hewas no longer of any use. So when the grandchildrentook charge, they threw Sir Ghost into the lagoon,substituting their own father’s skull as the symbol ofthe household’s new spiritual patron.

With the development of chiefdoms, ruling elitesemployed specialists whose job was to memorize thenames of the chief’s ancestors. To make sure that theremains of these dignitaries did not get thrown awaylike Sir Ghost’s skull, paramount chiefs built elabo-rate tombs that preserved links between generationsin a tangible form. Finally, with the emergence ofstates and empires, as the rulers’ souls rose to taketheir places in the firmament alongside the highgods, their mummified mortal remains, surroundedby exquisite furniture, rare jewels, gold-encrustedchariots and other preciosities, were interred in gi-gantic crypts and pyramids that only a true godcould have built.

HARRIS • WHY WE BECAME RELIGIOUS AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRIT WORLD | 19




20

In primitive societies, we do not always find theworship of God or a god, nor the idea of the super-natural. Yet religion is always present in man’s viewof his place in the universe, in his relatedness to manand nonhuman nature, to reality and circumstance.His universe may include the divine or may itself bedivine. And his patterned behavior often has a reli-gious dimension, so that we find religion permeatingdaily life—agriculture and hunting, health mea-sures, arts and crafts.

We do find societies where a Supreme Being isrecognized; but this Being is frequently so far re-moved from mundane affairs that it is not present inthe consciousness of the people except on the specificoccasions of ceremonial or prayer. But in these samesocieties, we find communion with the unperceiv-

able and unknowable in nature, with an ultimatereality, whether spirit, or power, or intensified being,or personal worth, which evokes humility, respect,courtesy or sometimes fear, on man’s part. This rela-tionship to the ultimate reality is so pervasive that itmay determine, for example, which hand a man willuse in adjusting his loin cloth, or how much water hewill drink at a time, or which way his head will pointwhen he sleeps, or how he will butcher and utilizethe carcass of a caribou. What anthropologists label“material culture,” therefore, is never purely mater-ial. Often we would be at least as justified to call theoperation involved religious.

All economic activities, such as hunting, gather-ing fuel, cultivating the land, storing food, assume arelatedness to the encompassing universe, and withmany cultures, this is a religious relationship. Insuch cultures, men recognize a certain spiritualworth and dignity in the universe. They do not setout to control, or master, or exploit. Their ceremoni-als are often periods of intensified communion, evensocial affairs, in a broad sense, if the term may be

3

Religious Perspectivesin AnthropologyDorothy Lee

At first glance, the study of the religion of non-Western cultures may appear somewhat esoteric,albeit interesting. In reality, however, religion is very much a part of everyday, practical activities inthese cultures, and knowledge of a society’s religion is essential for the successful introduction of so-cial changes. In the following article, Dorothy Lee dramatically shows how religion is part and par-cel of preliterate people’s worldview, or Weltanschauung: the corpus of beliefs about the life andenvironment in which members of a society find themselves. Among preliterate societies, economic,political, and artistic behavior is permeated by religion. Lee points out that anthropologists makeevery attempt to understand the insiders’ “emic” view of their universe, which they share with othermembers of their group, and demonstrates that an outsider’s “etic” view is too limited a base of cul-tural knowledge on which to introduce innovations that do not violate the religious tenets of thesociety and meet with acceptance.

”Religious Perspectives in Anthropology” by Dorothy Lee fromRELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES IN COLLEGE TEACHING,Hoxie N. Fairchild (ed.), The Ronald Press Company, New YorkCity, 1952, pp. 338–359.




extended to include the forces of the universe. Theyare not placating or bribing or even thanking; theyare rather a formal period of concentrated, enjoyableassociation. In their relationships with nature, thepeople may see themselves as the offspring of a cher-ishing mother, or the guests of a generous hostess, oras members of a democratic society which proceedson the principle of consent. So, when the Baiga inIndia were urged to change over to the use of an ironplow, they replied with horror that they couldnot tear the flesh of their mother with knives. AndAmerican Indians have hunted many animals withthe consent of the generic essence of these—of whichthe particular animal was the carnal manifestation—only after establishing a relationship or reciprocity;with man furnishing the ceremonial, and Buffalo orSalmon or Caribou making a gift of the countlessmanifestations of his flesh.

The great care with which so many of the Indiangroups utilized every portion of the carcass of ahunted animal was an expression, not of economicthrift, but of courtesy and respect; in fact, an aspectof the religious relationship to the slain. The WintuIndians of California, who lived on land so woodedthat it was difficult to find clear land for putting upa group of houses, nevertheless used only deadwood for fuel, out of respect for nature. An oldWintu woman, speaking in prophetic vein, ex-pressed this: “The White people never cared forland or deer or bear. When we Indians kill meat, weeat it all up. When we dig roots we make littleholes. When we build houses, we make little holes.When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’truin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts.We don’t chop down the trees. We only use deadwood. But the White people plow up the ground,pull up the trees, kill everything. The tree says,‘Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But they chop itdown and cut it up. The spirit of the land hatesthem. They blast out trees and stir it up to itsdepths. They saw up the trees. That hurts them. TheIndians never hurt anything, but the White peopledestroy all. They blast rocks and scatter them on theground. The rock says, ‘Don’t! You are hurting me.’But the White people pay no attention. When theIndians use rocks, they take little round ones fortheir cooking. . . . How can the spirit of the earthlike the White man? . . . Everywhere the White manhas touched it, it is sore.”

Here we find people who do not so much seekcommunion with environing nature as find them-selves in communion with it. In many of these soci-eties, not even mysticism is to be found, in our senseof the word. For us, mysticism presupposes a priorseparation of man from nature, and communion isachieved through loss of self and subsequent merg-ing with that which is beyond; but for many cultures,there is no such distinct separation between self andother, which must be overcome. Here, man is innature already, and we cannot speak properly ofman and nature.

Take the Kaingang, for example, who chops out awild beehive. He explains his act to the bees, as hewould to a person whom he considered his coordi-nate. “Bee, produce! I chopped you out to make beerof you! Yukui’s wife died, and I am making beer ofyou so that I can cut his hair.” Or he may go up to ahive and say simply, “Bee, it is I.” And the Arapeshof New Guinea, going to his yam garden, will firstintroduce to the spirit of the land the brother-in-lawwhom he has brought along to help him with thegardening. This is not achieved communication,brought about for definite ends. It implies an alreadypresent relatedness with the ultimate reality, withthat which is accepted in faith, and which exists irre-spective of man’s cognition or perception or logic. Ifwe were to abstract, out of this situation, merelythe food getting or the operational techniques, wewould be misrepresenting the reality.

The same present relatedness is to be found insome societies where the deity is more specificallydefined. The Tikopia, in the Solomon Islands Protec-torate, sit and eat their meals with their dead underthe floor, and hand food and drink to them; the deadare all somewhat divine, progressively so as theycome nearer to the original, fully divine ancestor ofthe clan. Whatever their degree of divinity, theTikopia is at home with them; he is aware of theirvague presence, though he requires the services of amedium whenever he wants to make this presencedefinite.

Firth describes an occasion when a chief, havinginstructed a medium to invite his dead nephew tocome and chew betel with him, found himself occu-pied with something else when the dead arrived,and so asked the medium to tell the spirit—a minordeity—to chew betel by himself. At another time,during an important ceremonial, when this chief was

LEE • RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES IN ANTHROPOLOGY | 21




receiving on his forehead the vertical stripe whichwas the symbol that he was now the incarnation ofthe highest god, he jokingly jerked his head aside, sothat the stripe, the insignium of the presence of thegod, went crooked. These are the acts of a man whofeels accepted by his gods, and is at one with them.And, in fact, the Tikopia appear to live in a contin-uum which includes nature and the divine withoutdefining bounds; where communion is present, notachieved; where merging is a matter of being, not ofbecoming.

In these societies, where religion is an everpre-sent dimension of experience, it is doubtful that re-ligion as such is given a name; Kluckhohn reportsthat the Navaho have no such word, but mostethnographers never thought to inquire. Many ofthese cultures, however, recognized and named thespiritual ingredient or attribute, the special qualityof the wonderful, the very, the beyondness, in na-ture. This was sometimes considered personal,sometimes not. We have from the American Indiansterms such as manitou, or wakan, or yapaitu, oftentranslated as power; and we have the well-knownMelanesian term mana. But this is what they reachthrough faith, the other end of the relationship; therelationship itself is unnamed. Apparently, to be-have and think religiously, is to behave and think.To describe a way of life in its totality is to describea religious way of life.

When we speak of agricultural taboos and rites,therefore, we often introduce an analytical factorwhich violates the fact. For example, when prepar-ing seed for planting, one of the several things aNavaho traditionally does is to mix ground “miragestone” with the seed. And in the process of storingcorn, a double-eared stalk is laid at the bottom of thestorage pit. In actual life, these acts are a continuouspart of a total activity.

The distinction between the religious and thesecular elements may even separate an act from themanner of performance, a verb from its adverb.The direction in which a man is facing when per-forming a secular act, or the number of times heshakes his hand when spattering water, often havetheir religious implications. When the Navahoplanted his corn sunwise, his act reflected a totalworld view, and it would be nonsense for us to sep-arate the planting itself from the direction of theplanting.

Those of us who present religion as separate from“everyday” living reflect moreover the distinctionsof a culture which will identify six days with the sec-ular in life and only the seventh with religion. Inmany primitive societies, religion is rarely absentfrom the details of everyday living, and the ceremo-nials represent a formalization and intensification ofan everpresent attitude. We have societies such asthat of the Hopi of Arizona, where ceremonials, andthe preparation for them, cover most of the year.Some years ago, Crowwing, a Hopi, kept a journalfor the period of a year, putting down all events ofceremonial import. Day after day, there are entriescontaining some casual reference to a religious activ-ity, or describing a ritual, or the preparation for a cer-emonial. After a few weeks of such entries, we cometo a sequence of four days’ entries which are devotedto a description of a ball game played by two oppos-ing groups of children and enjoyed by a large num-ber of spectators. But, in the end, this also turns outto have been ceremonial in nature, helping the cornto grow.

Among many groups, agriculture is an expres-sion of man’s religious relatedness to the universe.As Robert Redfield and W. Lloyd Warner have writ-ten: “The agriculture of the Maya Indians of south-eastern Yucatan is not simply a way of securing food.It is also a way of worshipping the gods. Before aman plants, he builds an altar in the field and praysthere. He must not speak boisterously in the corn-field; it is a sort of temple. The cornfield is planted asan incident in a perpetual sacred contract betweensupernatural beings and men. By this agreement, thesupernaturals yield part of what is theirs—the richesof the natural environment—to men. In exchange,men are pious and perform the traditional cere-monies in which offerings are made to the super-naturals. . . . The world is seen as inhabited by thesupernaturals; each has his appropriate place in thewoods, the sky, or the wells from which the wateris drawn. The village is seen as a reflection of thequadrilateral pattern of the cosmos; the cornfield toois oriented, laid out east, west, north, and south, withreference to the supernaturals that watch over thecardinal points; and the table altars erected for theceremonies again remind the individual of this pat-tern. The stories that are told at the time when menwait to perform the ceremony before the planting ofthe corn or that children hear as they grow up are





largely stories which explain and further sanctionthe traditional way of life.”

Art also is often so permeated with religion thatsometimes, as among the Navaho, what we classifyas art is actually religion. To understand the rhythmof their chants, the “plot” of their tales, the making oftheir sand paintings, we have to understand Navahoreligion: the concept of harmony between man andthe universe as basic to health and well being; theconcept of continuity, the religious significance of thegroups of four, the door of contact opened throughthe fifth repetition, the need to have no completelyenclosing frame around any of their works so thatcontinuity can be maintained and the evil inside canhave an opening through which to leave.

The sand paintings are no more art than they areritual, myth, medical practice or religious belief.They are created as an integral aspect of a ceremo-nial which brings into harmony with the universalorder one who finds himself in discord with it; orwhich intensifies and ensures the continuation of aharmony which is already present. Every line andshape and color, every interrelationship of form, isthe visible manifestation of myth, ritual and reli-gious belief. The making of the painting is accom-panied with a series of sacred songs sung over asick person, or over someone who, though healed ofsickness by emergency measures has yet to bebrought back into the universal harmony; or in en-hancing and giving emphasis to the present har-mony. What we would call purely medical practicesmay or may not be part of all this. When the cere-monial is over, the painting is over too; it is de-stroyed; it has fulfilled its function.

This is true also of the art of the neighboring Hopi,where the outstanding form of art is the drama. Inthis we find wonderfully humorous clowning, in-volving careful planning and preparation, creationof magnificent masks and costumes, rehearsals, or-ganization. Everyone comes to see and respondswith uproarious hilarity. But this is not mere art. It isan important way of helping nature in her work ofgrowing the corn. Even the laughter of the audiencehelps in this.

More than dramatic rehearsal and creation of cos-tumes has gone into the preparation. The actors haveprepared themselves as whole persons. They haverefrained from sexual activity, and from anything in-volving conflict. They have had good thoughts only.

They have refrained from anger, worry and grief.Their preparations as well as their performance havehad a religious dimension. Their drama is one act inthe great process of the cyclical growing of corn, a di-vinity indispensable to man’s well being, and towhose well being man is indispensable. Corn wantsto grow, but cannot do so without the cooperation ofthe rest of nature and of man’s acts and thoughts andwill. And, to be happy, corn must be danced by manand participate in his ceremonials. To leave the reli-gious dimension out of all this, and to speak of Hopidrama as merely a form of art, would be to present afallacious picture. Art and agriculture and religionare part of the same totality for the Hopi.

In our own culture, an activity is considered to beeconomic when it deals with effective utilization orexploitation of resources. But this definition cannotbe used when speaking of Hopi economics. To beginwith, it assumes an aggressive attitude toward theenvironment. It describes the situation of the home-steader in Alaska, for example, who works againsttremendous odds clearing land for a dairy farm,against the inexorable pressure of time, againsthostile elements. By his sweat, and through ingenu-ity and know-how and the use of brutally effectivetools, he tames nature; he subjugates the land andexploits its resources to the utmost.

The Hopi Talayesua, however, describing hiswork on the land, does not see himself in opposi-tion to it. He works with the elements, not againstthem. He helps the corn to grow; he cooperateswith the thunderstorm and the pollen and the sun.He is in harmony with the elements, not in conflict;and he does not set out to conquer an opponent. Hedepends on the corn, but this is part of a mutual in-terdependence; it is not exploitation. The corn de-pends on him too. It cannot grow without his help;it finds life dull and lonely without his companyand his ceremonials. So it gives its body for hisfood gladly, and enjoys living with him in his gra-nary. The Hopi has a personal relationship with it.He treats it with respect, and houses it with thecare and courtesy accorded to an honored guest. Isthis economics?

In a work on Hopi economics we are given an ac-count of the Hopi Salt Journey, under the heading“Secondary Economic Activities.” This expedition isalso described in a Hopi autobiography, and here wediscover that only those men who have achieved a





certain degree of experience in the Hopi way can goon this journey, and then, only if their minds are pureand they are in a state of harmony with the universe.There is a period of religious preparation, followedby the long and perilous journey which is attendedby a number of rituals along the way. Old men, low-ering themselves from the overhanging ledge ontothe salt deposits, tremble with fear, knowing thatthey may be unable to make the ascent. The occasionis solemnly religious. This is no utilization of re-sources, in the eyes of the Hopi who makes the jour-ney. He goes to help the growing corn; the Salt Jour-ney brings needed rain. Twelve adult men willspend days and court dangers to procure salt whichthey can buy for two dollars from the itinerant ped-dler. By our own economic standards, this is not anefficient use of human resources. But Hopi ends tran-scend our economic categories and our standards ofefficiency are irrelevant to them.

In many societies, land tenure, or the transfer-ence of land, operations involved in hunting andagriculture, are often a part of a religious way of life.In our own culture, man conceives of his relation-ship to his physical environment, and even some-times his human environment, as mechanistic andmanipulative; in other cultures, we often find whatRuth Benedict has called the animistic attitude to-ward nature and man, underlying practices whichare often classified miscellaneously together inethnographics, under the heading of superstitionsor taboos. The courteous speech to the bear about tobe killed, the offering to the deer world before thehunter sets out, the introduction of the brother-in-law to the garden spirit, or the sacrifice to the ricefield about to be sold, the refraining from inter-course, or from the eating of meat or from touchingfood with the hand, are expressive of such an atti-tude. They are the practices we find in a democraticsociety where there is consideration for the rights ofeveryone as opposed to the brutal efficiency of thedictator who feels free to exploit, considering therights of none. They reflect the attitude of peoplewho believe in conference and consent, not in coer-cion; of people who generally find personality ormana in nature and man, sometimes more, some-times less. In this framework, taboo and supersti-tious act mean that man acts and refrains from act-ing in the name of a wider democracy whichincludes nature and the divine.

With such a conception of man’s place in nature,what is for us land tenure, or ownership, or rights ofuse and disposal, is for other societies an intimatebelongingness. So the Arapesh conceive of them-selves as belonging to the land, in the way that floraand fauna belong to it. They cultivate the land by thegrace of the immanent spirits, but they cannot dis-pose of it and cannot conceive of doing so.

This feeling of affinity between society and land iswidespread and appears in various forms and vary-ing degrees of intensity, and it is not found onlyamong sedentary peoples. We have Australian tribeswhere the very spirit of the men is believed to residein the land, where a bush or a rock or a peculiar for-mation is the present incarnation of myth, and con-tains security and religious value; where a socialclass, a structured group of relatives, will contain inaddition to human beings, an animal and a feature ofthe landscape. Here, when a man moves away fromthe land of his group, he leaves the vital part of him-self behind. When a magistrate put people from suchsocieties in jail in a distant city, he had no idea of theterrifying severity of the punishment he was meting;he was cutting the tribesman off from the very sourceof his life and of his self, from the past, and the futurewhich were incorporated and present in his land.

In the technology of such societies we are againdealing with material where the religious and secu-lar are not distinct from each other. We have, for ex-ample, the description which Raymond Firth givesof the replacing of a wornout wash strake on a canoe,among the Tikopia. This operation is expertly andcoherently carried out, with secular and religiousacts performed without distinction in continuoussuccession or concurrently. A tree is cut down for thenew wash strake, a libation is poured out to thedeities of the canoe to announce this new timber, anda kava rite is performed to persuade the deities tostep out of the canoe and on to a piece of bark cloth,where they can live undisturbed, while the canoe isbeing tampered with. Then comes the unlashing ofthe old wash strake, the expert examination of thebody of the canoe in search of lurking defects, thediscovery of signs indicating the work of a borer,the cutting of the body of the canoe with a swiftstroke to discover whether the borer is there, accom-panied by an appeal to the deities of the canoe by theexpert, to witness what he is doing, and the necessityfor doing it.





Now a kinsman of the original builder of thecanoe, now dead and a tutelary deity, spontaneouslydrops his head on to the side of the canoe and wailsover the wounding of the body of the canoe. Theborer is discovered, in the meantime, to be still there;but only a specially consecrated adze can deal withhim successfully. The adze is sent for, dedicatedanew to the deity, invoked, and finally wielded withsuccess by the expert.

All this is performed with remarkable expeditionand economy of motion yet the Tikopia workers arenot interested in saving time; they are concerned nei-ther with time limits not with speed in itself. Theirconcern is with the dispossessed deities whose homemust be made ready against their return; and thespeed of their work is incidental to this religious con-cern. The end result is efficiency; but unlike our ownefficiency, this is not rooted in the effort to utilize andexploit material and time resources to the utmost; itis rooted in that profound religious feeling whichalso gives rise to the time-consuming rites and thewailing procedures which, from the purely economicpoint of view, are wasteful and interfering.

The world view of a particular society includesthat society’s conception of man’s own relation to theuniverse, human and non-human, organic and inor-ganic, secular and divine, to use our own dualisms. Itexpresses man’s view of his own role in the mainte-nance of life, and of the forces of nature. His attitudetoward responsibility and initiative is inextricablefrom his conception of nature as deity-controlled,man-controlled, regulated through a balanced coop-eration between god and man, or perhaps main-tained through some eternal homeostasis, indepen-dent of man and perhaps of any deity. The way a manacts, his feeling of guilt and achievement, and hisvery personality are affected by the way he envisionshis place within the universe.

For example, there are the Tiv of Southern Nigeriawho, as described by one of them in the thirties, peo-ple the universe with potentially hostile and harmfulpowers, the akombo. Man’s function in the mainte-nance of his own life and the moderate well-being ofthe land and of his social unit is to prevent the man-ifestation of akombo evil, through performing ritesand observing taboos. So his rites render safethrough preventing, through expulsion and purging.His role is negative, defending the normal courseagainst the interference. Vis-à-vis the universe, his

acts arise out of negative motives. Thus what corre-sponds to a gift of first fruits to a deity in other cul-tures is phrased as a rite for preventing the deitiesfrom making a man’s food go bad or diminish tooquickly; fertility rites for a field are actually rites pre-venting the evil-intentioned from robbing the fieldsof their normal fertility.

In the writings of R. F. Barton, who studied theIfugao of Luzon in the early part of this century,these people also appear to see deities as ready to in-terfere and bring evil, but their conception of man’srole within the structure of the universe is a differentone from that of the Tiv. In Barton’s descriptive ac-counts, the Ifugao either accept what comes as deity-given, or act without being themselves the agents;they believe that no act can come to a conclusive endwithout the agency of a specific deity. They have aspecific deity often for every step within an opera-tion and for every part of the implement to be used.R. F. Barton recorded the names of 1,240 deities andbelieved that even so he had not exhausted the list.

The Ifugao associate a deity with every struc-tured performance and at least a large number oftheir deliberate acts. They cannot go hunting, for ex-ample, without enlisting the aid of the deity of eachstep of the chase, to render each effective, or to nul-lify any lurking dangers. There is a deity for thelevel spot where “the hunter stands watching andlistening to the dogs”; one for when the dogs “aresicced on the game”; one for when “the hunter leanson his spear transfixing the quarry”; twelve arelisted as the deities of specific ways of renderingharmless to the hunter’s feet the snags and fangs ofsnakes which he encounters. If he is to be successfulin the hunt, a man does not ask the blessing of adeity. He pays all the particular deities of every spe-cific spot and act, getting them to transitivize eachact individually.

Even so, in most cases an Ifugao remains nona-gentive, since the function of many of the deities is tosave man from encounter, rather than to give himsuccess in his dealing with it. For example, in thearea of interpersonal relations, we have Tupya whois invoked so that “the creditor comes for dun forwhat is owed, but on the way he forgets and goesabout other business”; and Dulaiya, who is invokedso that “the enemies just don’t think about us, sothey don’t attack.” His tools, also, are ineffective ofthemselves; so that, when setting a deadfall, he





invokes and bribes such deities as that for the FlatStone of the Deadfall, the Main Posts of the Deadfall,the Fall of the Deadfall, the Trigger of the Deadfall.Most of the Ifugao economy is involved in providingsacrifices to the deities, big or little according to themagnitude of the operation and the importance ofthe deities. There is no warmth in the sacrifices; noexpression of gratitude or appeal or belongingness.As the Ifugaos see it, the sacrifice is a bribe. Withsuch bribes, they buy the miraculous interventionand transitivization which are essential for achieve-ment, health, and good personal relations.

The Ifugao show no humility in the face of this in-effective role in the universe; they merely accept it asthe state of things. They accept their own failures,the frequent deaths, the sudden and disastrous flar-ing up of tempers, as things that are bound to hap-pen irrespective of their own desires and efforts. Butthey are neither passive nor helpless. They carry ongreat undertakings, and, even now they go on for-bidden head hunts. They know when and how andwhom to bribe so as to perfect their defective acts.When however, a deity states a decision, they acceptit as immutable. A Catholic priest tells a story aboutthe neighboring Iloko which illustrates this accep-tance. A Christian Iloko was on his deathbed, and thepriest, trying to persuade him to repent of his sin,painted to him vividly the horrors of hell; but thedying man merely answered, “If God wants me to goto hell, I am perfectly willing.”

Among the Wintu Indians of California we findthat man sees himself as effective but in a clearly lim-ited way. An examination of the myths of the Wintushows that the individual was conceived as having alimited agentive role, shaping, using, intervening,actualizing and temporalizing the given, but nevercreating; that man was viewed as needing skill forhis operations, but that specific skill was uselesswithout “luck” which a man received through com-munion and pleading with some universal power.

It is to this limited role of man, geared to theworking of the universe, that I referred when I spokeearlier of Hopi drama and agriculture. Without anunderstanding of this role, no Hopi activity or atti-tude or relationship can be understood. The Hopihave developed the idea of man’s limited effective-ness in their own fashion, and have elaborated itsystematically in what they call the “Hopi Way.”Laura Thompson says of the Hopi, “All phenomena

relevant to the life of the tribe—including man, theanimals, and plants, the earth, sun, moon, clouds,the ancestors, and the spirits—are believed to be in-terdependent. . . . In this system each individual—human and non-human—is believed to have . . . adefinite role in the universal order.” Traditionally,fulfillment of the law of nature—the growth of thecorn, the movements of the sun—can come onlywith man’s participation, only with man’s perfor-mance of the established ceremonials. Here man waseffective, but only in cooperation with the rest of thephenomena of nature.

The Indians of the Plains, such as the Crow andthe Sioux, have given a somewhat different form tothis conception of man’s circumscribed agency. Theaggressive behavior for which they have beenknown, their great personal autonomy, their self-assurance and assertiveness and in recent years,their great dependence and apathy, have been ex-plained as an expression of this conception. Thesesocieties envisioned the universe as pervaded by anundifferentiated religious force on which they weredependent for success in their undertakings and inlife generally. The specific formulation differed in thedifferent tribes, but, essentially, in all it was believedthat each individual and particularly each man, musttap this universal force if his undertakings were to besuccessful. Without this “power” a man could notachieve success in any of the valued activities,whether warfare or the hunt; and no leadership waspossible without this power. This was a force en-hancing and intensifying the being of the man whoacted; it was not, as with the Ifugao, an effectivenessapplied to specific details of activities. The individ-ual himself prepared himself in the hardihood, self-control, skills and areas of knowledge necessary.Little boys of five or seven took pride in their abilityto withstand pain, physical hardship, and the terrorsof running errands alone in the night. The Sioux didnot appeal for divine intervention; he did not wantthe enemy to forget to come. Yet neither was he fear-less. He appealed for divine strength to overcome hisown fears as well as the external enemy.

The relationship with the divine, in this case, ispersonal and intense. The Plains Indian Sioux didnot, like the Hopi, inherit a specific relatedness whenhe was born in a specific clan. Each man, each pre-adolescent boy, had to achieve the relationship forhimself. He had to go out into the wilderness and





spend days and nights without food or drink, in thecold, among wild beasts, afraid and hungry and anx-ious, humbling himself and supplicating, sometimesinflicting excruciating pain upon himself, until someparticular manifestation of the universal force tookpity upon him and came to him to become his life-long guardian and power. The appeals to the univer-sal force were made sometimes in a group, through

the institution of the Sun Dance. But here also theywere individual in nature. The relationship with thedivine was an inner experience; and when theDakota Black Elk recounted his autobiography, hespoke mainly of these intense, personal religious ex-periences. Within this range of variation in form andconcept and world view, we find expressed by all thesame immediate relatedness to the divine.





28

Anthropologists in general have a negative attitudetoward missionaries, especially when they conceiveof missionaries as agents of culture change. Eventhough there seems to be little systematic indoctrina-tion, early in their training anthropology students

learn that missionaries are to be regarded as “ene-mies.” Powdermaker (1966) refers to discussionswhich she and fellow students at the London Schoolof Economics had in 1925 about the necessity ofkeeping natives pure and undefiled by missionariesand civil servants. Missionaries were seen as ene-mies who wanted to change cultures. She commentsthat “now, with the sociological interest in socialchange and the knowledge of the significant rolesplayed by missionaries and civil servants, our hostileattitude seems indeed biased.”

4

Anthropologists VersusMissionaries: The Influenceof PresuppositionsClaude E. Stipe

In this article, Claude Stipe suggests that the general attitude of anthropologists toward mission-aries has been negative, even though the discipline stresses the importance of objectivity. Stipe notesthat, although there appears to be little “systematic indoctrination” that would lead to this negativeattitude, it is evident that, early in the study of anthropology, students develop the attitude thatmissionaries are the enemy. However, he asks, if no systematic indoctrination occurs, how does oneexplain this basically negative attitude? Noting that the idea of an “objective observer,” a long-heldtenet in anthropology, is now generally regarded as a myth, Stipe points out that certain presup-positions influence the way we view situations. He then discusses in depth two presuppositionsthat he believes may result in the negative attitude of anthropologists toward missionaries: that pre-literate cultures display an organic unity (that is, they are ideal societies and change produced inthem by other cultures is harmful to them) and that religious beliefs are basically meaningless.Stipe also suggests another possible factor contributing to the negative attitude (as suggested bySalamone 1977: 409): that anthropologists and missionaries are actually similar, “both believingthey have the truth, being protective of the people among whom they work, and opposing that whichthey define as evil.”

Excerpts from C. E. Stipe, “Anthropologists VersusMissionaries: The Influence of Presuppositions,” CURRENTANTHROPOLOGY 21:2 (1980) pp. 165–179. Reprinted bypermission of The University of Chicago Press.




Although the majority of anthropologists haveprobably come into contact with missionaries whiledoing field research, Salamone (1977: 408) has notedthat the mention of missionaries in textbooks andethnographies is “both brief and somewhat hiddenin the text” and that “rarely is a straightforwardhostile antimissionary statement found” (Salamone1979: 54). According to Burridge (1978: 9), anthropol-ogists and other academics who have contributed tothe negative stereotype “would never dream of com-mitting to paper as a considered opinion the thingsthey actually said.” My own survey of the literaturehas corroborated these statements. The term “mis-sionary” does not appear in the index of many stan-dard texts in cultural anthropology, and when mis-sionaries are mentioned it is often in terms of theirdisapproving of certain cultural practices such aswife lending or gambling (cf. Richards 1977: 218,335) or tending to destroy a society’s culture andself-respect (cf. Ember and Ember 1977: 306). Exam-ples of negative statements in ethnographies includethe suggestions that the missionaries in question dopoor translation work (Hogbin 1964), use force andcruelty (Jocano 1969), unsuspectingly carry diseases(Graburn 1969), interfere with native customs(Fortune 1963), and disapprove of dancing (Middle-ton 1970). Turnbull (1961) is very negative towardsome Protestant missionaries who refused to prayfor a non-Christian pygmy who had been gored buthas high praise for a Catholic priest.

One textbook with an extended discussion of mis-sionaries is Keesing’s (1976) Cultural Anthropology: AContemporary Perspective, which includes positive aswell as negative aspects of missionary work. Keesingnotes that anthropologists and missionaries (at leastin stereotype) have been at odds with one anotherfor decades: “The caricatured missionary is a strait-laced, repressed, and narrow-minded Bible thumpertrying to get native women to cover their bosomsdecently; the anthropologist is a bearded degen-erate given to taking his clothes off and samplingwild rites” (p. 459). He decries the fact that Chris-tianity was taken to Latin America and other areas asan instrument of conquest and subjugation andnotes that in many regions the “wounds to peoples’self-conception and to the integrity of their culturesremain deep and unhealed” (p. 460). On the otherhand, he recognizes the old and enduring tradition

of missionary scholarship and statesmanship, in-cluding, e.g., Sahagún, Lafitau, Codrington, andSchebesta as well as many present missionary ethno-graphers and linguists. Keesing concludes his treat-ment by stating (p. 462):

Many Christian missionaries have devoted theirlives in ways that have enriched the communitieswhere they worked. Many, in immersingthemselves in other languages and cultures, haveproduced important records of ways nowvanishing. But more important, in valuing these oldways and seeing Christianization as a challenge tocreate syntheses of the old and new, the bestmissionaries have helped to enrich human livesand provide effective bridges to participation in aworld community.

One ethnography with an extended negativeevaluation of missionaries is Tonkinson’s (1974) ac-count of the Jigalong Mob in Australia. The situa-tion is quite atypical, since the Apostolic Churchmissionaries are given no training for their work.They know nothing about linguistics, anthropology,desert survival, or the aboriginal culture (Tonkinson1974: 119). Most devote two or more years to mis-sionary work to fulfill what they consider to be a re-ligious duty.

Chagnon (1974: 181–82) seems to show an anti-missionary bias when commenting on a group ofYanomamö who had accepted the missionaries’teaching that tobacco, drugs, and polygyny weresin:

They were going to stay there in that swamp and befed and clothed by the people from God’s villageuntil their gardens began producing; they weregoing to learn to sing and be happy. . . . [They were]swatting incessantly at the mosquitos with whichthey had chosen to live, free from sin. They were amere shadow of the people who had greeted meboisterously in their magnificent, airy andmosquito-free shabono deep in the jungle a fewyears earlier, a sovereign people, strong andconfident.

It is instructive to compare this comment with hisearlier report (1967: 24) from a jungle village that“everybody in the village is swatting vigorously atthe voracious biting gnats, and here and there

STIPE • ANTHROPOLOGISTS VERSUS MISSIONARIES: THE INFLUENCE OF PRESUPPOSITIONS | 29




groups of people delouse each other’s heads andeat the vermin.” He also seems to evaluate the peo-ple’s actions differently in these two publications.In the earlier (1967: 26–30) he describes their gradedsystem of violence, which includes duels, clubfights, spear fights, raids, and tricks (in which theyhave killed visitors). Despite their extreme aggres-siveness, they show at least two qualities he ad-mires: “they are kind and indulgent with childrenand can quickly forget personal angers” (p. 31). Itseems valid to infer that Chagnon’s negative re-sponse to the condition of the Yanomamö involvedwith missionaries is based on the fact of that in-volvement as well as on their actual condition. Acomment by Keesing (1976: 459) seems appropriatehere:

Anthropologists who have battled missionariesthrough the years have often bolstered their positionwith a cultural relativism and romanticism aboutthe “primitive” that seems increasingly anachronistic.The anthropologist who finds himself in defense ofinfanticide, head-hunting, or the segregation andsubordination of women, and in opposition tomissionization, can well be uncomfortable aboutthe premises from which he argues.

If no systematic indoctrination takes place, howcan the basically negative attitude of anthropologiststoward missionaries be explained? It is now gener-ally accepted that the concept of an “objective ob-server” who does not let personal values influenceobservations and conclusions is a myth. We realizethat experiences shape attitudes and values, whichin turn affect our evaluations. Presuppositions influ-ence the way in which we look at situations. I sug-gest that two common presuppositions may con-tribute to the negative attitude of anthropologiststoward missionaries: that primitive cultures arecharacterized by an organic unity and that religiousbeliefs are essentially meaningless.

The Organic-Unity Concept

Many anthropologists have a penchant for seeing theculture they are studying (especially if it is sufficientlyprimitive) as a “work of art whose beauty [lies] in theway in which the parts [are] counterbalanced and in-terrelated” (Richardson 1975: 523). According to theteleological assumption of functionalism, which is

apparent in much of the ethnographic literature, theideal society is in perfect equilibrium, and change,especially that produced by outside contacts, isharmful (Hughes 1978: 78).

Bennett (1946) has shown how the organic ap-proach takes into account only certain facets of aculture. He contrasts Laura Thompson’s “organic”approach with Esther Goldfrank’s “repression” ap-proach to Pueblo culture. Thompson sees the cultureand society as “integrated to an unusual degree, allsectors being bound together by a consistent, harmo-nious set of values, which pervade and homogenizethe categories of world view, ritual, art, social orga-nization, economic activity, and social control”(Bennett 1946: 362–63). According to Thompson,such a culture develops an ideal personality typewhich fosters the virtues of gentleness, nonaggres-sion, cooperation, modesty, and tranquility. Shestresses the organic wholeness of preliterate life, con-trasting it with the heterogeneity and diffuseness ofmodern civilization. On the other hand, Goldfrankcharacterizes Pueblo culture as marked by “consid-erable covert tension, suspicion, anxiety, hostility,fear, and ambition” (Bennett 1946: 363). Children arecoerced subtly and sometimes brutally into behav-ing according to Pueblo norms. Authority is in thehands of the group and the chiefs, and the individualis suppressed and repressed. In contrasting the twopositions, Bennett notes (p. 366) that “while the ‘or-ganic’ approach tends to show a preference for ho-mogeneous preliterate culture, the ‘repressed’ theoryhas a fairly clear bias in the direction of equalitariandemocracy and non-neurotic ‘free’ behavior.”

Since anthropologists have preached the integrityof each culture, change (unless it has been internallymotivated) “has been seen as upsetting a delicatemachine, a functioning organism, or an intricatesymbolic or communication system—whichevermetaphor we have used for organizing our ideasabout society or culture” (Colson 1976: 267). Muchhas been written about the marginal person who isno longer at home in his or her own culture and is at-tempting to find a place of security in the larger so-cial universe. We contrast the alienation we imputeto such people with the contentment and emotionalsecurity we attribute to individuals in a closedcommunity.

It is interesting that anthropologists for the mostpart have been reformers primarily with respect





to other people in their own society. We are oftenuncomfortable with policies which endanger thecustomary ways of life of local communities, andwhen such communities are exposed to new, con-flicting demands some of us even call those policiesgenocide or ethnocide. We seem to be saying that“options are bad for other people upon whom wedo ethnography, but very good for ourselves, whouse the teaching of social anthropology to free our-selves, and our peers, from constraining tradition”(Colson 1976: 267). As Lewis (1973: 584–85) hasargued,

The very qualities of primitive life which theanthropologist romanticizes and wants to seepreserved are attributes which he findsunacceptable in his own culture. The personalfreedom and self-determination he insists upon forhimself he withholds from the “primitive” on thebasis of cultural conditioning and the need for theaccommodation of the individual within thecommunity. He writes enthusiastically of the highlyintegrated life of the “primitive,” of the lack ofstress experienced when there is little freedom ofchoice and few alternatives from which to choose;yet he defends for himself the right to make hisown decisions and his own choices.

A local point of view is often myopic, and an-thropologists are no exception. We often do not re-alize that the seeming equilibrium of a tribe mayhave been largely created by the colonial situation.When one is concerned with a single society, it isoften difficult to see how the populations of a givenregion are bound together in networks of trade, ex-change, and the flow of ideas (Keesing 1976: 432).Although the present is a precipitate of history, at-tempts are often made to explain the present interms of itself.

The organic view of cultures is due in part to theshort time an anthropologist ordinarily spends in agiven culture. Even though it may extend over sev-eral years, a single field trip encourages a descriptionwhich emphasizes the homogeneity of a culture, thesituation at a specific time being seen as the idealcondition (Colson 1976: 269). In too many cases theanthropologist does not observe a society longenough to see how the people grow dissatisfied withtheir condition and attempt to change it. Whathe/she may see as an ideal situation may be viewedby the people as an unsatisfactory compromise. As

Colson (1976: 264) notes:

It is people who are the actors, attempting to adaptand use their institutions to attain their ends,always fiddling with the cultural inheritance andexperimenting with its possibilities. They need totake thought of what they do. They lose sight of oneend in pursuing another. Frequently they losethemselves in a dreadful muddle. There is nonecessary feedback system that will automaticallycorrect the state of affairs and return them to baseone to start again having learned from theirmistakes. And no shining model of an idealsociety . . . is going to save them from theirmistakes, though it may comfort them in theiraffliction. This is as true of those who live in Africanvillages or the islands of the Pacific as it is of us inour cities and bureaucracies which we create andthen decline to control. Ethnographers have usuallypresented each social group they study as a successstory. We have no reason to believe this is true.

Although most people value their customary ways,they certainly are not reluctant to change when theyanticipate that the changes will improve their situa-tion. There is a sense, therefore, in which any givenculture is always being tested, and this is no moretrue of our own than it is of others which are lesscomplex.

O’Brien and Ploeg (1964: 291) discuss the fact thatwhen a group of Dani met to plan for the burning ofweapons, the throwing away of jao, and the abolitionof in-law avoidances, no one questioned the desir-ability of these acts. “To account for this unanimity,one should realize that the motive underlyingthe movement—dissatisfaction with the originalculture—applied with equal force to all Dani. Also,all concurred in thinking that the Europeans enjoyeda vastly superior way of life.” The Dani appreciatedthe improvements in their standard of living whichwere due mainly to the cessation of warfare, avail-ability of medical treatment, and improvement of theeconomic system. As Salamone (1976: 62) has noted,“Individuals will become converts to those religioussystems which enable them to better adapt to theirecological niches.”

Hippler (1974: 336) has argued that the introduc-tion of Euro-American civilization to Alaskan nativegroups was more a blessing than a curse:

It occurs to us that the introduction of modernmedicine, freedom from the dangers and





uncertainties of the hunt, reduction in interpersonalviolence and the like are positively acceptedchanges. The only Indians and Eskimos we knowwho wholly extoll the past are those too young tohave experienced that untouched aboriginalculture. Mothers do prefer to have most of theirchildren live; only fools wish to have unrestrainedinterpersonal violence. It is . . . very possible thatmuch complaint about the “loss of one’s culture”now expressed by young Eskimos and Indians ishyperbolic cant derived in part from a misreadingor, unfortunately, a correct reading of someanthropological writings and the comments of localpolitical ideologues.

Hippler concludes that the concept of the death of aculture, which is an analogy applied to an abstrac-tion, may be less important in the scheme of individ-ual human lives than many anthropologists make itseem.

Discussions of culture change often given the im-pression that indigenous peoples were passive spec-tators in the acculturation process and that mission-ization was a force which unilaterally impinged onpassively recipient peoples. In actuality, there areusually “continuing interactions of Western and in-digenous religious beliefs, structures, and institu-tional arrangements” (Tiffany 1978: 305; see alsoLa–tu–kefu 1978: 462).

From these examples, it is obvious that not all an-thropologists take an idealistic view of the organicnature of a culture and therefore see culture changeas necessarily bad for the indigenous peoples. How-ever, one should not be surprised when those whodo hold this position manifest a negative attitude to-ward missionaries who attempt to change cultures.

The Meaninglessness of Religious Beliefs

Although a missionary (Edwin Smith) was oncepresident of the Royal Anthropological Institute, themajority of anthropologists are either atheistic oragnostic. According to Evans-Pritchard (1965, 1972),the early anthropological writers on religion (e.g.,Tylor, Frazer, Malinowski, and Durkheim) had allhad a relatively dreary religious upbringing whichled to an animosity toward revealed religion. Theywere looking for a weapon which could be usedwith deadly effect against Christianity, for if they

could explain away primitive religion as an intellec-tual aberration or by its social function they coulddiscredit and explain away the higher religions aswell (1965: 15). Evans-Pritchard concludes (1972:205) that

social anthropology has been the product of mindswhich, with very few exceptions, regarded allreligion as outmoded superstition, suited no doubtto a pre-scientific age and historically justified, likeclasses in the eyes of Marxists, for a given period,but now useless, and even without ethical value,and worse than useless because it stood in the wayof a rational regeneration of mankind and socialprogress.

The basic approach of social anthropologists toreligion can be characterized by Radcliffe-Brown’s(1952: 155) dictum that in studying religion “it is onthe rites rather than the beliefs that we should firstconcentrate our attention.” Gluckman (1962: 14–15)elaborated on this position by asserting that modernminds are bored with the intellectualist approach ofthe 19th-century anthropologists and that contempo-rary anthropologists demonstrate that rituals “are infact to be understood in terms of the social relationswhich are involved in the rituals.” Leach (1954: 15)maintained that the structure which is symbolized inritual is “the system of socially approved ‘proper’relations between individuals and groups.”

Lawrence (1970) and Horton (1971) trace thisview to 18th-century rationalistic philosophy. Godhad ceased to be personal for many people by theend of the 17th century, and by the end of the 18thcentury many had decided that they could do with-out God completely. When religion no longer pro-vides a theory for how the world really works, man’sencounter with God can easily be relegated to the“supreme archetypal social relationship” (Horton1971: 96).

In at least some cases, anthropologists seem tohave had a type of “conversion experience” awayfrom Christianity. At the 1974 meeting of the Ameri-can Anthropological Association in Mexico City Igave a paper on the role of religion in culture change,in which I demonstrated that in many instances onecannot explain the occurrence or the direction of cul-ture change without understanding the religiousbeliefs of the people. In the same session was a paperin which the author argued that all differences be-tween Protestants and Catholics in a Guatemalan





village could be explained by socioeconomic and po-litical factors. He was disturbed by my approach andexplained that he had been a seminary student andthat his “conversion” to anthropology involved therejection of the position that religious beliefs weremeaningful. He therefore resented being subjected(especially by another anthropologist) to the veryposition from which he had been converted.

The only published statement I have seen isRichardson’s (1975: 519), in which he attributes toanthropology his liberation from Christian beliefs:

My freedom from the things that nearly destroyedme (and that continue to haunt me) would comefrom studying them, and wrestling with them inorder to expose their secret. At that point, just shortof stomping on them and destroying them, for somereason my private battle stops. Today, I have nolove for the Southern Baptists, but I can almost say“Billy Graham” without sneering.

This comment seems incompatible with his state-ment (p. 523) that cultural relativism is a “moral jus-tification for being an anthropologist.” It seemsincongruous that a cultural relativist would sneer atanyone’s religion. From an anthropological perspec-tive, Lowie’s statement that it is the responsibility ofthe fieldworker to understand the “true inwardness”of the beliefs and practices is more appropriate.Lowie asserts (1963: 533),

. . . I have known anthropologists who accorded abenevolent understanding to the Hopi but denied itto Catholics, Mormons, Buddhists, orMohammedans. This dichotomy of viewpointstrikes me as ridiculous and completelyunscientific. I will study as many religions as I can,but I will judge none of them. I doubt if any otherattitude is scientifically defensible.

Burridge (1978: 10) mentions an anthropologistwho was in the habit of smoking on the premises ofa missionary organization that had strict regulationsagainst the use of tobacco or alcohol within its com-pound. In fact, he even urged some of the people liv-ing there to accept free gifts of cigarettes. One won-ders if he would just as inconsiderately have offeredpork chops to the caretaker of a mosque or eaten hotdogs in a Hindu temple.

I suspect that, in at least some instances, the an-tipathy of anthropologists toward missionaries liesin the fact that missionaries take seriously and teach

other people religious beliefs which the anthropolo-gists have personally rejected. It would be difficultfor most people to maintain a positive (or even neu-tral) attitude toward a position they had personallyrejected as being either invalid or meaningless. AsBurridge (1978: 8) suggests,

Somehow, whether the person was a physician, anagricultural expert, a technician, a schoolteacher—whatever—the fact that he or she was also amissionary seemed to neutralize the expertise beingproffered. One was left with the impression that itwas the rarely articulated “Christian” in the generallabel “missionary” that was the prime target ofobjection.

Conclusion

Although early anthropologists relied heavily onmissionary publications and there have been manymissionary ethnographers, the general attitude ofanthropologists toward missionaries has been nega-tive. It would be simplistic to suggest that this atti-tude is entirely due to the acceptance of one (or both)of the presuppositions I have discussed. However,the positions that cultures are organic wholes whichshould not be disturbed and that religious beliefs areessentially meaningless would certainly contributeto such an attitude. Another contributing factor thathas been suggested (Salamone 1977: 409) is that an-thropologists and missionaries are actually similar,both believing they have the truth, being protectiveof the people among whom they work, and oppos-ing that which they define as evil. Burridge (1978: 5)argues that Malinowski’s diaries display an animustoward missionaries which has overtones of an unre-solved Oedipus problem: “Missionaries had fa-thered the work to which he was dedicating himselfwith typical missionary zeal—on the other side ofthe fence.”

Since the involvement of some anthropologistswith missionaries will no doubt continue, we shouldbe concerned with the bases of the negative attitudewhich many of us manifest and be candid in dealingwith it. An unwillingness to do so can result in a fail-ure to control for bias in field research (cf. Salamone1979: 57). This is especially important in areas suchas Oceania, where an analysis of missionary en-deavor is crucial to an understanding of the processof culture change.





34

This selection was written especially for this volume.

When I began my training as an anthropologist with aspecialization in Thailand, I knew from the start Iwould be studying an overwhelmingly Buddhist na-tion, which in the 2000 census was reported to be 94.6percent Buddhist (CIA World Factbook). Even as I im-mersed myself in the sometimes dry volumes of read-ing necessary for graduate school, I half-consciouslyentertained distant childhood memories of NationalGeographic photographs of stunningly beautiful,lichen-covered Buddha sculptures, which I laterlearned were from Thailand’s ancient capital,Sukhothai, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Thephotographs must have appeared during the time ofthe Vietnam War, and they provided counterpoint tothe powerful war reportage I was accustomed toseeing in newspapers and on television. That made

even the name of the region—Southeast Asia—slightlyscary and off-putting to me as an American child. Icannot discount the role such images played, both thesublime Buddha images and the now iconic photos ofthe Vietnam War, in motivating me—a white, middle-class female from a small university town in Califor-nia—to eventually want to learn to speak Thai andwrite a dissertation about Thai musicians.

But what was this “Buddhism” that I vaguely ex-pected to find in Thailand? Visiting wats (temples)with Thai friends in the United States, I began to getto know a louder, more sociable, more community-minded Buddhism than my earliest preconceptionshad allowed, one with plenty of room for encounter-ing and making sense of the supernatural. Once inThailand, I found musicians intensely engaged withdeities from the Hindu pantheon, deities that aremanifested during performance and honored, alongwith esteemed teachers from the past, in elaborate

5

Thai Buddhism and thePopularity of Amulets inAnthropological PerspectivePamela Moro

The following article begins by acknowledging the role of preconceptions in motivating the study ofreligions outside of one’s own society, reflecting on the author’s interest in Thailand. The article in-troduces some basic characteristics of the anthropological study of religion, with an emphasis on par-ticular challenges in understanding Buddhism in Southeast Asia. The relationship between religionas articulated in authoritative texts and as lived in daily practice has been a key concern for ethnog-raphers, including influential mid-20th century figures such as Melford E. Spiro and Robert Redfield.The second half of the article is an extended example of why religious beliefs and activities are fruit-fully studied in social context. Everyday concerns in the lives of individuals, but also in society atlarge, can fuel short-lived responses only loosely connected to orthodox religion, such as the passion-ate collecting of amulets in Thailand.




rituals. In fact, contemporary scholarship on ThaiBuddhism reveals a complex interplay between his-torical influences from India (both Hindu and Bud-dhist), Chinese religion, local spirit cults, astrologyand fortune telling, political power and nationalidentity, and today’s globally mediated marketplaceof religion (for example, Klima 2002, R. Morris 2000,Taylor 2008, Terwiel 1975.)

At any rate, thinking of Thailand as a “Buddhistnation,” or any part of the world as a fill-in-the-religion-blank country, can foster misleading assump-tions about how people engage in a day-to-day waywith religious concerns. Anthropology offers anumber of tools for understanding the relationshipbetween a so-called world religion and the diverseways of enacting it.

Anthropological studies of religion differ fromthose of other perspectives in goal, stance, andmethod. Our goal is to understand that wide assort-ment of difficult-to-define human experiences thatWestern intellectual traditions have led us to call re-ligion (cf. Asad 1993), with particular concern for thespecific cultural and historical circumstances thatmake each example meaningful. Depending on theanthropologist’s training and theoretical inclina-tions, this may mean a focus on symbolism and rit-ual, or on the functions of religion for differentgroups in society, including the state, or on powerand authority as shaped through historicalprocesses. These approaches contrast strongly withthose of the theologian or spiritual follower whoseeks the truth, or correct teachings from the per-spective of her own tradition—working from a per-spective “within the faith.” Instead, anthropologistsadopt a stance that turns aside from questions of whatis true, real, or correct. With its reliance upon ethno-graphic methods such as participant-observation,interviews, and immersion in primary sources, an-thropology seeks multi-textured understandings ofreligious experience, with attention not only to reli-gious authorities and specialists but also to thewhole myriad of participants within a society. Whilescholars in other fields typically have strong interestsin religion as it has been written down, such as scrip-ture and other canonic texts—locating “the religion”in the normative version articulated by authoritiesthroughout the ages—anthropologists are likely tobe interested in how authoritative traditions areunderstood by, adapted, altered, used, or rejected by

everyday participants as well as broadly influentialleaders.

These characteristics are abundantly clear in theanthropological studies of Theravada Buddhism inSoutheast Asia, the part of the world where my ownresearch interests lie. Were one to read only historicaland text-based accounts of Buddhism, one would bemightily surprised by the concerns and activities ofactual Buddhists in Thailand, for example, whetherordained monks or lay people. The philosophicalfoundations expressed in the Diamond and LotusSutras seem a far cry from such everyday Thai con-cerns as donating food to monks on their morningalms-gathering walks and making offerings at house-hold spirit shrines. As with many world religions,outsiders have developed particular preconceptionsabout Buddhism based on images circulated throughpopular culture, tourism, Western-authored inter-pretations of Buddhist philosophy and aesthetics,and well-intentioned encapsulations promotingmulticultural tolerance. This discourse has long his-torical roots (cf. Lopez 1998). It comes as a shock tomany non-Buddhist Westerners that, contrary totheir expectations, most Thai, for example, do notmeditate, and they do not eschew worldly posses-sions. The country has a high murder rate, and tem-ples are only sometimes sites of quiet introspection.Even monks, visually distinctive in orange robes andshaved heads as they go about their highly disci-plined daily routine, are motivated by a variety ofgoals, including entry into adulthood through tem-porary ordination for young men, fulfillment of par-ents’ expectations, and the pursuit of power. Onlysome are concerned with systematic practices to seekenlightenment. It is the anthropologist’s job to payattention to such varieties of experiences within asociety—as well as, of course, documenting cross-cultural similarities and contrasts discernable from aglobal level.

Not that anthropologists ignore canonic texts. Infact, one of the preeminent ethnographers of Ther-avada Buddhism in the mid 20th century, Melford E.Spiro, specialized precisely in the relationship be-tween Buddhism as articulated in texts and Bud-dhism as lived experience, noting points of similarity,points of contrast, and how the two shaped one an-other. Spiro conducted fieldwork in village Burma in1961–62, but as the work of other ethnographers hasborn out, the patterns identified by Spiro also apply

MORO • THAI BUDDHISM AND THE POPULARITY OF AMULETS IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE | 35




to Thailand, Sri Lanka, and other places adhering tothe Theravada tradition. (Theravada, or Hinayana,Buddhism is one of two majors sects in Buddhism,distinct from the Mahayana tradition which devel-oped about two millennia ago.)

Indeed, so far as Buddhist scholarship is concerned,one might say that the anthropologist takes offwhere the textual and historical scholar ends, forthe anthropologist is not concerned with religioustexts per se, but with the interaction between thedoctrines found in these texts and conceptionsfound in the heads of religious devotees, andconsequently, with the relation between thesereligious conceptions and the general ordering ofsocial and cultural life (Spiro 1982:3).

To Spiro, text-focused studies tell an incompletestory of Buddhism, since “...many of its doctrines areonly rarely internalized by the members of these so-cieties, because they are either ignored or rejected bythe faithful” (ibid: 10). While some of his contempo-raries in anthropology deliberately ignored textualversions of Buddhism, Spiro’s study of BurmeseBuddhism was specifically concerned with the gapbetween textual scholarship—as normally carriedout by historians of religion or religious studiesspecialists—and the field investigations of anthro-pologists. Around the time of Spiro’s work onBurma—which was monumental in scope andpublished as three books—other anthropologistsworked on the issue of how written, authoritativeversions of culture, such as those of religious scrip-ture, articulate with popular understandings, or asSpiro put it, how “the normative tradition and thesocial actors who have acquired it or been exposed toit” relate to one another (ibid:5). Robert Redfield(1956) coined the useful if somewhat evaluative-sounding terms Great Tradition and Little Traditionto describe the two spheres, and he urged the studyof how the two shape each other. These termswere later taken up by Milton Singer (1970) andother anthropologists specifically interested in Asia,though they maintained that the terms were poten-tially misleading if applied too strictly or with theview that one completely derives from the other, oris a corruption or misunderstanding of the other.

Perhaps because of the lively interplay betweenthe key ideas of Buddhism and the daily practicesand attitudes of common people, both rural and

urban, anthropologists have been fascinated byapparent paradoxes in the faith. In a recent overview,Brian Morris describes how Buddhism challenges theapplicability of standard analytical categories in reli-gion scholarship, by anthropologists or anyone(2006:44–76). Is Buddhism really “a religion”? Towhat extent are the Buddha and other significantfigures, such as saintly monks, recognized as dead?What are the complex relationships betweenBuddhism and state power? Given that ordinary peo-ple do not live like monks, how do they attempt tolive up to Buddhist values? As Spiro argued, the keyideals of Buddhism seem to be somehow separatefrom the daily practices and attitudes of the commonpeople, whether in villages or urban communities.Yet despite the esoteric nature of the most intellectualBuddhist texts, to some degree even “the humblestvillager” is familiar with basic principles of the faith.

. . . [T]hroughout most of Thailand, Burma, andamong the Sinhalese, Buddhism is a livingtradition. The five basic precepts of Buddhism—notto kill, steal, engage in sexual misconduct, lie, ordrink intoxicants—are upheld, and along with thefamous “triple Jewel”—“I take refuge in theBuddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take myrefuge in the Sangha”—are recited every day byalmost every villager. Importantly, though suchdevotions are said before an image of the Buddha,the Buddha is not considered a god, though suchimages, as well as the famous relics, are oftenconceived as having spiritual power (B. Morris2006:53).

Melford Spiro found his way around the para-doxes by inserting a decisive scholarly hand. Hedistinguished three orientations within TheravadaBuddhism, related to different goals or instrumentalneeds and corresponding to some degree with an in-dividual’s status as either monk or layperson. Thethree categories are creations of the researcher, andthe names given to them by Spiro are not householdwords that Southeast Asian people themselveswould use, yet the general patterns alert us to the di-versity of concerns and observances within the faith.Spiro’s three orientations are:

• nibbanic Buddhism—concerned with reachingnirvana, the release from suffering and transcend-ing of individuality. He also called this soteriologicalBuddhism because it is related to salvation;





• kammic Buddhism—concerned with karma or theaccruing of spiritual merit to insure better rebirths;

• apotropaic Buddhism—concerned with relievingday-to-day problems, insuring luck and good for-tune. Apotropaic means having the power to avertevil or ill fortune.

Nibbanic Buddhism tends to be the realm of onlya few pious monks, while kammic Buddhism is theaim of the vast majority of lay people, and indeedmany Theravada Buddhist ritual observances,whether enacted daily or at the time of holidays, aremotivated by the accumulation of spiritual merit.Apotropaic concerns engage just about everyone atsome point (1982:140ff).

It is in the realm of apotropaic Buddhism, to useSpiro’s term, that the remainder of this article moves.We will see how Thai from all walks of life recentlyturned to a particular form of religious amulet in atime of social uncertainty. To unravel the amuletcraze, we put to use the standard tools of anthropol-ogy: examination of historically situated culturalpatterns as well as the immediate political and eco-nomic context, drawing on primary sources, fieldexperiences, and related literature from scholarswithin as well as outside of Thailand.

Anthropologists have characterized the Thaiworldview as concerned to the point of obsessionwith supernatural power (cf. Mulder 1985, Tambiah1982). This power—to be feared, controlled, manipu-lated, and put to use—can collect in certain placesand be imbued in particular objects. Among thecountless such objects in Thailand are amulets,their trade long a vibrant informal economy, andtheir associated beliefs constituting a detailed realmof local knowledge and folk culture. The forms andfunctions of Thai amulets have varied across time,but the most common are molded clay or metal ob-jects, most often featuring a Buddha image, andendowed with supernatural power to insure luck,safety, fertility, prosperity, or success, or to ward offundesirable conditions and fortunes. Some are in-the-round or three-dimensional—including specialpurpose amulets shaped like phalluses or animals—while others are flat lozenges; still others areswatches of printed fabric, bearing cabalistic writ-ing and/or sacred images. Noted Thai folklorist

Phya Anuman Rajadhon contributed a detailedoverview and classification of the many kinds, in-cluding categories of recitations, tattoos, and nat-ural objects such as certain kinds of leaves. FromRajadhon’s work it is clear that over time variousstyles of amulets have risen and fallen in popularity(1968).

Like all sacred objects in Thailand, especially allrepresentations of the Lord Buddha (properly calledBuddha images, never “Buddhas”), amulets aretreated with respect and care. They are commonlyworn on the body, most often under one’s clothes ona neck chain, but they may also be placed on a homealtar, the dashboard of a motor vehicle, or other spe-cial place. It is likely that nearly all Thai, whetherurban or rural, possess at least a few amulets. Whilepeople in the West may wear a Christian cross or aStar of David on a neck chain as a sign of pride, toassert an identity, or as an intimately meaningfulpersonal reminder of faith, Thai amulets (while theymight serve the former roles as well) primarily func-tion as objects of actual power. They do not stand forpower but actually have power. Certain types arealso offered as vow-fulfillment at sacred sites.

In the scholarly literature, amulets have alsobeen referred to as talismans and charms. There isminimal consistency in definitions, and I have cho-sen to use the term “amulet” because it has beenshowcased in earlier studies of Thailand. TheodorH. Gaster, in the Encyclopedia of Religion, distin-guishes amulets, as small objects charged withmagical power to ward off undesirable things, fromtalismans, intended to enhance desirable qualitiesand fortunes. “Amulets and talismans are two sidesof the same coin: the former are designed to repelwhat is baneful; the latter, to impel what is benefi-cial. The employment of both (which is universal)rests on the belief that the inherent quality of athing can be transmitted to human beings by con-tact” (2005:297-98). Carolyn Morrow Long uses thegeneric European term “charm” to encompass bothamulets and talismans: “A charm is any object,substance, or combination thereof believed to be ca-pable of influencing physical, mental, and spiritualhealth; manipulating personal relationships andthe actions of others; and invoking the aid of thedeities, the dead, and the abstract concept of ‘luck’“(2001:xvi).





Using concepts first introduced a century ago byJames Frazer, in his massive cross-culturalcompendium of religious beliefs, The Golden Bough,Long notes that charms work by the principle ofsympathetic magic. They produce results because ofa sympathetic connection between the charm andthe person or events to be influenced (ibid:xvii). Thissympathetic connection is articulated in imitativecharms when the ingredients or appearance of theobject is “like” its purpose—like produces like. Inother cases the sympathetic connection operates be-cause things that were once in contact continue toaffect each other. Thai amulets generally fall in theimitative category. Though publications aboundabout amulets, talismans, and charms, most are of anon-scholarly or semi-scholarly nature (for exampleD. Morris 1999, Paine 2004). An early classic work isE.A. Wallis Budge’s Amulets and Talismans, a compar-ative account tracing such items to ancient Egyptand Babylonia, first published in 1911 and reflectingthe British antiquarian perspective of its day. How-ever, all such classifications do little to deepen ourunderstanding of what the amulets mean to the peo-ple who use them, or why their use becomes intensein particular times and places.

The methods for crafting amulets and imbuingthem with sacred power are forms of specializedknowledge in Thailand, associated with lineages ofparticipants who pass the knowledge along semi-secretly. Power can build or be proven, however,after the time of manufacture. What often happens isthat a particular kind of amulet will be associatedwith a miraculous event, and legendary acclaim willfollow. For example, when some small, bronze-colored metal amulets, bearing the image of arevered monk, were found to be carried by survivorsin the horrific collapse of a hotel in 1992, that style ofamulet suddenly grew in popularity. A dear friend’smother, concerned about our safety, gave a pair tomy husband and me before a flight back to theUnited States.

As an anthropologist studying Thailand, whilemy central research interests were with music, Icould not fail to be fascinated by amulets. Arrivingin Bangkok for the first time in 1985, I quicklydiscovered neighborhoods known for the sale ofamulets and other sacred objects and saw with myown eyes the ubiquity of amulet wearing. Grand-mothers wore weighty strands of locket-encased

charms and small babies were lovingly protectedwith tiny Buddha figurines on delicate chains.Despite having read the most important scholarlyworks on Thai amulets, I had somehow underes-timated what must be one of the most immediate,everyday encounters with the supernatural for per-haps millions of Thai. I most definitely had underes-timated the exchange value of amulets, evidencednot only in the lively streetside markets but also inglossy trade magazines for amulet dealers, collec-tors, and investors. Some enthusiasts put a greatdeal of effort into learning to distinguish real fromfake or reproduction items. On the surface, the out-sider might falsely compare such trade with coin orbaseball card collecting, where scarcity, condition,and aesthetic appeal determine value. The value ofamulets may well be partly shaped by such factors,and fair enough, coin and baseball card collectorsmay fetishize their objects of desire to a certaindegree. Yet Thai sacred objects are fundamentallyvaluable because they contain power, and value willrise and fall with perceptions of the efficacy of thatpower.

Living in the northern city of Chiangmai for sev-eral months in 2007, as a guest at Chiangmai RajabhatUniversity, I was caught by surprise once again. Anew style of amulet, jatukham-rammathep, hadrecently shot into prominence. Originally producedat a single monastery, Wat Mahathat, in the southerncity of Nakhon Si Thammarat in the mid-1980s, theywere just one among the many varieties of amuletsuntil 2006 and especially 2007. They suddenlysurged in popularity and monetary value, constitut-ing a craze or what Thai slang refers to as a “hit.”Their name refers to two Hindu deities, guardians toholy relics at Wat Mahathat and represented in im-ages on doors at the temple. Jatukham-rammatheepamulets are distinctive visually. They are round,larger than most amulets (about 3” in diameter),embossed with Hindu images and astrological signs,and worn in eye-catching lockets on large goldchains—displayed openly for all to see, sometimesturned around to a person’s back—especially bymales. Though I have no proof, I have wondered ifthe lockets and chains are influenced by hip-hopfashion. There actually are countless differentjatukham-rammathep amulets, with different im-ages and manufactured from different substances.Compared to the subdued terra cotta or brass of





most other amulets, they are colorful and, becausethey include herbal ingredients, are distinctivelyfragrant.

In 2007, the bazaar-style sale of the amulets inChiangmai, and apparently throughout the nation,was striking. They just seemed to be everywhere,from sidewalk stalls to supermarket foyers. Onweekends, the entire ground-level floor of a majorshopping center turned into an amulet market withdozens of small-scale vendors offering jatukham-rammathep. 7-Eleven stores (incidentally, the largestchain store in the world in 2007, with massive num-bers of outlets in Thailand (GreenwichMeanTime.com 2009; Japan News Review 2007), sold magazinesand catalogs devoted to the amulets, displayedprominently near the cash registers, and even offeredtheir own amulets via mail order. An entrepreneurialcivil servant at my neighborhood post office sold,from behind the counter, shirts with jatukham-rammathep images. Some believe the shirts have thesame potential power as the amulets. With so muchbuying, selling, and speculating, it is no wonder thatthe objects escalated in value precipitously. In 2007,their prices ranged from several hundred to severalmillion baht (US$1 equals about 35–39 baht).

Unlike most amulets which are ready-to-go whenacquired, in 2007 jatukham-rammathep requiredcharging up: they needed to be consecrated by theuser. This is commonly done in mass ceremonies of-ficiated by monks (though most monks, by far, arenot involved with the jatukham-rammathep craze).Especially desirable is blessing from the abbot of WatMahathat, the temple originally associated with theirmanufacture. A range of related commodities couldalso be used to enhance the power of the jatukham-rammathep, for example, candles ornamented withritualistic writing. Such activities suggest a personalagency on the part of the users, a commitment totending the artifact.

As with meteoric crazes in any part of the world,the phenomenon soon aroused controversy, andwas documented in nearly daily, sometimes sensa-tional, news stories. Thai economists became con-cerned by the wildly inflated prices of the amulets,and by how much of the Thai economy was tied upin them, like tulip mania in 16th and 17th centuryHolland. An Air Force pilot took a load of amuletsup in a plane, to increase their power; a ruralmonastery created a special set containing ashes of

cremated infants; other monasteries financed build-ing and renovation projects through the sale ofcommissioned amulets; an outspoken monk, criti-cal of the obsession, poked fun by marketingamulet-shaped cookies and dog treats. Yet by thetime I was leaving Chiangmai in September 2007,prices were beginning to fall, and word on thestreet was that the craze was passing, the economicbubble burst.

Setting aside for the moment the purely economicaspects of the jatukham-rammathep phenomenon,with some participants undisputedly buying andselling in order to get rich, we might ask why thecraze erupted when it did, and why this particularkind of amulet, out of all those available, became ofsuch interest. A superficial answer to the question isthe 2006 death of Major-General Phantarak Rajadej,the Nakhon Si Thammarat police chief who origi-nally promoted the amulets (Head 2007). Tens ofthousands of people attended his funeral, and copiesof the amulets were distributed, stimulating interestin the older version (ibid.). However, there is no sin-gle miraculous event or crisis aversion associatedwith the police chief, or indeed with jatukham-rammathep as a whole. Instead, following the lead ofThai scholars who convened a 2007 conferencedevoted to the amulets, we must find our answer inthe social, economic, and political circumstances ofThailand at the time.

Anthropologists frequently attribute belief inmagic, and turns to religion in general, as ways tocontrol the uncontrollable and to explain the unex-plainable. Classic contributions from BronislawMalinowski on magic in the Trobriand Islands (seearticles 36 and 37 in the present volume) and by E. E. Evans-Pritchard on witchcraft among theAzande (article 36) are in this vein. Humans arenever without things that need to be controlled andexplained, and hence—from a functionalist point ofview—it is likely that the usual varied assortmentof amulets has offered comfort and satisfaction tomany Thai, in ways that the otherworldly philoso-phy of orthodox Buddhism might not. As Spiropointed out, the apotropaic orientation withinSoutheast Asian Buddhism offers relief for dailyproblems, in its focus on “important matters in thisexistence” (1982:140).

However, around the time of the jatukham-rammathep phenomenon, a striking confluence of





circumstances worried the nation and might ac-count for why the public would be attracted to thepromise of a new kind of supernatural assistance.The December 26, 2004, tsunami struck Thailand’ssouthern peninsula, tragically killing both localpeople and foreigners, and temporarily devastatingthe region’s tourist economy. A coup d’état onSeptember 19, 2006, ousted controversial PrimeMinister Thaksin Shinawatra and banned his party,and it led to leadership by a junta until elections inlate 2007. During the period of junta leadership,Bangkok protests in support of the ousted primeminister frequently ended in mass arrests. For thefirst time ever, citizens approved a new constitutionthrough referendum in August 2007. Under theleadership of Thaksin as well as the junta, long-simmering conflict between Thai-speaking Bud-dhists and Malay-speaking Muslims, all Thaicitizens, in southern Thailand became violent. Hotspots erupted along Thailand’s other, notoriouslyporous borders. During these same years concernsgrew about avian influenza, contaminants in food,and the relocation of wage-paying jobs to China asmultinational companies moved their factories to acheaper source of labor. After years of robust eco-nomic growth that swelled the Thai middle class,the first inklings of global economic problems—stemming from the U.S. mortgage crisis—began tobe reported in Thailand in 2007. Perhaps more thananything, however, there was concern for Thai-land’s revered king, approaching his 80th birthdayin fragile health, arousing softly whispered anxietyabout succession and stability. Public disquiet con-tinued amidst political instability, public protests,and strong symbolic rallying around the kingthrough 2008. In more ways than one, the symbolicbody of the nation seemed to be under attack anddestabilized.

It is eerie now to look back at Stanley Tambiah’sdetailed study of an earlier amulet craze (1982). Basedon fieldwork in the 1970s in the nation’s northeast aswell as Bangkok, the work was published soon afterThailand’s experimental democratic period, 1973–76,which ended tragically with a right-wing crackdownand the deaths of university student protestors (cf.Bowie 1997, Morell and Samudavanija 1981). Tambiahrelated the period’s passion for amulets to what hecalled “street machismo,” which he saw manifested inaggressive motor vehicle driving and urban crime. Hewas struck by a divide between the respectful eti-

quette governing interpersonal relations and the free-for-all of anonymous public behavior (ibid:228-29).“In a sense, then, the Thai craze for and insatiable col-lection of protective amulets and other fetishes shouldbe viewed in relation to [Thai] propensities andpreoccupations with the exercise of power, inwhich violence shows its dark face” (ibid:229).

Social tensions therefore help explain the timingof such crazes and account for why people whoalready accept the efficacy of amulets (as part of acultural repertory of symbols) would become espe-cially attracted to them in the years 2006 and 2007.We may still ask, however, given the variety of avail-able sacred objects, many quite localized and sup-ported by local legends and mystic figures, why thejatukham-rammathep would rise to prominence.Thai scholars who held a conference devoted tojatukham-rammathep (covered in a special issue ofthe journal Sinlapawatthanatham in June 2007) notedsome significant factors. The amulets appear noveland are aesthetically pleasing in and of themselves.The interactiveness required, such as blessing andconsecration, allow participants to do something ac-tively, to take a psychologically reassuring step inuncertain circumstances. And, they were promotedingeniously, at both grassroots and commercial lev-els. This included the marketing of sets or serieswhich, as many consumers of “collectibles” aroundthe world know, can motivate acquisition.

The specific connection between the growth in exchange value and the amulets’ growth in super-natural efficacy and desirability remains somewhatunclear, and undoubtedly deserves further theoriz-ing. What is clear is that jatukham-rammathepconstitute a commodification of religious forms farbeyond the scale to which most Thai were accus-tomed. The jatukham-rammathep craze generatedinternal cultural criticism, in part because Buddhistmonks were involved in creating and selling theitems. While monasteries have always raised fundsto build and repair facilities, such practical necessi-ties have usually been administered by lay people,often in festivities that encourage participation indance, music, and local folkways. Monks areexpected to model self-denial and the control of de-sires, and publicly visible business activity like pro-moting amulets draws certain condemnation, or atthe very least gossip.

Of course, the buying and selling of small religious objects is far from limited to Thailand.





Cross-cultural examples demonstrate a widespreadcommercialization of religious forms in the last cen-tury, paralleling the spread of capitalism and its attendant commodification of many previouslyprivate spheres of life. Long’s study of Africa-derived religions in North America traces a gradualcommodification of traditional charms throughoutthe 20th century (2001:99-126). Long notes, however:“Despite the change from handmade charms to man-ufactured products, the intentions for which they areused remain the same: the state of one’s own bodyand mind; relationships with others; and the controlof external forces like luck, the saints, and thespirits” (p. 109). Inge Maria Daniels reaches a similarconclusion regarding household shrines in contem-porary Japan, which entails the purchase of commer-cially available spiritual artifacts. Rather thanviewing the mass production and commercial sale ofsuch objects as a cultural ill, Daniels argues thatcommodification enables a democratic diffusion ofspirituality. “Good luck charms are neither sacrednor secular; they challenge the supposed dividebetween the aesthetic value and utility of objects”(2003:619).

That amulets bridge the divide between sacredand secular, aesthetic and utilitarian, came home tome powerfully in Thailand in 2007, when my friend

and language tutor, Gig, gave my family a jatukham-rammathep amulet. A black disc with white bas-relief figures, the amulet had been in her possessionfor years—since long before the craze, kept lovinglyin a red-cushioned box. Gig said she had beencollecting jatukham-rammathep since she was a teenin the 1980s, attracted to them for their beauty alone.She demurely denied any knowledge of what theamulet might be worth monetarily. “I don’t care—now I just give them to my friends as gifts,” she explained.

To conclude, amulets in Thailand are a local man-ifestation of global phenomena. They share featureswith similar charms that can be traced to antiquity,and that serve similar functions despite being foundin diverse societies, in association with a variety ofreligions. As efficacious sacred objects, they increasein value when associated with propitious circum-stances, and as commodities exchanged in thecontemporary marketplace, they increase in valuewhen there is consumer demand. As meaning-ladenartifacts, they are part of Thailand’s symbolic reper-tory, drawn into play during social crises. They are a superb example of the apotropaic orientation inBuddhism, in dialogue with orthodox religious ex-pression but responding to immediate needs, andtied to a cultural concern with power.


Suggested Readings

Bowie, Fiona2006 The Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

deWaal Malefijt, Annemarie1968 Religion and Culture:An Introduction to Anthropology of Religion. New York: Macmillan.

Glazier, Stephen, D., ed.1999 Anthropology of Religion: A Handbook. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.

Klass, Morton, and Maxine Weisgrau, eds.1999 Across the Boundaries of Belief: Contemporary Issues in the Anthropology of Religion. Boulder,

Colo.: Westview Press.

Lambek, Michael, ed.2002 A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.

Morris, Brian2006 Religion and Anthropology: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


2. Myth, Symbolism, and Taboo


42

CHAPTER TWO

Myth,Symbolism,and Taboo

Tales, legends, proverbs, riddles, adages, and myths make up what anthropologists callfolklore, an important subject for the study of culture. Because of its sacred nature, myth isespecially significant in the analysis of comparative religion. Fundamental to the definitionof myths are the community’s attitudes toward them. Myths are narratives that are held tobe sacred and true; thus, they often are core parts of larger ideological systems (Oring 1986:124). Myths are set outside of historical time, usually at the beginning of time up to the pointof human creation, and they frequently account for how the world came to be in its presentform. Many of the principal characters are divine or semi-divine; most are not human be-ings but animals or cultural heroes with human attributes. The place, time, and manner inwhich a myth is performed may be special, and even the language in which it is expressedmay be out of the ordinary. Elliott Oring considers the familiar story of Adam and Eve as anexample:

For those who hold the story to be both sacred and true, the activities of this primordialcouple, in concert with beguiling serpent and deity, explain fundamental aspects of worldorder: why the serpent is reviled, why a woman is ruled by her husband and suffers inchildbirth, why man must toil to live—and most importantly—how sin entered the worldand why man must die. (Ibid.)

To the anthropologist or folklorist, it is of no consequence whether the myth is objectivelyor scientifically true. What matters is its validity in its own cultural context. All of thesecharacteristics distinguish myth from other forms of folk narrative, such as legend and folk-tale (Bascom 1965).

Beyond shaping worldview and explaining the origins of human existence, myths alsoserve as authoritative precedents that validate social norms. One of the founding figures ofanthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski, described myth as a social “charter”—a model forbehavior:

[Myth] is a statement of primeval reality which lives in the institutions and pursuits of acommunity. It justifies by precedent the existing order and it supplies a retrospective pattern

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of moral values, of sociological discriminations and burdens and of magical belief. . . . Thefunction of myth is to strengthen tradition and to endow it with a greater value and prestigeby tracing it back to a higher, better, more supernatural, and more effective reality of initialevents (1931: 640–41).

Some anthropologists apply a psychological approach to myth analysis and see myths assymbolic expressions of sibling rivalry, male-female tensions, and other themes. Others—structural anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss—view myths as cultural means ofresolving critical binary oppositions (life-death, matrilineal-patrilineal, nature-culture) thatserve as models for members of a society (Hunter and Whitten 1976: 280–81). Whether inJudeo-Christian and Muslim cultures, where myths have been transcribed to form theTorah, Bible, and Koran, or in other, less familiar cultures, these sacred narratives still servetheir time-honored function for the bulk of humanity as the basis of religious belief. What isimportant to remember is that myths are considered to be truthful accounts of the past,whether transmitted orally in traditional societies or through the scriptural writings of theso-called great religions.

The scholarly study of myth has been important in the West since the time of the an-cient Greeks. To Plato we owe the confusion over the meaning of the word myth, as he feltit was synonymous with falsehood or lie. Indeed, the use of myth to mean “fallacy” contin-ues today, in clear contrast to the way anthropologists and other scholars of religion usethe term. We can credit the anthropologists of the early 20th century with drawing atten-tion to how myth functions in actual societies, rather than regarding myths as texts fromthe past. Distinctive to the anthropological approach to myth is an emphasis uponculture-specific meanings. This perspective differs from that of popular myth theoristJoseph Campbell, whose compelling books and television appearances have inspiredmany in the United States. Influenced greatly by psychologist Carl Jung, Campbell’s goalwas to uncover common symbols and themes that lie beneath the mythic traditions of allthe world’s cultures. Today, the study of myth remains multidisciplinary, with importantcontributions continuing in the fields of anthropology, folklore, literary studies, psychology,and religion.

The study of symbolism, too, is vital to the study of religion. In fact, “the human beingswho perform the rituals . . . , and those who are ostensibly a ritual’s objects, are themselvesrepresentations of concepts and ideas, and therefore symbolic” (La Fontaine 1985: 13). An-thropology has been less than clear in its attempt to define the meaning of this importantconcept. Minimally, a symbol may be thought of as something that represents somethingelse. The development of culture, for example, was dependent on human beings having theability to assign symbolic meanings of words—to create and use a language. Religion is alsoa prime example of humanity’s proclivity to attach symbolic meanings to a variety ofbehavior and objects. “The object of symbolism,” according to Alfred North Whitehead, “isthe enhancement of the importance of what is symbolized” (1927: 63).

That anthropological interest in the topic of symbolism had its start with the study of re-ligious behavior is not surprising, especially in light of the plethora of symbols present inreligious objects and ceremonies. Reflect for a moment on any religious service. Immedi-ately on entering the building, be it a church, synagogue, or mosque, one is overwhelmedby symbolic objects—the Christian cross, the Star of David, paintings, statues, tapestries,and assorted ceremonial paraphernalia—each representing a religious principle. Fittingly,Clifford Geertz has noted that a religious system may be viewed as a “cluster of sacredsymbols” (1957: 424). Unlike the well-defined symbols in mathematics and the physicalsciences, these religious symbols assume many different forms and meanings: witness Turner’sconcept of the multivocalic nature of symbols (their capacity to have many meanings).

INTRODUCTION | 43




More than a simple reminder of some remote aspect of a religion’s history, religious sym-bols are often considered to possess a power or force (mana) emanating from the spiritualworld itself. The symbols provide people with an emotional and intellectual commitment totheir particular belief system, telling them what is important to their society, collectivelyand individually, and helping them conform to the group’s value system. Durkheim ac-counted for the universality of symbols by arguing that a society kept its value systemthrough their use; that is, the symbols stood for the revered values. Without the symbols,the values and, by extension, the society’s existence would be threatened.

Whereas symbols, like myths, prescribe thoughts and behaviors of people, taboos re-strict actions. Because the term taboo (also known as tabu and kapu) originated in the PacificIslands, beginning anthropology students often associate it with images of “savage” Poly-nesians observing mystical prohibitions. It is true that Pacific Islanders did cautiously re-gard these restrictions, being careful to avoid the supernatural retribution that was certainto follow violations. Taboos are not limited to the Pacific, however; every society has re-strictions that limit behavior in one respect or another, usually in association with sex, food,rites of passage, sacred objects, and sacred people. The incest taboo is unique in that it isfound in all societies. Although anthropologists have yet to explain adequately why the in-cest taboo exists everywhere, they have demonstrated that most taboos are reinforced bythe threat of punishments meted out by supernatural forces.

As anthropologists have pointed out, taboos are adaptive human mechanisms: they func-tion to counter dangers of both the phenomenal and ideational world. It is possible to theo-rize that the existence of fewer real or imagined dangers would result in fewer taboos, but itis equally safe to argue that all societies will continue to establish new taboos as new threatsto existence or social stability arise. Certainly taboos function at an ecological level—for ex-ample, to preserve plants, animals, and resources of the sea. Taboos also function to distin-guish between and control social groups, threatening violators with supernatural punish-ments as severe as the denial of salvation. Depending on the culture, sacred authority is oftenas compelling as the civil codes to which people are required to comply. Simply stated, thebreaking of a sacred taboo, as opposed to a civil sanction, is a sin. The impersonal power ofmana made certain objects and people in Pacific cultures taboo. Although the concept ofmana does not exist in contemporary Western cultures, certain symbols and objects are sim-ilarly imbued with such an aura of power or sacredness that they, too, are considered taboo.

Using a variety of approaches to the study of myth, symbol, and taboo, the articles se-lected for this chapter clearly show the importance of these topics to the study of compara-tive religion. We begin with Leonard and McClure’s exploration of myth, which introducesseveral ways of defining and studying myth in cross-cultural perspective. The authors con-sider the insights of key theorists in psychology, literary studies, and religious studies, aswell as anthropology.

Leonard and McClure’s overview is followed by examples of two contrasting ap-proaches to myth within the field of anthropology. The excerpt by John Beattie illustratesthe functionalist approach, with its attention to the close relationship between myth andsocial organization. “Harelips and Twins: The Splitting of a Myth” is an example of thestructuralist approach of Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the 20th century’s most original schol-ars of myth.

In the fourth article, Eric Wolf explores a single, multifaceted, and historically significantsymbol from Mexico.

In her examination of the concept of taboo, Mary Douglas defines and shows the signif-icance of taboo in reducing ambiguity and injecting order into cultural systems, stressingcommonalities in taboos, whether found in Polynesia or the West.

44 | MYTH, SYMBOLISM, AND TABOO




INTRODUCTION | 45

Mary Lee Daugherty’s case study of snake-handling congregations in West Virginia,originally written in 1976, shows the integration of myth and symbol in religious practice.Daugherty argues that snake handling is a form of sacrament, a religious ceremony thatsymbolically expresses the relationship between believers and Christ.

References

Bascom, William 1965 “The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives.” Journal of American Folklore 78: 3–20.

Geertz, Clifford 1957 “Ethos, World-View and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols.” Antioch Review 17: 421–37.

Hunter, David E., and Phillip Whitten 1976 Encyclopaedia of Anthropology. New York: Harper and Row.

La Fontaine, Joan S. 1985 Initiation. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.

Malinowski, Bronislaw 1931 “Culture.” In Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Edwin R. A. Seligman, editor-in-chief,

vol. 4, pp. 621–46. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Oring, Elliott 1986 Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction. Logan: Utah State University Press.

Whitehead, Alfred N. 1927 Symbolism. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.




Why Study Myths?

The study of myths—mythology—has a long, rich,and highly contested history of debate about exactlywhat myths are, what they do, and why they are wor-thy of systematic study. Because of the complexity ofsuch considerations about myths, any short answer tothe question “Why study myths?” will be, at best,

only a starting place. Yet this very complexity is one ofthe reasons why such study can be so exciting. Thestudy of myth is a field of inquiry that ranges from theearliest known history of humanity up to and includ-ing contemporary cultures and societies and even ourown individual senses of self in the world.

Every part of this [inquiry] should serve more asa direction for further investigation than as a fullysatisfactory explanation of settled facts. In our view,(1) the intertwined nature of the uses of myths in di-verse cultures; (2) the myriad ways in which mythscan be seen to embody cultural attitudes, values,and behaviors; and (3) the rich rewards awaitingquestioners willing to approach myths from nu-merous points of view are all open-ended fields of

6

The Study of MythologyScott Leonard and Michael McClure

In this selection, authors Leonard and McClure help us understand the meaning and importance ofmyths. Myths, the authors tell us, are ancient narratives that help us understand such fundamentalhuman questions as how the world came to be, how we came to be here, who we are, what our valuesshould be, how we should behave or not behave, and what the consequences of such behavior are. Theystate that the meaning of myth has always been contested:

For two and a half millennia, debates over the importance and meaning of myth have been strug-gles over matters of truth, religious belief, politics, social custom, cultural identity, and history.The history of mythology is a tale told by idiots—but also by sages, religious fundamentalistsand agnostic theologians, idealists and cynics, racists and fascists, philosophers and scholars.Myth has been understood as containing the secrets of God, as the cultural DNA responsible fora people’s identity, as a means of reorganizing all human knowledge, and a justification forEuropean and American efforts to colonize and police the world.

In discussing the study of mythology, Leonard and McClure pay special attention to the 20th cen-tury, examining the various approaches to myth in such academic disciplines as anthropology, psy-chology, literary criticism, and the history of religions. They end the article with a look at the studyof mythology today, suggesting that, despite intensive study over the years, we still have no single,all-encompassing explanation of myth.

From PURPOSES AND DEFINITIONS, MYTH ANDKNOWING: AN INTRODUCTION TO WORLDMYTHOLOGY by Scott Leonard and Michael McClure,pp. 1–31. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by permission ofThe McGraw-Hill Companies.

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inquiry. We see this [work] as an invitation to enterinto these fields, whether briefly or as a lifelong in-terest. The study of myth entails discovering a wayof making meaning that has been part of everyhuman society.

What Are Myths?

Myths are ancient narratives that attempt to answerthe enduring and fundamental human questions:How did the universe and the world come to be?How did we come to be here? Who are we? What areour proper, necessary, or inescapable roles as we re-late to one another and to the world at large? Whatshould our values be? How should we behave? Howshould we not behave? What are the consequences ofbehaving and not behaving in such ways?

Of course, any short definition, however carefullywrought, must oversimplify in order to be clear andshort, so accept this definition as a starting pointonly. If this definition holds up under more extensiveexamination of myths across the world and in ourown backyards, then what a promise with which tostart a book, what an answer to the opening ques-tion, “Why study myths?”

Engaging thoughtfully with the myths in thisbook and with research projects that go far beyondwhat space constraints allow us to present in thisbook will deepen and complicate the elements of ourstarting definition. For example, myths are ancientnarratives. But they are not static artifacts. They arenot potsherds and weathered bone fragments. Inmany cases, they are living texts with which livingpeople continue to write or narrate or perform theirunique answers to basic human questions. Thisnever-ending quality to myth is one reason we haveincluded in this book not only ancient or “primary”versions of myths but also more contemporary tales,such as “Out of the Blue” by Paula Gunn Allen,which take up ancient myths and refashion theirconstituent elements in order to update answers toperennial questions and participate in ongoing cul-tural self-definitions.

Modern Native Americans, for example, who takeup myths from their varied heritages and retell themdo so in a context that includes the whole history oftheir people, from their ancient roots and primordialself-definitions to their contacts with European-American culture and modern self-definitions that

search for meaning in a world forever changed bythat contact. Today’s Irish poets, for another exam-ple, who use Celtic myths as source material and in-spiration and who write in Irish, a language whichcame perilously close to extinction, are engaged incultural reclamation on a number of levels, and Irishmyths, ancient and modern, are an important part ofthat effort. Looking at examples of ancient and morecontemporary uses of myths introduces their variedcultural values and behaviors to us, and, at the sametime, such study helps us develop intellectual toolswith which to look at and question our own ancientand contemporary mythic self-understandings. Inthis sense, studying myths introduces other culturesto us and, at the same time, provides us with differ-ent lenses through which to view our own.

. . .

. . . Toward the end of the 19th century, . . . early an-thropology’s view of myth emphasized functionabove all else. Interest in this functional approach tomythology led to the breakup of the largely bookishand tendentious study of literary myth. Whatemerged were various approaches toward mythdriven by disciplinary concerns within anthropol-ogy, psychology, literary criticism, and the history ofreligions.

Mythology in the 20th Century

Early Anthropology

The Golden Bough The first of these disciplines,anthropology, came to view myth as primarily a liv-ing, oral, culture-preserving phenomenon. Led bysuch pioneers as Edward B. Tylor, Andrew Lang,Franz Boas, Sir James George Frazer, and EmileDurkheim, emphasis switched from textual compar-isons and blood-and-soil interpretive theories to dis-covering the ways in which myths function in livingsocieties. Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough is thebest known and remains the most widely read ex-ample of the early versions of this anthropologicalwork. The Golden Bough, which grew to 12 volumes,depicts the widely dispersed stories of dying andresurrecting gods as literary transformations ofprimitive, magical-religious rituals in which “sacredkings” were slaughtered in hopes of ensuring agri-cultural fertility. Frazer approached myth and cul-ture from an evolutionary perspective, assuming,

LEONARD AND MCCLURE • THE STUDY OF MYTHOLOGY | 47




not unlike Vico, a progression from the “mute signs”of primitive magic (e.g., rituals believed to create de-sired effects) to the largely allegorical use of ritual inprimitive religion (e.g., the substitutionary death ofa “scapegoat”) to the abstract symbolism of civilizedreligion (e.g., the doctrine of transubstantiation).

Frazer also assumed that myth was “primitivescience,” which attributed to the will of deities, peo-ple, or animals that which modern science attributesto the impersonal functioning of various physicallaws and biological processes. While Frazer sharedthe new anthropological science’s interests in myth’sfunction in living cultures, he nevertheless did notcompletely break with comparative mythology’sarmchair approach.

The “Myth-and-Ritual” School Frazer’s quasi-anthropological work had wide influence and in-spired, at least in part, the also quasi-anthropological“myth-and-ritual” school. This relatively short-livedbranch of mythological research was intensely func-tionalist in its approach, caring little for the originsof myth and looking at content only as a means ofdemonstrating the contention that myth is a scriptfrom which early religious rituals were performed.As Fontenrose puts it in the preface to The Ritual The-ory of Myth: “Some . . . are finding myth everywhere,especially those who follow the banner of the ‘myth-ritual’ school—or perhaps I should say banners ofthe schools, since ritualists do not form a singleschool or follow a single doctrine. But most of themare agreed that all myths are derived from ritualsand that they were in origin the spoken part of ritualperformance” (1971, n.p.).

Modern Anthropology

Another of Frazer’s admirers was BronislawMalinowski, whose fieldwork in the Trobriand Islandscontributed much to the evolving methods of modernanthropology. In a 1925 lecture given in Frazer’shonor, Malinowski lavishly praised the elder writerand then proceeded to outline what has been taken,until recently, as field anthropology’s gospel:

Studied alive, myth . . . is not symbolic, but a directexpression of its subject-matter; it is not anexplanation in satisfaction of a scientific interest,but a narrative resurrection of a primeval reality,told in satisfaction of deep religious wants, moral

cravings, social submissions, assertion, evenpractical requirements. Myth fulfills in primitiveculture an indispensable function: it expresses,enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards andenforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency ofritual and contains practical rules for the guidanceof man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of humancivilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-workedactive force; it is not an intellectual explanation oran artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter ofprimitive faith and moral wisdom (1926/1971, 79).

Malinowski’s outline of anthropology’s view ofmyth contains several crucial remarks. First, the an-thropologist states emphatically that myth is not an“explanation in satisfaction of a scientific interest.”This view contrasts sharply with the euhemerism ofFrazer, Tylor, and the comparatists, who believed toone degree or another that myths are little more thanprimitive or mistaken science. Second, Malinowskisaw myth as profoundly “true” in the sense that it hada visible role as “pragmatic charter of primitive faithand moral wisdom.” He also saw myth as real in thesense that it could be observed by the field researcherin the form of oral performance, rituals, and cere-monies, and that it visibly influenced a living people’ssociopolitical behavior. As his later fieldwork makesclear, Malinowski’s views are considerably broaderthan those of the myth-ritualists, who would havelimited myth’s functionality to religious ritual only.

But we can also see from Malinowski’s remarksthat he did not entirely part ways with his mentor.Even though the younger man claimed to have alsodisputed the older’s evolutionary theory of culture,it is significant that he nevertheless discusses myth’srole in the “primitive faith” and in the “primitivepsychology” of his research subjects. It can be ar-gued that Malinowski and his contemporaries werenot explicitly dismissive of “primitive” societies, thatthey were even respectful of the “face-to-face” na-ture of such societies when compared with moreinstitutional and “impersonal” developed ones. Yetthe effects of ethnocentric assumptions make itextremely difficult to avoid such hierarchical valua-tions, even if there is some question about themotives or intentions of the researchers.

Nevertheless, folkloric and anthropologicalmethodologies profoundly influenced 20th-centurymythology. For example, anthropological and folk-lorist approaches to myth emphasize field research






and have thus underscored the importance of thereal-world conditions in which myths perform theirfunctions. As a result, those working in other disci-plines have come to respect myth’s functions ascultural charter and socializing agent. In addition,anthropology’s correlation of myths to the material,social, political, and economic facts of living cultureshelps those interested in the myths of extinct cul-tures to understand some of the obscure referencesand actions in the stories they study. Moreover, theinsistence of anthropologists and folklorists on ex-amining the function of myths in living societiesdemonstrates how ignorant the 19th century’s arm-chair mythologists had been of what so-called prim-itives actually do understand about the physicalworld and the degree to which they are and are notnaive about the truth-value of these narratives. Inshort, anthropology and folklore have encouragedall mythologists to relate their theories about myth tothe lived experience of human beings.

The Rise of Psychology

About the time that Frazer and the early anthro-pologists were beginning to turn the focus ofmythology away from questions of racial identityand to replace the comparative method of the NatureSchool with theories of social functionalism, psychi-atric pioneers Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung hadbegun to investigate the relationship between mythand the unconscious. Freud and Jung believed thatmythic symbols—both as they are encountered in re-ligion and as they manifest themselves in dreamsand works of the imagination—emerge from thedeepest wells of the psyche. Although their conclu-sions about the landscape of the human mind dif-fered, both men shared a belief that our gods andother mythic characters, as well as our dreams andworks of fiction, are projections of that which theunconscious contains. For Freud, “the unconsciousis the true psychical reality” (Complete Works1953–1966, 612–13), but our conscious minds censorour impulses, desires, fantasies, and preconsciousthoughts because they are too raw and dangerous toface unmediated. Freud saw the images that appearto us in dreams and in such imaginative works asnovels and myths as tamed projections of the uncon-scious’s ungovernable terrors. From this point ofview, myths are the conscious mind’s strategy for

making visible and comprehensible the internalforces and conflicts that impel our actions and shapeour thoughts.

Jung’s view is similar to but not identical withFreud’s. Jung viewed the unconscious not as the in-dividual’s personal repository “of repressed or for-gotten [psychic] contents” (1959/1980, 3). Rather, heargued, “the unconscious is not individual but uni-versal [collective]; unlike the personal psyche, it hascontents and modes of behavior that are more or lessthe same everywhere and in all individuals” (3–4).Jung defined “the contents of the collective uncon-scious . . . as archetypes” (4). Just exactly what anarchetype is psychologically is far too complex todiscuss here, but, briefly, Jung defined them as“those psychic contents which have not yet beensubmitted to conscious elaboration” (5). Indeed,Jung and Freud believed that we never see the un-conscious and its contents; rather, we see only pro-jected and therefore refined images that symbolizethe things it contains.

Jung and his followers argued that such mythicarchetypes as the Wise Woman, the Hero, the GreatMother, the Father, the Miraculous Child, and theShadow are aspects of every individual psyche, re-gardless of gender, culture, or personal history. Thehealthy mind, they reasoned, learns to view the con-tradictory impulses represented by these archetypesin a balanced pattern, or “mandala.” Those with var-ious neuroses and psychoses, however, can’t balancethese impulses and are overwhelmed by the uncon-scious’s self-contradictory forces. Jung saw the uni-versalized symbols and images that appear in myth,religion, and art as highly polished versions of thearchetypes lurking in the collective unconscious.Therefore, Zeus, Yahweh, Kali, and Cybele are theirrespective cultures’ elaborations of universally avail-able psychic material. Jung called these elaborations“eternal images” that

are meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and tooverpower. [These images] are created out of theprimal stuff of revelation and reflect the ever-uniqueexperience of divinity. That is why they always giveman a premonition of the divine while at the sametime safeguarding him from immediate experienceof it. Thanks to the labors of the human spirit overthe centuries, these images have become embeddedin a comprehensive system of thought that ascribesan order to the world, and are at the same time




represented by . . . mighty, far-spread, and venerableinstitution[s like] the Church (1959/1980, 8).

Joseph Campbell: Literary and Cultural Critic

Whereas in the 19th century what passed for liter-ary criticism of myth was largely a matter of anti-quarians, classicists, biblicists, and specialists in deadlanguages reading myths and theorizing the linguis-tic and cultural events that explained and connectedthem, in the 20th century literary approaches to mythgrew more sophisticated. Important literary critics in-terested in reading myths include Robert Graves,author of The White Goddess and Greek Myths, andNorthrop Frye, whose Anatomy of Criticism makes thecase that four basic motifs corresponding to theseasons (spring–comedy, summer–romance, autumn–tragedy, and winter–satire) give shape to all litera-ture. Many scholars wrote extensively aboutmyth and were influential in their disciplines, butJoseph Campbell achieved a much broader popularfollowing.

Campbell was the best-known mythologist of the20th century if for no other reason than because hewas able to present his ideas on television. His six-part series in the 1980s with Bill Moyers, The Power ofMyth, reached a wide audience eager to hear about“universal human truths” in an age of increasing so-cial fragmentation. At first glance it might seem oddto highlight Campbell’s television success here, butin terms of general awareness of myth in Americatoday and in terms of the argument that myth haspowerful resonance even in today’s modern world,Campbell’s television success is precisely to thepoint. His first book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,continues to be widely read, and, according toEllwood, “George Lucas freely acknowledges the in-fluence of reading . . . [it] and [Campbell’s] TheMasks of God” (1999, 127–28) on his science fictionepic, Star Wars. Campbell wrote voluminouslythroughout his life, but the ideas he lays out in Heroform a core that changed little during his career—even when criticism and discoveries in other fieldsurged the necessity to revisit them.

Campbell openly acknowledged the influence ofJung and Freud on his work. Yet he never seemsquite at home with Jung’s collective unconscious.Rather, the American mythologist always saw mythas the story of the rugged individual who realizes his

true nature through heroic struggle. Archetypalsymbols and universals there may be, Campbellseems to say, but mythology is ultimately and al-ways the vehicle through which the individual findsa sense of identity and place in the world. Like Jungand Frazer, Campbell sought to present the mastertheory through which all myths could be under-stood. In his view, there was a single “monomyth”organizing all such narratives. Ellwood summarizesCampbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces in this way:

The basic monomyth informs us that themythological hero, setting out from an everydayhome, is lured or is carried away or proceeds to thethreshold of adventure. He defeats a shadowypresence that guards the gateway, enters a darkpassageway or even death, meets many unfamiliarforces, some of which give him threatening “tests,”some of which offer magical aid. At the climax of thequest he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains hisreward: sacred marriage or sexual union with thegoddess of the world, reconciliation with the father,his own divinization, or a mighty gift to bring backto the world. He then undertakes the final work ofreturn, in which, transformed, he reenters the placefrom whence he set out (1999, 144).

Campbell arrived at his theory of the monomythby synthesizing insights from psychoanalysis, meth-ods from 19th-century comparative mythology, andanalyses typical of literary and cultural criticism. Hewas not a member of the new wave of anthropologyand folklore that searched myths for references tomaterial, political, and social culture. Nor did heseem particularly interested in questions of transla-tion, of variants, or in the possible social, religious,and ritual contexts of the myths he used. Rather,Campbell promoted what he called “living mythol-ogy,” a nonsectarian spiritual path through whichthe individual might gain a sense of spiritual andsocial purpose and through which society might bereturned to simplicity and moral virtue.

Claude Lévi-Strauss and Structuralism

At the other end of the spectrum from Campbell’sindividual-centered mythology is the work of Frenchanthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose searchfor “deep structure” in myth had a profound influ-ence on anthropologists and literary critics alike.Lévi-Strauss’s search for the skeletal core of myth—and the related searches for organizing principles in






literature carried out most famously by VladimirPropp, Tzetvan Todorov, and Jonathan Culler—cameto be known as structuralism. The influence of struc-turalism on the mythologies of the 20th centurywould be difficult to overstate, and structuralism as acritical model can be applied far beyond the bound-aries of mythology or literature. It is the search for theundergirding steel that holds up the buildings of allhuman artifacts and endeavors, including those ofmeaning-making through myth and literature.

As Robert Scholes discusses the application ofthese ideas to literature (and, in fact, to any writtentext), structuralism sought “to establish a model ofthe system of literature itself as the external referencefor the individual works it considers” (1974, 10). Assuch, structuralism can be seen as a reaction against19th-century comparatist and literary approaches tomyth and classical literature, especially to their sub-jective, even idiosyncratic, interpretations of thesestories. What Lévi-Strauss and others sought was anobjective way of discussing literary meaning. By bor-rowing from linguistics such structural notions assyntax, grammar, phonemes, and morphemes, theFrench anthropologist attempted to develop a modelthat would describe how all myths worked—and doso in a way that any literature specialist could dupli-cate without resorting to his or her personal impres-sions and imagination. With its focus on discoveringan unchanging core of patterned relations givingshape to narratives of all kinds, structuralismpromised to put literary criticism and anthropologi-cal investigations of myth on the firm ground ofempirical science.

A quick way into the issues that structuralismwanted to raise would be to look at the work of oneof Lévi-Strauss’s contemporaries, Vladimir Propp,who worked almost exclusively on the Russian folk-tale, attempting to distinguish between constant andvariable elements in that genre. After studying morethan a thousand stories, he concluded that the char-acters in fairy tales change but their functions withinthe plot do not. Propp argued that fairy tales have 31functions. For examples, Propp’s folktale structuresbegin with (1) the hero leaves home, (2) an interdic-tion is addressed to the hero, and (3) the interdictionis violated. The 31 total possible plot functions in-clude (12) the hero is tested, interrogated, attacked,which prepares the way for his receiving either amagical agent or helper, (17) the hero is branded,

(24) a false hero presents unfounded claims, (30) thevillain is punished, and (31) the hero marries and as-cends the throne (Scholes 1974, 63–64).

Lévi-Strauss, like Propp, gathered and analyzedas many versions of certain myths as he could find,hoping to penetrate their myriad surface elementsand see into a basic grammar of meaning. Workingamong the natives of South America, Lévi-Strausstook inventory of the various references found ineach myth. Ultimately, he determined that mythicstructure reveals itself through a limited number ofcodes. For example, “among South American mythshe [distinguished] a sociological, a culinary (ortechno-economic), an acoustic, a cosmological, andan astronomical code” (Kirk 1970, 43). Lévi-Straussfurther determined that these codes embodied polaropposites, or “binary oppositions.” Thus, within theculinary code, as the title of one of his most famousbooks puts it, one finds the binary of the “raw andthe cooked.” Within the sociological code, one wouldfind such binaries as married versus unmarried,family versus nonfamily, and the people versus theother.

Lévi-Strauss concluded that myths mediate thetension created by these always-present oppositions,whether individuals within a society are aware of itor not. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss discusses the codes andstructures that manifest themselves in myths inmuch the same way that Freud and Jung discuss theunconscious. Whereas the psychologists describedthe unconscious as the hidden source from which in-dividual consciousness arises, Lévi-Strauss viewedthe structures of myth and language as the hiddenbedrock upon which narratives are built. In fact, hesounds more like a metaphysician than a scientistwhen he claims that the deep structures of narrativeexist—like Plato’s ideal forms or St. John’s logos—ina realm beyond and untouched by actual stories andstorytellers. As Lévi-Strauss writes in The Raw and theCooked (1964), “we cannot therefore grasp [in ouranalysis of myth] how men think, but how mythsthink themselves in men, and without their aware-ness” (1990, 20). In other words, people don’t thinkmyths into existence; mythic structures inherent inlanguage do a people’s thinking for them, expressingthemselves when people use language. Ultimately,he reduced the codes and the patterned relations hediscovered among South American Indian mythsto a kind of algebra, a symbol system intended to




express that which was always true of these stories,regardless of such surface details as plot, character,and setting.

Mircea Eliade’s Time Machine

Mircea Eliade has been described as “the preemi-nent historian of religion of his time” (Ellwood 1999,79), and his ideas about the essential connection be-tween myth and religion remain influential amongstudents of myth. As a young man Eliade investedhimself in nationalist politics. Believing in the powerof myth to give a downtrodden people the courageand vision necessary to stage a spiritually motivatedpolitical revolution, Eliade became involved witha proto-fascist group called the Legion of theArchangel Michael.

Recent criticism of Eliade’s political associationshas begun to erode his reputation as a mythologist tosome extent. However, it is important to contextual-ize his sympathy with a political ideology that fused,in its early days, a Christian commitment to charityfor the poor and outrage at injustice with a myth of aRomania that had a special destiny to fulfill. Like somany of the 19th- and early 20th-century mytholo-gists who explored the connection between myth andVolk, Eliade looked to his people’s Indo-Europeanheritage for stories that would impart a spiritual au-thority to a people’s revolution.

In his Cosmos and History: The Myth of the EternalReturn; The Sacred and the Profane; Myths, Dreams, andMysteries; and Myth and Reality, Eliade demonstrateshis own brand of structuralism. Space, time, and ob-jects are perceived by the religious imagination, heargues, in binary terms, as either sacred or profane.Thus such objects as icons and religious utensils,such places as temples and special groves, and suchtimes as religious festivals are designated as sacred.Only certain limited activities can properly be per-formed with or within them. The profane, on the con-trary, are those things, places, and times available topeople without special ceremony or ritual.

Another important binary in Eliade’s mythologyis the distinction he makes between “archaic” andmodern man. In his view, archaic peoples are moreattuned than modern, history-obsessed peoples tothe sacred and express this understanding moreclearly in their relationships to nature and in theirmyths. Eliade’s mythology proposes yet anotheropposition—that which exists between cosmic time,or the time of origins, and human history. From his

perspective, moderns live in unhappy exile from theParadise of cosmic time in which a vital connectionto the sacred is natural. Myth, for Eliade, providesmoderns with a vehicle through which they can pe-riodically return to the time of origins and thus begintheir lives anew. This time-machine function resem-bles the myth-ritualists’ view that sacred narrativesfacilitate the putting to death of stale, profane con-sciousness, restoring the participants to the virginpossibilities of creation. Thus we can see that fromthe perspective of religious studies—at least insofaras Eliade still represents that discipline—myth has areligious function. Like going to confession, fastingon Yom Kippur, making animal sacrifice, or doingpenance, myth permits human beings, who are con-tinually contaminated by exposure to the profane, towipe the slate clean and make a fresh start.

Considering 20th-Century Mythology Critically

Our overview of 20th-century mythology has sofar described the lenses through which myth hasbeen studied in the past 100 years. One could easilyimagine that the history of mythology presentedhere has been leading up to a happy ending: at last,we come to the end of the 20th century and the cur-tains will part to reveal state-of-the-art mythology.After millennia of deprecating myths as child’s prat-tle and the fevered dreams of savages, after centuriesof romanticizing the simplicity of our premodernpast, after decades of trying to make the square pegof literature fit into the round hole of science, wehave finally gotten it right. Surely we have a mythol-ogy that fairly and objectively examines the object ofits study, that is methodologically but not blindlyrigorous, and that duly considers history, custom,material culture, and sociopolitical and religious in-stitutions without turning a story into a code to becracked or a “to-do” list. But the fact is that no suchmythology exists.

None of the mythologies of the past century hashad it quite right—and it is instructive to see whynot. Clearly, 19th-century comparative mythologywas deeply flawed in its search for irrecoverable Ur-languages and highly dubious speculations aboutthe German or Italian or Indian or Jewish character.The nature, ethnological, and myth-ritual schools,like Procrustes, made theoretical beds and thenstretched or lopped off evidential limbs in order toachieve a perfect fit. While we owe the comparatists






and their literary descendants gratitude for the thou-sands of myths they collected, and while we shouldnot deny that natural environment and ritual, forexample, are an important part of mythic content,we should also learn the lesson that no universaltheory “explains” myth.

And we ought to ask ourselves what is to begained from reducing all myth to a single “pattern.”If we read all myths as allegories of the seasonal cy-cles of fertility and infertility as, for example, Frazerand Graves did, what is to be gained? Are we contentto read the story of Jesus’ birth, ministry, and deathas one of many instantiations of the “year spirit”?Here’s death and resurrection! A seasonal pattern! Isthis label enough to satisfy our desire to understandmythic meanings and functions? Similarly, are wecontent to read all myths, as Campbell does, as yetanother version of the hero’s passage from home,through trial, through apotheosis, and back homeagain? Surely this plot line accounts for some signif-icant events in myth, but are we content to reduceeven myths of creation, fertility, and apocalypse tothe story of an individual’s separation, initiation,and return? What do we say after we identify, asEliade does, the basic alienation that exists in mythbetween human beings and the sacred? A one-trickpony, even when the trick is pretty good, is still aone-trick pony.

But anthropology and folklore, despite the fact thatthey have done mythology an inestimable service bygrounding it in observation-based science, are notquite the answer either. Following Malinowski,anthropologists have, to greater and lesser degrees,illuminated the relationships among myths, religion,custom, sociopolitical behaviors, and material culture.Working within this discipline, Lévi-Strauss andPropp attempted to create a completely objective ty-pology of narrative functions through which all mythscould be analyzed. To some degree, particularly inPropp’s work on the morphology of the folktale, struc-turalism succeeded.Any student of myth can examineany number of fairy tales using Propp’s model andwill find that the Russian folklorist’s functions areindeed present and in the described order.

Yet, for all that anthropologists and folkloristshave contributed to the study of myth, their disci-plined focus on the function of myths within a nexusof material, social, political, and economic phenom-ena has come at a considerable cost. Such concerns,as important as they are, are only partial, and they

ignore the pleasures and power of narrative per sefor us here and now as well as for the myth tellersand their more immediate audiences. And struc-turalist anthropology does not and really cannot an-swer one of the most important questions: So what?Once we have learned Propp’s 31 elements of thefolk tale, the various codes in creation myths, and thebinary oppositions Lévi-Strauss claims they suggest,what do we really have? From our point of view asprofessors of English, anthropology’s tight focus onthe functionality of and within myth diverts atten-tion away from the fundamental fact that myths arestories. We need only think of Lévi-Strauss’s algebraof mythic functions or Malinowski’s search forreferences to food, clothing, shelter, and political re-lationships in the myths of the Trobriand islanders torealize that something vital is lost when myth is can-nibalized for its references to the “real” world. Wecan ask anthropologists, as we asked literary theo-rists, whether reducing myths to lists of material cul-ture items or to a set of narrative functions isn’t asdistorting as reducing all myths to allegories ofnature, the year spirit, or the hero’s quest.

While anthropology and folklore focused onmyth’s functions and 19th- and early 20th-centuryliterary criticism preoccupied itself largely withmyth’s contents, psychological approaches havecontemplated those dimensions of myth and sug-gested a theory of psychic origins as well. Psycho-logical approaches to myth, therefore, have beengenerally more holistic than others. After all, what-ever else can be said about them, myths proceedfrom the human mind if for no other reason than themind needs to understand “the self” in relation tothe larger cosmos. For this reason, many in the latterhalf of the 20th century assumed that Freud’s orJung’s views about myth are fundamentally sound.And the psychological approach to myth has beenpowerfully suggestive. Jung’s archetypes, for exam-ple, offer a potent interpretation of widely distributedsymbols, images, and plot lines. There’s a satisfyingsymmetry to the notion that each individual containsand balances oppositions such as elder and child,male and female, sinner and saint. Innumerablemythic characters embody these and other humanqualities. And although Freud overstates his casewhen he claims that myths are nothing other than theworking out of the complex interrelationshipsamong identity, sexuality, and family relationships, agreat many myths do feature incest, rape, infanticide,




and parricide. Myths are about relationships amongthe irrational, the rational, and the individual’s re-sponsibility to society, or, in Freud’s terms, amongthe id, the ego, and the superego.

However, a principal weakness of literary, psy-chological, and structuralist approaches is that theyare ahistorical; they don’t consider the specific mate-rial and social conditions that shape myth. Indeed,most of the major mythologists of the 20th centurycared little for the cultural specifics of how livingmyths function in the day-to-day lives of the peoplewho told them. They cared little for cultural distinc-tions that might explain why one version of a mythdiffers from another; and, in the cases of Jung,Campbell, and Eliade, they seemed interested inmyth only as far as familiarity with its presumed“core” might provide the modern individual with areturn to Paradise lost—to a sense of self closelyconnected to the soil and fully at home in a homoge-neous sociopolitical order. Thus, while the mytholo-gies of the early- and mid-20th century demonstratedconsiderable genius, their lack of concern for histori-cal and cultural context and their insistence on read-ing myths through analytical schema that dispensedwith all but a story’s most rudimentary plot struc-ture perpetuated most of the significant shortcom-ings of their 18th- and 19th-century predecessors.Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, awarenessof these shortcomings has bred approaches to myththat insist on the importance of context, particularlywhere gender, cultural norms, and the specifics ofthe performance events are concerned. Moreover,much like this chapter, modern scholarship hasincreasingly focused on mythology rather than onmyth itself. We conclude with a brief survey ofseveral of the most recent and important contribu-tions to the study of myth and consider, even morebriefly, what uses these new ideas might have for theclassroom.

Mythology Today

William Doty’s “Toolkit”

Doty’s Mythography concludes with a number ofappendixes for “furbishing the creative mythogra-pher’s toolkit.” Among these tools are “questions toaddress to mythic texts.” Embedded in these ques-tions is a comprehensive methodology that urgesstudents of myth not to choose a single approach to

myth but to use as many of the questions and con-cerns of various mythological schools as possible.Doty’s questions arise from five central concerns:(1) the social, (2) the psychological, (3) the literary,textual, and performative, (4) the structural, and(5) the political (2000, 466–67). As the term “mythog-rapher’s toolkit” implies, Doty’s approach to thesubject is profoundly practical. Above all he is con-cerned with methodology and principles of analysis,and he has distilled the concerns of many fields,including sociology, anthropology, psychology, andliterary criticism into a systematic series of ex-ploratory questions and research procedures that arewell within reach of most non-specialists. The ques-tions that Doty poses for each of the five areas of con-cern just mentioned are particularly congenial to thekinds of thinking, discussion, and research per-formed in the classroom.

Bruce Lincoln’s Ideological Narratives

As suggestive as Doty’s questions are, otherapproaches to myth have been advocated recently.Lincoln, whose Theorizing Myth is an important con-tribution to the current study of myth, would definemyth and mythology as “ideology in narrative form”because, as he says, all human communication is“interested, perspectival, and partial and . . . its ideo-logical dimensions must be acknowledged, ferretedout where necessary, and critically cross-examined”(1999, 207, 208).

Ultimately, Lincoln advocates making modernmythology the study of previous mythologies. Thisscholarly endeavor would revolve around “excavat-ing the texts within which that discourse [mythology]took shape and continues to thrive . . . [explicating]their content by placing them in their propercontexts, establishing the connections among them,probing their ideological and other dimensions, ex-plicit and subtextual” (1999, 216). How studentsshould approach myths other than those told byscholars about myth Lincoln doesn’t say—though itseems plausible that his approach would be approxi-mately the same for myth as for mythology.

Wendy Doniger’s Telescopesand Microscopes

Wendy Doniger, in her The Implied Spider: Politicsand Theology in Myth, argues for an updated and re-calibrated version of the kind of comparative






mythology that the Grimm brothers and Sir JamesFrazer practiced. Among the ways Doniger suggestsimproving the comparative mythology of the 19thcentury is, “whenever possible . . . to note the con-text: who is telling the story and why”; and, sheargues, that context could also include—indeedwould have to include—“other myths, other relatedideas, as Lévi-Strauss argued long ago” (1998, 44,45). Doniger advocates stripping individual mythsto their “naked” narrative outlines—to symbols,themes, and similarities in plot—in order to managethe amount of detail that the comparatist will have toanalyze. Unlike Lévi-Strauss, Doniger wouldn’t re-duce myth to a level where all myths look alike. Con-text would still matter. Accordingly, she says, wecould include in our comparison the contexts ofmyths. Attention to the sociopolitical and performa-tive contexts in which myths occur would, inDoniger’s method, “take account of differencesbetween men and women as storytellers, and alsobetween rich and poor, dominant and oppressed”(46). Doniger would also have students of mythlearn how to switch back and forth between the “mi-croscope” of a single telling to the “telescope” of theworld’s numerous variations on a mythologicaltheme.

Thus Doniger’s comparative mythology respectsthe integrity of a single myth as a unique story and,at the same time, enriches our understanding of thatstory through comparisons with other stories withsimilar plots, characters, and symbolic imagery aswell as through comparisons with other mythic sto-ries with similar contexts of telling. For one exampleof this last sense of comparison, we might be en-riched by considering myths specifically told bywomen even as we would likely be rewarded bycomparing myths with women or goddesses as cen-tral characters.

Robert Ellwood’s “Real Myths”

Robert Ellwood, who, like Lincoln, was one ofEliade’s students at the University of Chicago in the1960s, suggests yet another approach in The Politics ofMyth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and JosephCampbell (1999). Ellwood argues that what we call“myth” does not exist. Or, to put it more precisely,modern students of myth do not study mythos, inHesiod’s sense of a poet “breathing” the divinelyinspired utterance. Rather, what we call myth “is

always received from an already distant past, liter-ary (even if only oral literature), hence a step awayfrom primal simplicity” (174). This is an importantpoint for Ellwood and other modern mythologistsbecause “official” myths like the Iliad and the Odyssey,the Theogony—or the Bhagavad Gita or the Bible—“are inevitably reconstructions from snatches of folk-lore and legend, artistically put together with an eyefor drama and meaning” (175). But “real” myths are,like one’s own dreams, “so fresh they are not yet rec-ognized as ‘myth’ or ‘scripture,’ [and] are fragmen-tary, imagistic rather than verbal, emergent, capableof forming many different stories at once” (175).

What students of myth study in mythologyclasses, then, are usually the literary product of manyhands over the course of many generations. Even if aname like Homer or Hesiod gets attached to mythswhen they finally achieve their final form, they beginas folktales and campfire stories, as religious pre-cepts, images, and rituals, as mystical revelations,and as entertaining fictional and speculative explo-rations of how the cosmos came into being and con-tinues to operate. Over the generations, in the handsof gifted storytellers, a narrative capable of combin-ing and artistically organizing these fragments andthemes emerges. By the time a society officially au-thorizes a story as scripture or myth, the events itdescribes have slipped so far into the past that theycan be believed—anything could have happened inthe beginning—or disbelieved. Myth representshuman truths in a variety of ways, few if any ofwhich depend on mere plausibility of character orevent. “To put it another way,” as Ellwood says,“myth is really a meaning category on the part ofhearers, not intrinsic in any story in its own right.Myth in this sense is itself a myth” (1999, 175).

Reading Mythology

Ellwood, like Lincoln, doesn’t explicitly articulate amethodology by which students can analyze mythsfor themselves, but his suggestion that myths, likethose contained in this book, come down to us inliterary form suggests a well-established methodol-ogy: close reading and a consideration of how liter-ary conventions inform and enable various levels ofmeaning.

Doty, when speaking of Müller’s and Frazer’s eu-hemerism, remarked that not only these two but




“many other 19th-century [and 20th-century] scholarsregarded myth almost exclusively as a problem formodern rationality” (2000, 11). Müller and Frazer, themyth-ritualists, the sociofunctionalist anthropolo-gists, and the psychoanalysts have all attempted to“solve” the problem of the mythic irrational and to ar-ticulate in authoritative terms what myths “really”mean. Their efforts were not entirely wasted; theywere simply too one-dimensional, too unable to en-gage with myth in a holistic sense. Our book takes theview that myths are not codes to be cracked or naiveand mistaken perceptions that must be corrected.Rather, myths are literary truths told about the mys-teries and necessities that always have and always willcondition the human experience. These truths, thesemythoi, have made sophisticated use of symbolic im-agery and narrative strategy, have created unforget-table characters that continue to typify for us abstractrealities such as love, bravery, wisdom, and treachery,and have enacted as compellingly as any modernnovel the humor and horror, the ecstasy and anguish,and the fear and hope of the human drama.

One of the great strengths of the literary approachto myth is that one needn’t dispense with the meth-ods, concerns, and insights developed through othermythologies in order to pay appropriate attention tosuch features of narrative as plot, point of view, char-acterization, setting, symbols, and theme. Indeed, ourunderstanding and enjoyment of myths is enhancedif, as Doty would say, we furbish our mythographer’stoolkit with as many tools as possible. For example,by using such structural approaches as those devel-oped by Campbell, Lévi-Strauss, and Propp we cansharpen our focus on such basic plotting issues as theevents that constitute the rising action of the story, theprecise moment at which the turning point isreached, and the events of the falling action that re-solve the conflict or tension that gives the story itsnarrative energy. Yet, literary analysis offers studentsof myth more than charts and formulas because italso equips us with a conceptual vocabulary and spe-cific language to understand and describe how thearrangement of a story’s action and its setting affectour emotions and intellects. How, for example, arewe affected by the opening lines that introduce theaction in the Maya’s Popul Vuh?

Here follow the first words, the first eloquence:There is not yet one person, one animal, bird, fish,crab, tree, rock, hollow, canyon, meadow, forest.

Only the sky alone is there; the face of the earth isnot clear. Only the sea alone is pooled under all thesky; there is nothing whatever gathered together. Itis at rest; not a single thing stirs. It is held back, keptat rest under the sky. Whatever there is that mightbe is simply not there: only the pooled water, onlythe calm sea, only it alone is pooled (see Chapter 2,page 93).

How do we feel about the difficulty the narratorseems to have expressing a state of existence that is si-multaneously nothing and yet contains a primordialsea with sleeping gods shining in its depths? Whatquestions does this paragraph raise for us? What ex-pectations are created and what words and phrasescreate them? Literary analysis of such details invitesus to consider the personal connections we developto a story and encourages us to reflect upon howa gifted storyteller (or generations of gifted story-tellers) can utilize and refine language to createthought-shaping, life-defining images, ideas, andfeelings within their hearers and/or readers.

Similarly, consulting the methods and insights ofthe comparative and psychological approaches tomyth can increase our sensitivity to the universalityof certain character types and to a deeper apprecia-tion of the motives, values, and actions of the variousprotagonists and antagonists that people the world’ssacred narratives. Through close reading of myth,we can make the crucial distinction between charac-terization and the more ambiguous notion of charac-ter. The characterization of Heracles (Hercules inLatin), for example, utilizes certain stock phrasesthat emphasize his strength, resilience, and resource-fulness. While pinpointing precisely the languagethrough which storytellers have depicted charactershas rewards, it can be even more rewarding to artic-ulate and debate the psychological makeup of thisGreek hero’s character. For instance, does Heracles’salienation from his divine father, with all the rejec-tion and confusion that such a separation implies,create in him the determination necessary to accom-plish his famous twelve labors? Are Heracles’s manymighty deeds motivated by an obsessive need toprove his worth to a distant father whose fame andinfluence far outmatch his own? While these ques-tions are clearly speculative and center upon a fic-tional entity, they nevertheless take us to the heart ofliterature’s mysterious power over us. How fascinat-ing that people, places, and things that may never






have had a literal existence off the page, can never-theless live in our minds as vividly as any of ourflesh-and-blood acquaintances!

Likewise, we can borrow from early anthropologyits insights and raw data about the prevalence ofcertain themes in myth. Preoccupations with suchmatters as the seasons, fertility, and disastrousconsequences of intimate union between gods andmortals abound in myth and some anthropologicalstudies supply us with a vast wealth of cases in point.We can also follow the lead of more recent anthropo-logical study and generate lists of material cultureitems, social strata, customs, and technologies and ourunderstanding of some of myth’s most obscure refer-ences can be illuminated by this discipline’s focus onthe ritual and performance contexts as well as thesocio-political functions of myth in living cultures.

Literary analysis, however, urges us also to con-sider how a narrative’s uses of various materialgoods, social arrangements, and technologies workas symbols and icons. Returning to the Popul Vuh, wenotice that the creation of human beings is the culmi-nation of four successive attempts, a creative processthat is successful only after the correct material—maize—is used. While the scientist might view thisreference as evidence that the Maya cultivated cornfrom earliest times, making similar observationsabout the tortilla griddles, domesticated dogs andturkeys, pots and grinding implements the story alsomentions, the literary critic would likely emphasizethe symbolic value of corn to the story. The gods’spoken word vibrating in the air, mud, and wood allprove inadequate materials for producing beingscapable of intelligible speech and rational thought.However, the premier product of settled living andscientific observations about soil conditions, seed-ing, and the seasons is the perfect medium.

And then the yellow corn and white corn wereground, and Xmucane [Grandmother of Light] didthe grinding nine times. Corn was used, along withthe water she rinsed her hands with, for the

creation of grease; it became human fat when it wasworked by the Bearer, Begetter, Sovereign PlumedSerpent, as they are called. After that, they put itinto words: the making, the modeling of our firstmother-father, with yellow corn, white corn alonefor the flesh, food alone for the human legs andarms, for our first fathers, the four human works. Itwas staples alone that made up their flesh (seeChapter 2, page 98).

When the narrator places maize at the pivotal mo-ment in the story when the gods at last perfect theircreation, it suggests not only were human beings thepinnacle of the creation (the fourth time is thecharm!) but that the Maya viewed themselves as lit-eral children of the corn. While such archaeologicalevidence as carvings of corn stalks, farming imple-ments, and the ruins of granaries and farms are suf-ficient to indicate that the mastery of agrarian tech-nology supplied the nourishment and wealthnecessary to build and sustain the Maya empire,those attending to the symbolic value of corn in theirmythic charter know the degree to which the Mayathemselves were aware of this fact.

Like an onion, a myth has many layers. Thus weurge students of myth to familiarize themselves withthe methods and assumptions of each mythologyand to combine them with the methods and assump-tions of literary study. Euhemerism permits us to re-move one layer of the myth-onion, the comparativemethod another, the structuralist and functionalistapproaches further layers, and psychological and lit-erary analyses still others. We should resign our-selves to the fact that, after all our efforts, we willfind at the core, quite literally, no-thing, no single all-encompassing explanation of myth. But, those whoexert the disciplined effort to peel away and examinethe social, political, historical, psychological, cul-tural, functional, and literary layers of the myth-onion will certainly become permeated with its dis-tinct essence. Given the fascinating subject we study,that is reward enough.




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What interests us most about myths is the way inwhich they may express attitudes and beliefs currentat the present time. Mythologies always embodysystems of values, judgments about what is consid-ered good and proper by the people who have themyth. Especially, myth tends to sustain some systemof authority, and the distinctions of power and statuswhich this implies. Thus Nyoro myths tend to vali-date the kinds of social and political stratificationwhich I have said are characteristic of the culture,and to support the kingship around which the tradi-tional political system revolved. In Malinowski’sphrase, Nyoro legend provides a “mythical charter”for the social and political order.

For Nyoro, human history begins with a first fam-ily, whose head is sometimes called Kintu, “the cre-ated thing.” There are three children in this family,all boys. At first these are not distinguished from oneanother by name; all are called “Kana,” which means“little child.” This is of course confusing, and Kintuasks God if they may be given separate names. Godagrees, and the boys are submitted to two tests. First,six things are placed on a path by which the boyswill pass. These are an ox’s head, a cowhide thong, abundle of cooked millet and potatoes, a grass head-ring (for carrying loads on the head), an axe, and aknife. When the boys come upon these things, the el-dest at once picks up the bundle of food and starts toeat. What he cannot eat he carries away, using thehead-ring for this purpose. He also takes the axe andthe knife. The second son takes the leather thong,and the youngest takes the ox’s head, which is allthat is left. In the next test the boys have to sit on theground in the evening, with their legs stretched out,

7

Nyoro MythJohn Beattie

Although numerous scholars emphasize the symbolic and structural aspects of myth, an importantstrand of anthropology has viewed myth instead as an explanation of the behavior and practices ofpresent-day society. Because myth provides a sacred account of why the world is in its present form,it can authorize and underscore the legitimacy of sociopolitical arrangements. This functionalistview is associated strongly with the mid-20th-century anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, whoconsidered myth to be a pragmatic set of rules, a social charter.

Malinowski’s idea of myth as charter is exemplified in the following excerpt, drawn from a classicethnography by one of Britain’s best-known anthropological specialists on Africa. John Beattie initiallystudied the Nyoro, who live in Uganda, between 1951 and 1955. Using examples of Nyoro myths,Beattie shows how the narratives—divine and indisputable—account for such features of Nyoro lifeas hierarchical, descent-based social categories; respect for the wisdom of the old; inheritance customs;and the legitimacy of the current king. If a ruler’s credentials are based on mythological antecedents,then his power is valid. Beattie ends by warning that myth should not be taken at face value as a lit-eral account of history but, rather, as Malinowski suggests, as a justification for present structures ofauthority.

From BUNYORO, AN AFRICAN KINGDOM, by John Beattie.© 1960. Reprinted with permission of Wadsworth, a division ofThomson Learning: www.thomsonrights.com. Fax 800 730-2215.

www.thomsonrights.com




BEATTIE • NYORO MYTH | 59

each holding on his lap a wooden milk-pot full ofmilk. They are told that they must hold their potssafely until morning. At midnight the youngest boybegins to nod, and he spills a little of his milk. Hewakes up with a start, and begs his brothers for someof theirs. Each gives him a little, so that his pot is fullagain. Just before dawn the eldest brother suddenlyspills all his milk. He, too, asks his brothers to helpfill his pot from theirs, but they refuse, saying that itwould take too much of their milk to fill his emptypot. In the morning their father finds the youngestson’s pot full, the second son’s nearly full, and theeldest’s quite empty.

He gives his decision, and names the three boys.The eldest, and his descendants after him, is alwaysto be a servant and a cultivator, and to carry loads forhis younger brothers, and their descendants. For hechose the millet and potatoes, peasants’ food, and helost all the milk entrusted to him, so showing himselfunfit to have anything to do with cattle. Thus he wasnamed “Kairu,” which means little Iru or peasant.The second son and his descendants would have therespected status of cattlemen. For he had chosenthe leather thong for tying cattle, and he had spiltnone of his milk, only providing some for hisyounger brother. So he was called “Kahuma,” littlecowherd or Huma, and ever since the cattle-herdingpeople of this part of the inter-lacustrine region havebeen called Huma or Hima. But the third andyoungest son would be his father’s heir, for he hadtaken the ox’s head, a sign that he would be at thehead of all men, and he alone had a full bowl of milkwhen morning came, because of the help given himby his brothers. So he was named “Kakama,” littleMukama or ruler. He and his descendants becamethe kings of Bunyoro, or Kitara, as the country wasthen called. When the three brothers had beennamed, their father told the two elder that theyshould never leave their young brother, but shouldstay with him and serve him always. And he toldKakama to rule wisely and well.

This myth explains and justifies the traditional di-vision of Nyoro society into distinct social categoriesbased on descent. At the beginning, people wereundifferentiated—this is symbolized by the threeboys having no separate names or identities—butthis was confusing, and the only orderly solution wasto grade them in three hierarchically ordered cate-gories. It is true that in Bunyoro the distinction

between Hima and Iru is of decreasing social impor-tance, but the distinctions of status implied by themyth and especially the differential allocation ofauthority are still strongly marked in social life.What is validated is basically the “givenness” of dif-ferences of status and authority based on birth and,in general, the preeminence of ascribed status overpersonal achievement. Subordinates may find subor-dination less irksome, and superordinates may rulemore calmly and confidently, when everyone ac-knowledges the difference between them and thedivine origin of that difference.

Many stories, all of which point a moral, are toldof the very first kings, Kakama’s earliest descen-dants. The following is one of the best known. KingIsaza came to the throne as a very young man; hewas disrespectful toward the elders whom his fatherhad left to advise him, and he drove them away fromthe palace, replacing them by gay youngsters withwhom he used to go hunting, which was his favoritepastime. One day he killed a zebra, and he was sopleased with its gaily striped hide that he deter-mined to dress himself in it at once. So his youngcompanions sewed the skin on him. But as the daywore on, the hot sun dried the skin, and it quicklyshrank and began to squeeze Isaza until he wasnearly dead. He begged his friends for help, but theyjust laughed at him and did nothing. When he haddriven the old men away, two had stayed nearby,and now Isaza sent to them for help. First they re-fused, but after a while they relented, and toldIsaza’s young men to throw the king into a pond.They did so, and the moisture loosened the hide sothat it could be removed. Isaza was so grateful to theold men that he called them all back to the palace,gave them a feast and reinstated them. At the sametime he reprimanded his young associates, tellingthem that they should always respect the old.

This Nyoro “cautionary tale” points the familiarmoral that a person in authority neglects at his perilthe advice of those older and wiser than he, and thatold men are likely to be better informed than callowyouths. But it also stresses another important featureof Nyoro ideas about authority—namely, that it is notinappropriate for young persons to have power. Itwill be remembered that in the previous myth it wasthe youngest son, not the eldest, who succeeded tohis father’s authority; in fact, succession by theyoungest, or a younger, son is a characteristic feature




of Nyoro inheritance. The role of the older brother isto act as guardian until the heir is old enough to as-sume full authority. Nyoro say that a first son shouldnot inherit; we shall see that the Mukama may not besucceeded by his eldest son. But the Isaza myth alsostresses the wisdom of the old, and the respect due tothem. Age is a qualification for advisory, not execu-tive, authority; it is right that the aged should bespared the arduousness of decision making, butright that they should guide and advise those inpower. The legend of Isaza and the zebra skin is apopular one, for it expresses values important toNyoro and which we shall meet again.

It is important also to examine the cycle of dynas-tic myths which merge into traditional history andlink up (if the series be regarded chronologically)with the “real” history which we shall go on to con-sider. Nyoro believe that there have been three royaldynasties; first, the shadowy Tembuzi, of whomKakama was the first and Isaza the last; second, theChwezi, part-legendary hero-gods whose marvelousexploits are still spoken of; and third, the Bito, the lineto which the present king belongs. We shall see thatpart of the significance of the myths which we nowdiscuss lies in the way in which they link these threedynasties together into a single line of descent, socreating an unbroken chain between the presentruler and the very first king of Bunyoro.

The story is rich in descriptive detail, but herewe can only give an outline account. It begins bytelling how the king of the world of ghosts, calledNyamiyonga, sent a message to king Isaza (whosehunting exploit has just been recounted) asking himto enter into a blood pact with him. Isaza’s coun-cilors advised against this, so Isaza had the pactmade on Nyamiyonga’s behalf with his chief minis-ter, a commoner called Bukuku. When Nyamiyongadiscovered that he had been united in the blood pactwith an Iru or commoner, he was angry, and he de-termined to get Isaza into his power. So he sent hisbeautiful daughter Nyamata to Isaza’s court, whereshe so attracted the king that he married her, notknowing who she was. But he resisted all her effortsto persuade him to visit her home, for he could notbear to be parted from his cattle, which he lovedmore than anything else. So Nyamiyonga thought ofanother plan. He caused two of his most handsomecattle to be discovered near Isaza’s kraal, and thesewere taken to the king, who soon loved them most of

all his herd. One day they disappeared, and the dis-tracted Mukama went in search of them, leavingBukuku to rule the kingdom in his absence. Aftermuch wandering, Isaza arrived in the country ofghosts, where he found his two cattle and also hiswife Nyamata, who had gone home some timepreviously to bear him a child. Nyamiyonga wel-comed the Nyoro king, but he had not forgiven him,and he never allowed him to return to the world ofmen.

In due course Nyamata’s child was born and wasnamed Isimbwa. When Isimbwa grew up he marriedin the world of ghosts and had a son called Kyomya,of whom we shall hear more later. Isimbwa, unlikehis father, could visit the world of living men, and ona hunting expedition he came to the capital whereBukuku still reigned in Isaza’s place. Bukuku wasunpopular because he was a commoner and had noreal right to rule, but there was no one else to doso. He had a daughter called Nyinamwiru, and atNyinamwiru’s birth diviners had told Bukuku thathe would have reason to fear any child that shemight bear. So he kept her in a special enclosurewhich could only be entered through his own well-guarded palace. When Isimbwa reached Bukuku’scapital he was intrigued by this state of affairs, andafter making clandestine advances to Nyinamwiruthrough her maid, he managed to climb into her en-closure and, unknown to Bukuku, he stayed therefor three months. He then left the kingdom and wasnot seen again for many years.

In due course Nyinamwiru bore a son, to the con-sternation of Bukuku, who gave orders for the childto be drowned. So the baby was thrown in a river,but by chance its umbilical cord caught in a bush,and the child was discovered by a potter, Rubumbi,who took it home and brought it up as a member ofhis family. He knew that it was Nyinamwiru’s child,and he told her that it was safe. Bukuku, of course,believed it to be dead. The boy grew up strong andspirited, and was constantly in trouble with Bukuku’sherdsmen, for when the king’s cattle were being wa-tered he would drive them away, so that he couldwater Rubumbi’s cattle first. This angered Bukuku,who one day came to the drinking trough himself topunish the unruly potter’s son. But before Bukuku’smen could carry out his orders to seize and beat him,he rushed round to the back of Bukuku’s royal stooland stabbed him mortally with his spear. He then sat





BEATTIE • NYORO MYTH | 61

down on the king’s stool. The herdsmen wereaghast, and ran at once to tell Nyinamwiru what hadhappened. The story tells that she was both glad andsorry; glad because her son had taken the throne,sorry because of her father’s death. So Ndahura,which is what the young man was called, came to hisgrandfather Isaza’s throne, and he is reckoned as thefirst of the Chwezi kings.

There were only three—some say two—Chwezikings; Ndahura, his half-brother Mulindwa, and hisson Wamara. Many wonderful things are told of theirwisdom and achievements, but during Wamara’sreign things began to go badly for them. So theycalled their diviners and an ox was cut open so thatits entrails could be examined. The diviners were as-tonished to find no trace of the intestines, and theydid not know what to say. At that moment a strangerfrom north of the Nile appeared, and said that he wasa diviner and would solve the riddle for them. Butfirst he insisted (wisely, as it turned out) on making ablood pact with one of the Chwezi, so that he couldbe safe from their anger if his findings were unfavor-able. Then he took an axe and cut open the headand hooves of the ox. At once the missing intestinesfell out of these members, and as they did so a blacksmut from the fire settled on them, and could not beremoved.

The Nilotic diviner then said that the absence ofthe intestines from their proper place meant that therule of the Chwezi in Bunyoro was over. Their pres-ence in the hoofs meant that they would wander faraway; in the head, that they would, nonetheless, con-tinue to rule over men (a reference to the possessioncult, centered on the Chwezi spirits). And the blacksmut meant that the kingdom would be taken over bydark-skinned strangers from the north. So the Chwezideparted from Bunyoro, no one knows whither.

Meantime the diviner went back to his own coun-try in the north, and there he met the sons of Kyomya,who was, it will be remembered, Isimbwa’s son byhis first wife. Kyomya had married in the country tothe north of the Nile, and had settled down there.The diviner told Kyomya’s sons that they should gosouth and take over the abandoned Nyoro kingdomof their Tembuzi grandfathers. There were fourbrothers altogether: Nyarwa, the eldest; the twinsRukidi Mpuga and Kato Kimera; and Kiiza, theyoungest. They were the first Bito. Nyarwa (as wemight expect) did not become a ruler, though some

say that he remained as adviser to his second brotherRukidi, who became the first Bito king of Bunyoro.Kato was allotted Buganda, then a dependency ofthe great Nyoro empire (Ganda, of course, have arather different version of these events), and Kiizawas given a part of what is now Busoga, a countrymany miles to the east of present-day Bunyoro.

When the Bito first arrived in Bunyoro, theyseemed strange and uncouth to the inhabitants. It issaid that half of Rukidi’s body was black and halfwhite, a reference to his mixed descent. They had tobe instructed in the manners appropriate to rulers; atfirst, they were ignorant of such important mattersas cattle keeping and milk drinking. But graduallyRukidi assumed the values and manners proper tothe heir of the pastoral rulers of the earlier dynasties.So began the reign of the powerful Bito dynasty,which has lasted up to the present.

This series of myths establishes a genealogical linkbetween the three recognized dynasties of Nyororulers. Having noted the importance in Bunyoro ofhereditarily determined status, we can see that amajor function is served by the genealogical linkingof the present ruling line with the wonderfulChwezi, whose exploits are still talked of throughoutthe region, and, through them, with the even moreremote Tembuzi and so with the very beginnings ofhuman existence. The connection enables the presentruling line to claim descent of an honor and antiq-uity not exceeded even by that of the pastoral Huma(who are said in some contexts to look down uponthe Bito as “commoners”). The marking off of theruling Bito from all other Nyoro contributes to theirunity and exclusiveness, and so lends validity totheir claims to special respect, prestige, and author-ity. And not only the rulers, but all Nyoro, share inthe glory of their ruling line and the wonderful featsof its progenitors. The exploits and conquests ofIsaza and the Chwezi rulers are known to everyNyoro. When people think of themselves, as Nyorosometimes do (for reasons which will become plainlater), as being in decline, there may be compensa-tion in the thought of past in default of present great-ness. And we may suppose that historically thegenealogical link was important for the immigrantBito, who lacked the prestige of the already existingHuma aristocracy, and needed the enhancement ofstatus which this “genealogical charter” provided. Sothe main social function of Nyoro mythical history is




the establishment of Bito credentials to govern, byemphasizing the distinction and antiquity of theirgenealogical antecedents.

According to the myth, the present Mukama isdescended in an unbroken patrilineal line from thevery beginning of things, and it may well be asked(as indeed it has been) why in this case there are saidto have been three dynasties in Nyoro history, andnot only one. But the question implies a too literal in-terpretation of the myth. The fact is that for Nyorothere are three dynasties, and whatever the truthabout their real relationship to one another, if any (oreven, in the case of the earlier ones, their very exis-tence), Nyoro believe them to have been three quite

different kinds of people. In other contexts theChwezi are spoken of as a strange and wonderfulpeople who came from far away, took over the king-dom from the Tembuzi, remained in the country fora generation or two, and then mysteriously disap-peared. There is linguistic and other evidence to sup-port the view that the Bito are of quite different racialand cultural stock from the people whose countryand kingship they took over. The myth is not to beunderstood as an attempt to reconstruct a historythat has been lost forever; it is rather to be seen asproviding a genealogical charter for a structure ofauthority whose existence is contemporaneous withthe myth itself.





Our starting point here will be a puzzling observa-tion recorded by a Spanish missionary in Peru,

Father P. J. de Arriaga, at the end of the sixteenthcentury, and published in his Extirpacion de la Idola-tria del Peru (Lima 1621). He noted that in a certainpart of Peru of his time, in times of bitter cold thepriest called in all the inhabitants who were knownto have been born feet first, or who had a harelip,or who were twins. They were accused of being

8

Harelips and Twins: The Splitting of a MythClaude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (born 1908) has been one of the most provocative and prolific anthropologistsof the second half of the 20th century. He fostered a school of thought known as structuralism, whichseeks to identify the underlying patterns of human thought that are common to all humans despitevariations in culture. Lévi-Strauss looked especially for patterns in myth, ritual, and kinship in orderto understand the unconscious structures that shape human cognition. His work often involved iden-tifying binary oppositions—to Lévi-Strauss, a fundamental characteristic of human thought—aswell as factors that mediate or resolve those oppositions. His studies of myth emphasized the culturesof South and North America.

Originally part of a radio series delivered in 1977, in this article Lévi-Strauss analyzes a relatedset of myths and mythological motifs that suggest an underlying similarity among twins, peoplewith harelips, and people born feet first. Although unusually concise, this piece nonetheless encapsu-lates the most important features of the author’s approach to myth. The analysis mixes together textsfrom several indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. He seeks patterns or structures that, un-seen at first, lie beneath the narrative sequence of events in the individual texts. In keeping with thestructural study of myth, Lévi-Strauss here searches for binary pairs (in this case, human twins) aswell as factors that mediate between binary oppositions. The hare, with its split lip and hence “incip-ient twinhood,” is such an intermediary.

Because Lévi-Strauss’s original works are in French, and are rich with literary allusions anddouble entendres, when translated into English they often prove to be challenging reading. For read-ers who would like a broader introduction to his work, we recommend Anthropology and Myth:Lectures 1951–1982 (translated by Roy Willis, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). This collection ofsuccinct summaries was originally delivered in annual lectures at his home university, Collège deFrance, over a period of three decades. They provide accessible introductions to all the major workspublished by this influential author, including his numerous volumes on myth.

“Harelips and Twins: The Splitting of a Myth,” from MYTHAND MEANING. New York: Schocken Books, 1979, pp. 25–33.Copyright © University of Toronto Press. Reprinted bypermission.

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responsible for the cold because, it was said, theyhad eaten salt and peppers, and they were ordered torepent and to confess their sins.

Now, that twins are correlated with atmosphericdisorder is something very commonly acceptedthroughout the world, including Canada. It is wellknown that on the coast of British Columbia, amongthe Indians, twins were endowed with special pow-ers to bring good weather, to dispel storms, and thelike. This is not, however, the part of the problemwhich I wish to consider here. What strikes me isthat all the mythographers—for instance, Sir JamesFrazer who quotes Arriaga in several instances—never asked the question why people with harelipsand twins are considered to be similar in some re-spect. It seems to me that the crux of the problem isto find out: why harelips? why twins? and why areharelips and twins put together?

In order to solve the problem, we have, as some-times happens, to make a jump from South Americato NorthAmerica, because it will be a NorthAmericanmyth which will give us the clue to the South Amer-ican one. Many people have reproached me for thiskind of procedure, claiming that myths of a givenpopulation can only be interpreted and understoodin the framework of the culture of that given popula-tion. There are several things which I can say by wayof an answer to that objection.

In the first place, it seems to me pretty obviousthat, as was ascertained during recent years by the so-called Berkeley school, the population of the Ameri-cas before Columbus was much larger than it hadbeen supposed to be. And since it was much larger, itis obvious that these large populations were to someextent in contact with one another, and that beliefs,practices, and customs were, if I may say so, seepingthrough. Any neighbouring population was always,to some extent, aware of what was going on in theother population. The second point in the case thatwe are considering here is that these myths do notexist isolated in Peru on the one hand and in Canadaon the other, but that in between we find them overand over again. Really, they are pan-Americanmyths, rather than scattered myths in different partsof the continent.

Now, among the Tupinambas, the ancient coastalIndians of Brazil at the time of the discovery, as alsoamong the Indians of Peru, there was a myth con-cerning a woman, whom a very poor individual

succeeded in seducing in a devious way. The bestknown version, recorded by the French monk AndréThevet in the sixteenth century, explained that theseduced woman gave birth to twins, one of themborn from the legitimate husband, and the otherfrom the seducer, who is the Trickster. The womanwas going to meet the god who would be her hus-band, and while on her way the Trickster intervenesand makes her believe that he is the god; so, she con-ceives from the Trickster. When she later finds thelegitimate husband-to-be, she conceives from himalso and later gives birth to twins. And since thesefalse twins had different fathers, they have antitheti-cal features: one is brave, the other a coward; one isthe protector of the Indians, the other of the whitepeople; one gives goods to the Indians, while theother one, on the contrary, is responsible for a lot ofunfortunate happenings.

It so happens that in North America, we findexactly the same myth, especially in the northwest ofthe United States and Canada. However, in compar-ison with South American versions, those comingfrom the Canadian area show two important differ-ences. For instance, among the Kootenay, who live inthe Rocky Mountains, there is only one fecundationwhich has as a consequence the birth of twins, wholater on become, one the sun, and the other themoon. And, among some other Indians of BritishColumbia of the Salish linguistic stock—the Thomp-son Indians and the Okanagan—there are two sisterswho are tricked by apparently two distinct individu-als, and they give birth, each one to a son; they arenot really twins because they were born from differ-ent mothers. But since they were born in exactly thesame kind of circumstances, at least from a moraland a psychological point of view, they are to that ex-tent similar to twins.

Those versions are, from the point of view of whatI am trying to show, the more important. The Salishversion weakens the twin character of the hero be-cause the twins are not brothers—they are cousins;and it is only the circumstances of their births whichare closely parallel—they are both born thanks to atrick. Nevertheless, the basic intention remains thesame because nowhere are the two heroes really twins;they are born from distinct fathers, even in the SouthAmerican version, and they have opposed charac-ters, features which will be shown in their conductand in the behaviour of their descendants.





LÉVI-STRAUSS • HARELIPS AND TWINS: THE SPLITTING OF A MYTH | 65

So we may say that in all cases children who aresaid to be twins or believed to be twins, as in theKootenay verison, will have different adventureslater on which will, if I may say so, untwin them.And this division between two individuals who areat the beginning presented as twins, either real twinsor equivalents to twins, is a basic characteristic of allthe myths in South America or North America.

In the Salish versions of the myth, there is a verycurious detail, and it is very important. You remem-ber that in this version we have no twins whatsoever,because there are two sisters who are travelling inorder to find, each one, a husband. They were told bya grandmother that they would recognize their hus-bands by such and such characteristics, and they arethen each deluded by the Tricksters they meet ontheir way into believing that they are the husbandwhom each is supposed to marry. They spend thenight with him, and each of the women will latergive birth to a son.

Now, after this unfortunate night spent in the hutof the Trickster, the elder sister leaves her youngersister and goes visiting her grandmother, who is amountain goat and also a kind of magician; for sheknows in advance that her granddaughter is coming,and she sends the hare to welcome her on the road.The hare hides under a log which has fallen in themiddle of the road, and when the girl lifts her leg tocross the log, the hare can have a look at her genitalparts and make a very inappropriate joke. The girl isfurious, and strikes him with her cane and splits hisnose. This is why the animals of the leporine familynow have a split nose and upper lip, which we call aharelip in people precisely on account of thisanatomical peculiarity in rabbits and hares.

In other words, the elder sister starts to split thebody of the animal; if this split were carried out tothe end—if it did not stop at the nose but continuedthrough the body and to the tail—she would turn anindividual into twins, that is, two individuals whichare exactly similar or identical because they are botha part of a whole. In this respect, it is very importantto find out what conception the American Indians allover America entertained about the origin of twins.And what we find is a general belief that twins resultfrom an internal splitting of the body fluids whichwill later solidify and become the child. For instance,among some North American Indians, the pregnantwoman is forbidden to turn around too fast when

she is lying asleep, because if she did, the body fluidswould divide in two parts, and she would give birthto twins.

There is also a myth from the Kwakiutl Indians ofVancouver Island which should be mentioned here.It tells of a small girl whom everybody hates becauseshe has a harelip. An ogress, a supernatural cannibalwoman, appears and steals all the children includingthe small girl with the harelip. She puts them all inher basket in order to take them home to eat them.The small girl who was taken first is at the bottom ofthe basket and she succeeds in splitting it open witha seashell she had picked up on the beach. The bas-ket is on the back of the ogress, and the girl is able todrop out and run away first. She drops out feet first.

This position of the harelipped girl is quite sym-metrical to the position of the hare in the myth whichI previously mentioned: crouching beneath the hero-ine when he hides under the log across her path, heis in respect to her exactly in the same position as ifhe had been born from her and delivered feet first. Sowe see that there is in all this mythology an actual re-lationship between twins on the one hand and deliv-ery feet first or positions which are, metaphoricallyspeaking, identical to it on the other. This obviouslyclears up the connection from which we started inFather Arriaga’s Peruvian relations between twins,people born feet first, and people with harelips.

The fact that the harelip is conceived as an incipi-ent twinhood can help us to solve a problem which isquite fundamental for anthropologists working espe-cially in Canada: why have the Ojibwa Indians andother groups of the Algonkian-speaking family se-lected the hare as the highest deity in which theybelieved? Several explanations have been broughtforward: the hare was an important if not essentialpart of their diet; the hare runs very fast, and so wasan example of the talents which the Indians shouldhave; and so on. Nothing of that is very convincing.But if my previous interpretations were right, itseems much more convincing to say: 1, among therodent family the hare is the larger, the more conspic-uous, the more important, so it can be taken as a rep-resentative of the rodent family; 2, all rodents exhibitan anatomical peculiarity which makes out of themincipient twins, because they are partly split up.

When there are twins, or even more children, inthe womb of the mother, there is usually in the mytha very serious consequence because, even if there are




only two, the children start to fight and compete inorder to find out who will have the honour of beingborn first. And, one of them, the bad one, does nothesitate to find a short cut, if I may say so, in orderto be born earlier; instead of following the naturalroad, he splits up the body of the mother to escapefrom it.

This, I think, is an explanation of why the fact ofbeing born feet first is assimilated to twinhood,because it is in the case of twinhood that the compet-itive hurry of one child will make him destroy themother in order to be the first one born. Both twin-hood and delivery feet first are forerunners of adangerous delivery, or I could even call it a heroic de-livery, for the child will take the initiative and becomea kind of hero, a murderous hero in some cases; buthe completes a very important feat. This explainswhy, in several tribes, twins were killed as well aschildren born feet first.

The really important point is that in all Americanmythology, and I could say in mythology the worldover, we have deities or supernaturals, who play theroles of intermediaries between the powers above

and humanity below. They can be represented indifferent ways: we have, for instance, characters ofthe type of a Messiah; we have heavenly twins. Andwe can see that the place of the hare in Algonkianmythology is exactly between the Messiah—that is,the unique intermediary—and the heavenly twins.He is not twins, but he is incipient twins. He is still acomplete individual, but he has a harelip, he is halfway to becoming a twin.

This explains why, in this mythology, the hare asa god has an ambiguous character which has wor-ried commentators and anthropologists: sometimeshe is a very wise deity who is in charge of putting theuniverse in order, and sometimes he is a ridiculousclown who goes from mishap to mishap. And thisalso is best understood if we explain the choice of thehare by the Algonkian Indians as an individual whois between the two conditions of (a) a single deitybeneficient to mankind and (b) twins, one of whom isgood and the other bad. Being not yet entirely di-vided in two, being not yet twins, the two oppositecharacteristics can remain merged in one and thesame person.





Occasionally, we encounter a symbol which seems toenshrine the major hopes and aspirations of an entiresociety.1 Such a master symbol is represented by theVirgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint. Duringthe Mexican War of Independence against Spain, herimage preceded the insurgents into battle.2 EmilianoZapata and his agrarian rebels fought under her em-blem in the Great Revolution of 1910.3 Today, herimage adorns house fronts and interiors, churchesand home altars, bull rings and gambling dens, taxisand buses, restaurants and houses of ill repute. She is

celebrated in popular song and verse. Her shrine atTepeyac, immediately north of Mexico City, is visitedeach year by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims,ranging from the inhabitants of far-off Indian vil-lages to the members of socialist trade union locals.“Nothing to be seen in Canada or Europe,” saysF. S. C. Northrop, “equals it in the volume or the vi-tality of its moving quality or in the depth of its spiritof religious devotion.”4

In this paper, I should like to discuss this Mexicanmaster symbol, and the ideology which surrounds it.In making use of the term “master symbol,” I do notwish to imply that belief in the symbol is common toall Mexicans. We are not dealing here with an ele-ment of a putative national character, defined as acommon denominator of all Mexican nationals. It isno longer legitimate to assume “that any member ofthe [national] group will exhibit certain regularitiesof behavior which are common in high degreeamong the other members of the society.”5 Nations,

9

The Virgin of Guadalupe:A Mexican National SymbolEric R. Wolf

While anthropologists have long recognized the symbolic nature of culture, the following classicarticle identifies a single “master symbol” that sums up the central focus and worldview of a par-ticular people. Eric Wolf traces the Virgin of Guadalupe to her origins in 16th-century legend andAztec goddess worship and examines how the symbol expresses the major social relationships inMexican society. As a mother figure, the Virgin is an emotionally rich symbol for life, hope, andhealth, yet her image also embodies political and religious aspirations. Wolf concludes that the sym-bol links family, politics and religion; the past and present; indigenous and Mexican identities.

Eric Wolf (1923–99) conducted fieldwork with agrarian peoples in Latin America and Europe andwas keenly interested in the nature of power and the effects of European expansion. His influentialbook Europe and the People Without History (University of California Press, 1982) argues thatthe peoples colonized by Europeans were not isolated and unchanging but had long been significantparts of global economic processes.

Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 71, No. 279 (1958),pp. 34–39. Used by permission of the American Folklore Society(www.afsnet.org)* Parts of this paper were presented to the Symposium onEthnic and National Ideologies, Annual Spring Meeting ofthe American Ethnological Society in conjunction with thePhiladelphia Anthropological Society, on 12 May 1956.

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like other complex societies, must, however, “pos-sess cultural forms or mechanisms which groups in-volved in the same over-all web of relationships canuse in their formal and informal dealings with eachother.”6 Such forms develop historically, hand inhand with other processes which lead to the forma-tion of nations, and social groups which are caughtup in these processes must become “acculturated” totheir usage.7 Only where such forms exist can com-munication and coördinated behavior be establishedamong the constituent groups of such a society. Theyprovide the cultural idiom of behavior and idealrepresentations through which different groups ofthe same society can pursue and manipulate theirdifferent fates within a coördinated framework. Thispaper, then, deals with one such cultural form, oper-ating on the symbolic level. The study of this symbolseems particularly rewarding, since it is not re-stricted to one set of social ties, but refers to a verywide range of social relationships.

The image of the Guadalupe and her shrine atTepeyac are surrounded by an origin myth.8 Accord-ing to this myth, the Virgin Mary appeared to JuanDiego, a Christianized Indian of commoner status,and addressed him in Nahuatl. The encounter tookplace on the Hill of Tepeyac in the year 1531, tenyears after the Spanish Conquest of Tenochtitlan.The Virgin commanded Juan Diego to seek out thearchbishop of Mexico and to inform him of her de-sire to see a church built in her honor on TepeyacHill. After Juan Diego was twice unsuccessful in hisefforts to carry out her order, the Virgin wrought amiracle. She bade Juan Diego pick roses in a sterilespot where normally only desert plants could grow,gathered the roses into the Indian’s cloak, and toldhim to present cloak and roses to the incredulousarchbishop. When Juan Diego unfolded his cloak be-fore the bishop, the image of the Virgin was miracu-lously stamped upon it. The bishop acknowledgedthe miracle, and ordered a shrine built where Maryhad appeared to her humble servant.

The shrine, rebuilt several times in centuries tofollow, is today a basilica, the third highest kind ofchurch in Western Christendom. Above the centralaltar hangs Juan Diego’s cloak with the miraculousimage. It shows a young woman without child, herhead lowered demurely in her shawl. She wears anopen crown and flowing gown, and stands upon ahalf moon symbolizing the Immaculate Conception.

The shrine of Guadalupe was, however, not thefirst religious structure built on Tepeyac; nor wasGuadalupe the first female supernatural associatedwith the hill. In pre-Hispanic times, Tepeyac hadhoused a temple to the earth and fertility goddessTonantzin, Our Lady Mother, who—like theGuadalupe—was associated with the moon. Temple,like basilica, was the center of large scale pilgrim-ages. That the veneration accorded the Guadalupedrew inspiration from the earlier worship of To-nantzin is attested by several Spanish friars. F.Bernardino de Sahagún, writing fifty years after theConquest, says: “Now that the Church of Our Ladyof Guadalupe has been built there, they call herTonantzin too. . . . The term refers . . . to that ancientTonantzin and this state of affairs should be reme-died, because the proper name of the Mother of Godis not Tonantzin, but Dios and Nantzin. It seems tobe a satanic device to mask idolatry . . . and theycome from far away to visit that Tonantzin, as muchas before; a devotion which is also suspect becausethere are many churches of Our Lady everywhereand they do not go to them; and they come from far-away lands to this Tonantzin as of old.”9 F. Martín deLeón wrote in a similar vein: “On the hill where OurLady of Guadalupe is they adored the idol of agoddess they called Tonantzin, which means OurMother, and this is also the name they give Our Ladyand they always say they are going to Tonantzin orthey are celebrating Tonantzin and many of them un-derstand this in the old way and not in the modernway. . . .”10 The syncretism was still alive in the sev-enteenth century. F. Jacinto de la Serna, in discussingthe pilgrimages to the Guadalupe at Tepeyac, noted:“. . . it is the purpose of the wicked to [worship] thegoddess and not the Most Holy Virgin, or bothtogether.”11

Increasingly popular during the sixteenth cen-tury, the Guadalupe cult gathered emotional impe-tus during the seventeenth. During this century ap-pear the first known pictorial representations of theGuadalupe, apart from the miraculous original; thefirst poems are written in her honor; and the first ser-mons announce the transcendental implications ofher supernatural appearance in Mexico and amongMexicans.12 Historians have long tended to neglectthe seventeenth century which seemed “a kind ofDark Age in Mexico.” Yet “this quiet time was of theutmost importance in the development of Mexican





WOLF • THE VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE: A MEXICAN NATIONAL SYMBOL | 69

Society.”13 During this century, the institution of thehacienda comes to dominate Mexican life.14 Duringthis century, also, “New Spain is ceasing to be ‘new’and to be ‘Spain.’”15 These new experiences require anew cultural idiom, and in the Guadalupe cult, thecomponent segments of Mexican colonial societyencountered cultural forms in which they couldexpress their parallel interests and longings.

The primary purpose of this paper is not, how-ever, to trace the history of the Guadalupe symbol. Itis concerned rather with its functional aspects, itsroots and reference to the major social relationshipsof Mexican society.

The first set of relationships which I would like tosingle out for consideration are the ties of kinship,and the emotions generated in the play of relation-ships within families. I want to suggest that some ofthe meanings of the Virgin symbol in general, and ofthe Guadalupe symbol in particular, derive fromthese emotions. I say “some meanings” and I use theterm “derive” rather than “originate,” because theform and function of the family in any given societyare themselves determined by other social factors:technology, economy, residence, political power. Thefamily is but one relay in the circuit within whichsymbols are generated in complex societies. Also, Iused the plural “families” rather than “family,” be-cause there are demonstrably more than one kind offamily in Mexico.16 I shall simplify the available in-formation on Mexican family life, and discuss thematerial in terms of two major types of families.17

The first kind of family is congruent with the closedand static life of the Indian village. It may be calledthe Indian family. In this kind of family, the husbandis ideally dominant, but in reality labor and author-ity are shared equally among both marriage part-ners. Exploitation of one sex by the other is atypical;sexual feats do not add to a person’s status in theeyes of others. Physical punishment and authoritar-ian treatment of children are rare. The second kind offamily is congruent with the much more open, mo-bile, manipulative life in communities which are ac-tively geared to the life of the nation, a life in whichpower relationships between individuals andgroups are of great moment. This kind of family maybe called the Mexican family. Here, the father’s au-thority is unquestioned on both the real and the idealplane. Double sex standards prevail, and male sexu-ality is charged with a desire to exercise domination.

Children are ruled with a heavy hand; physical pun-ishment is frequent.

The Indian family pattern is consistent with thebehavior towards the Guadalupe noted by JohnBushnell in the Matlazinca-speaking community ofSan Juan Atzingo in the Valley of Toluca.18 There, theimage of the Virgin is addressed in passionate termsas a source of warmth and love, and the pulque orcentury plant beer drunk on ceremonial occasions isidentified with her milk. Bushnell postulates thathere the Guadalupe is identified with the mother asa source of early satisfactions, never again experi-enced after separation from the mother and emer-gence into social adulthood. As such, the Guadalupeembodies a longing to return to the pristine state inwhich hunger and unsatisfactory social relations areminimized. The second family pattern is also consis-tent with a symbolic identification of Virgin andmother, yet this time within a context of adult maledominance and sexual assertion, discharged againstsubmissive females and children. In this second con-text, the Guadalupe symbol is charged with the en-ergy of rebellion against the father. Her image is theembodiment of hope in a victorious outcome of thestruggle between generations.

This struggle leads to a further extension of thesymbolism. Successful rebellion against power fig-ures is equated with the promise of life; defeat withthe promise of death. As John A. Mackay has sug-gested, there thus takes place a further symbolicidentification of the Virgin with life; of defeat anddeath with the crucified Christ. In Mexican artistictradition, as in Hispanic artistic tradition in gen-eral,19 Christ is never depicted as an adult man, butalways either as a helpless child, or more often as afigure beaten, tortured, defeated and killed. In thissymbolic equation we are touching upon some of theroots both of the passionate affirmation of faith in theVirgin, and of the fascination with death which char-acterizes Baroque Christianity in general, and Mexi-can Catholicism in particular. The Guadalupe standsfor life, for hope, for health; Christ on the cross, fordespair and for death.

Supernatural mother and natural mother are thusequated symbolically, as are earthly and other-worldly hopes and desires. These hopes center onthe provision of food and emotional warmth in thefirst case, in the successful waging of the Oedipalstruggle in the other.




Family relations are, however, only one elementin the formation of the Guadalupe symbol. Theiranalysis does little to explain the Guadalupe as such.They merely illuminate the female and maternal at-tributes of the more widespread Virgin symbol. TheGuadalupe is important to Mexicans not only be-cause she is a supernatural mother, but also becauseshe embodies their major political and religiousaspirations.

To the Indian groups, the symbol is more than anembodiment of life and hope; it restores to them thehopes of salvation. We must not forget that the Span-ish Conquest signified not only military defeat, butthe defeat also of the old gods and the decline of theold ritual. The apparition of the Guadalupe to an In-dian commoner thus represents on one level the re-turn of Tonantzin. As Tannenbaum has well said,“The Church . . . gave the Indian an opportunity notmerely to save his life, but also to save his faith in hisown gods.”20 On another level, the myth of the ap-parition served as a symbolic testimony that the Indian, as much as the Spaniard, was capable ofbeing saved, capable of receiving Christianity. Thismust be understood against the background of thebitter theological and political argument which fol-lowed the Conquest and divided churchmen, offi-cials, and conquerors into those who held that the In-dian was incapable of conversion, thus inhuman,and therefore a fit subject of political and economicexploitation; and those who held that the Indian washuman, capable of conversion and that this exploita-tion had to be tempered by the demands of theCatholic faith and of orderly civil processes of gov-ernment.21 The myth of the Guadalupe thus vali-dates the Indian’s right to legal defense, orderly gov-ernment, to citizenship; to supernatural salvation,but also to salvation from random oppression.

But if the Guadalupe guaranteed a rightful placeto the Indians in the new social system of New Spain,the myth also held appeal to the large group of dis-inherited who arose in New Spain as illegitimate off-spring of Spanish fathers and Indian mothers, orthrough impoverishment, acculturation or loss ofstatus within the Indian or Spanish group.22 For suchpeople, there was for a long time no proper place inthe social order. Their very right to exist was ques-tioned in their inability to command the full rights ofcitizenship and legal protection. Where Spaniardand Indian stood squarely within the law, they

inhabited the interstices and margins of constitutedsociety. These groups acquired influence and wealthin the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, butwere yet barred from social recognition and powerby the prevailing economic, social and politicalorder.23 To them, the Guadalupe myth came to repre-sent not merely the guarantee of their assured placein heaven, but the guarantee of their place in societyhere and now. On the political plane, the wish for areturn to a paradise of early satisfactions of food andwarmth, a life without defeat, sickness or death,gave rise to a political wish for a Mexican paradise,in which the illegitimate sons would possess thecountry, and the irresponsible Spanish overlords,who never acknowledged the social responsibilitiesof their paternity, would be driven from the land.

In the writings of seventeenth century ecclesias-tics, the Guadalupe becomes the harbinger of thisnew order. In the book by Miguel Sánchez, pub-lished in 1648, the Spanish Conquest of New Spain isjustified solely on the grounds that it allowed theVirgin to become manifest in her chosen country, andto found in Mexico a new paradise. Just as Israel hadbeen chosen to produce Christ, so Mexico had beenchosen to produce Guadalupe. Sánchez equates herwith the apocalyptic woman of the Revelation ofJohn (12: 1), “arrayed with the sun, and the moonunder her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelvestars” who is to realize the prophecy of Deuteron-omy 8: 7-10 and lead the Mexicans into the PromisedLand. Colonial Mexico thus becomes the desert ofSinai; Independent Mexico the land of milk andhoney. F. Francisco de Florencia, writing in 1688,coined the slogan which made Mexico not merelyanother chosen nation, but the Chosen Nation: nonfecit taliter omni nationi,24 words which still adorn theportals of the basilica, and shine forth in electric lightbulbs at night. And on the eve of Mexican indepen-dence, Servando Teresa de Mier elaborates still fur-ther the Guadalupan myth by claiming that Mexicohad been converted to Christianity long before theSpanish Conquest. The apostle Saint Thomas hadbrought the image of Guadalupe-Tonantzin to theNew World as a symbol of his mission, just as SaintJames had converted Spain with the image of theVirgin of the Pillar. The Spanish Conquest was there-fore historically unnecessary, and should be erasedfrom the annals of history.25 In this perspective, theMexican War of Independence marks the final





WOLF • THE VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE: A MEXICAN NATIONAL SYMBOL | 71

realization of the apocalyptic promise. The banner ofthe Guadalupe leads the insurgents; and their causeis referred to as “her law.”26 In this ultimate exten-sion of the symbol, the promise of life held out by thesupernatural mother has become the promise of anindependent Mexico, liberated from the irrationalauthority of the Spanish father-oppressors and re-stored to the Chosen Nation whose election had beenmanifest in the apparition of the Virgin on Tepeyac.The land of the supernatural mother is finally pos-sessed by her rightful heirs. The symbolic circuit isclosed. Mother; food, hope, health, life; supernatural

salvation and salvation from oppression; ChosenPeople and national independence—all find expres-sion in a single master symbol.

The Guadalupe symbol thus links together fam-ily, politics and religion; colonial past and indepen-dent present; Indian and Mexican. It reflects thesalient social relationships of Mexican life, and em-bodies the emotions which they generate. It providesa cultural idiom through which the tenor and emo-tions of these relationships can be expressed. It is, ul-timately, a way of talking about Mexico: a “collectiverepresentation” of Mexican society.




A taboo (sometimes spelled tabu) is a ban or prohibi-tion; the word comes from the Polynesian languageswhere it means a religious restriction, to break whichwould entail some automatic punishment. As it isused in English, taboo has little to do with religion.In essence it generally implies a rule which has nomeaning, or one which cannot be explained. CaptainCook noted in his log-book that in Tahiti the womenwere never allowed to eat with the men, and as themen nevertheless enjoyed female company he askedthe reason for this taboo. They always replied thatthey observed it because it was right. To the outsiderthe taboo is irrational, to the believer its rightnessneeds no explaining. Though supernatural punish-ments may not be expected to follow, the rules of anyreligion rate as taboos to outsiders. For example, thestrict Jewish observance forbids the faithful to makeand refuel the fire, or light lamps or put them out

during the Sabbath, and it also forbids them to ask aGentile to perform any of these acts. In his book ASoho Address, Chaim Lewis, the son of poor RussianJewish immigrants in London’s Soho at the begin-ning of this century, describes his father’s quandaryevery winter Sabbath: he did not want to let the firego out and he could not ask any favor outright.Somehow he had to call in a passerby and dropoblique hints until the stranger understood what ser-vice was required. Taboos always tend to land theirobservers in just such a ridiculous situation, whetherit is a Catholic peasant of the Landes who abstainsfrom meat on Friday, but eats teal (a bird whose fishydiet entitles it in their custom to be counted as fish),or a Maori hairdresser who after he had cut thechief’s hair was not allowed to use his own handseven for feeding himself and had to be fed for a timelike a baby.

In the last century, when the word gained cur-rency in European languages, taboo was understoodto arise from an inferior mentality. It was argued thatprimitive tribes observed countless taboos as part oftheir general ignorance about the physical world.These rules, which seemed so peculiar to Europeans,

10

TabooMary Douglas

To an outside observer, a taboo or religious prohibition might seem irrational; to the believer, it sim-ply seems right. Identifying where that sense of rightness comes from, and why it is so important, isMary Douglas’s task in the following article. Douglas’s functional analysis of taboos shows that theyunderpin social structure everywhere. Anthropologists, studying taboos over extensive periods oftime, have learned that taboo systems are not static and forever inviolate; on the contrary, they aredynamic elements of learned behavior that each generation absorbs. Taboos, as rules of behavior, arealways part of a whole system and cannot be understood outside their social context. Douglas’s ex-planation of taboos holds as much meaning for us in the understanding of ourselves as it does for ourunderstanding of rules of conduct in the non-Western world. Whether considering the taboos sur-rounding a Polynesian chief’s mana or the changing sexual taboos in the Western world, it is ap-parent that taboo systems maintain cultural systems.

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“Taboo” by Mary Douglas reprinted from Richard Cavendish,ed., MAN, MYTH, AND MAGIC (London, 1979), vol. 20, pp.2767–71, by permission of the author and BPCC/PhoebusPublishing.




were the result of false science, leading to mistakenhygiene, and faulty medicine. Essentially the taboois a ban on touching or eating or speaking or seeing.Its breach will unleash dangers, while keeping therules would amount to avoiding dangers and sick-ness. Since the native theory of taboo was concernedto keep certain classes of people and things apart lestmisfortune befall, it was a theory about contagion.Our scholars of the last century contrasted this false,primitive fear of contagion with our modern knowl-edge of disease. Our hygiene protects from a realdanger of contagion, their taboos from imaginarydanger. This was a comfortably complacent distinc-tion to draw, but hygiene does not correspond to allthe rules which are called taboo. Some are as obvi-ously part of primitive religion in the same sense asFriday abstinence and Sabbath rest. European schol-ars therefore took care to distinguish on the onehand between primitive taboo with a mainly secularreference, and on the other hand rules of magicwhich infused the practice of primitive religion.They made it even more difficult to understand themeaning of foreign taboos by importing a classifica-tion between true religion and primitive magic, andmodern medicine and primitive hygiene; and a verycomplicated web of definitions was based on thismisconception.

In the Eye of the Beholder

The difficulty in understanding primitive taboo arosefrom the difficulty of understanding our own taboosof hygiene and religion. The first mistake was to sup-pose that our idea of dirt connotes an objectively realclass from which real dangers to health may issue,and whose control depends on valid rules of hygiene.It is better to start by realizing that dirt, like beauty,resides in the eye of the beholder. We must be pre-pared to put our own behavior under the same mi-croscope we apply to primitive tribes. If we find thatthey are busy hedging off this area from that, stop-ping X from touching Y, preventing women from eat-ing with men, and creating elaborate scales of edibil-ity and inedibility among the vegetable and animalworlds, we should realize that we too are given to thisordering and classifying activity. No taboo can evermake sense by itself. A taboo is always part of a wholesystem of rules. It makes sense as part of a classifica-tion whose meaning is so basic to those who live by it

that no piecemeal explanation can be given. A nativecannot explain the meaning of a taboo because itforms part of his own machinery of learning. The sep-arate compartments which a taboo system constructsare the framework or instrument of understanding.To turn around and inspect that instrument mayseem to be an advanced philosophic exercise, but it isnecessary if we are to understand the subject.

The nineteenth-century scholars could not under-stand taboo because they worked within the separatecompartments of their own taboo system. For themreligion, magic, hygiene, and medicine were as dis-tinct as civilized and primitive; the problem of taboofor them was only a problem about native thought.But put in that form it was insoluble. We approach itnowadays as a problem in human learning.

First, discard the idea that we have anything like atrue, complete view of the world. Between what thescientists know and what we make of their knowl-edge there is a synthesis which is our own rough-and-ready approximation of rules about how weneed to behave in the physical world. Second, discardthe idea that there can ever be a final and correctworld view. A gain in knowledge in one directiondoes not guarantee there will be no loss or distortionin another; the fullness of reality will always evadeour comprehension. The reasons for this will becomeclear. Learning is a filtering and organizing process.Faced with the same events, two people will notnecessarily register two identical patterns, and facedwith a similar environment, two cultures will con-strue two different sets of natural constraints andregular sequences. Understanding is largely a classi-fying job in which the classifying human mind ismuch freer than it supposes itself to be. The events tobe understood are unconsciously trimmed and fil-tered to fit the classification being used. In this senseevery culture constructs its own universe. It attrib-utes to its own world a set of powers to be harnessedand dangers to be avoided. Each primitive culture,because of its isolation, has a unique world view.Modern industrial nations, because and insofar asthey share a common experience, share the samerules about the powers and dangers aroused. This isa valid difference between “Us” and “Them,” theirprimitive taboos and ours.

For all humans, primitive or not, the universe is asystem of imputed rules. Using our own distinctions,we can distinguish firstly, physical Nature, inorganic

DOUGLAS • TABOO | 73




(including rocks, stars, rivers) and organic (vegetableand animal bodies, with rules governing their growth,lifespan and death); secondly, human behavior;thirdly, the interaction between these two groups;fourthly, other intelligent beings whether incorporeallike gods, devils and ghosts or mixtures of humanand divine or human and animal; and lastly, the in-teraction between this fourth group and the rest.

The use of the word supernatural has beenavoided. Even a small amount of reading in anthro-pology shows how very local and peculiar to ourown civilization is the distinction between naturaland supernatural. The same applies even to such aclassification as the one just given. The fact that it isour own local classification is not important for thisargument as the present object is to make clear howtaboos should be understood. Taboos are rules aboutour behavior which restrict the human uses of thingsand people. Some of the taboos are said to avoidpunishment or vengeance from gods, ghosts andother spirits. Some of them are supposed to produceautomatically their dreaded effects. Crop failures,sickness, hunting accidents, famine, drought, epi-demic (events in the physical realm), they may allresult from breach of taboos.

The Seat of Mana

Taboos can have the effect of expressing politicalideas. For example, the idea of the state as a hierar-chy of which the chief is the undisputed head and hisofficials higher than the ordinary populace easilylends itself to taboo behavior. Gradings of power inthe political body tend to be expressed as gradings offreedom to approach the physical body of the personat the top of the system. As Franz Steiner says, inTaboo (1956):

In Polynesian belief the parts of the body formed afixed hierarchy which had some analogy with therank system of society. . . . Now the backbone wasthe most important part of the body, and the limbsthat could be regarded as continuations of thebackbone derived importance from it. Above thebody was, of course, the head, and it was the seat ofmana. When we say this, we must realize that by“mana” are meant both the soul aspect, the lifeforce, and a man’s ritual status. This grading of thelimbs concerned people of all ranks and both sexes.It could, for example, be so important to avoid

stepping over people’s heads that the veryarchitecture was involved: the arrangements of thesleeping rooms show such an adaptation in theMarquesas. The commoner’s back or head is thusnot without its importance in certain contexts. Butthe real significance of this grading seems to havebeen in the possibilities it provided for cumulativeeffects in association with the rank system. Thehead of a chief was the most concentrated manaobject of Polynesian society, and was hedged aroundwith the most terrifying taboos which operatedwhen things were to enter the head or when thehead was being diminished; in other words whenthe chief ate or had his hair cut. . . . The hands ofsome great chiefs were so dangerous that theycould not be put close to the head.

Since the Polynesian political systems was very com-petitive and chiefs had their ups and downs, greattriumphs or total failures, the system of taboo was akind of public vote of confidence and register of cur-rent distributions of power. This is important to cor-rect our tendency to think of taboo as a rigidly fixedsystem of respect.

We will never understand a taboo system unlesswe understand the kind of interaction between thedifferent spheres of existence which is assumed in it.Any child growing up learns the different spheresand interactions between them simultaneously.When the anthropologist arrives on the scene, hefinds the system of knowledge a going concern. It isdifficult for him to observe the changes being made,so he gets the wrong impression that a given set oftaboos is something hard-and-fast handed down thegenerations.

In fact, the classifying process is always active andchanging. New classifications are being pushed bysome and rejected by others. No political innovationtakes place without some basic reclassification. Totake a currently live issue, in a stratified society, if itis taboo for lower classes or Negroes to sit down attable or to join sporting events with upper classes orwhites, those who assert the rule can make it strongerif they find a basis in Nature to support the behaviorthey regard as right. If women in Tahiti are forbiddento eat with men, or in Europe to enter certain maleoccupations, some ultimate justification for the ruleneeds to be found. Usually it is traced back to theirphysical nature. Women are said to be constitution-ally feeble, nervous or flighty; Negroes to smell;lower classes to be hereditarily less intelligent.





DOUGLAS • TABOO | 75

Rules of the Game

Perhaps the easiest approach is to try to imaginewhat social life would be like without any classifica-tion. It would be like playing a game without anyrules; no one would know which way to run, who ison his side or against him. There would be no game.It is no exaggeration to describe social life as theprocess of building classification systems. Everyoneis trying to make sense of what is happening. He istrying to make sense of his own behavior, past andpresent, so as to capture and hold some sense ofidentity. He is trying to hold other people to theirpromises and ensure some kind of regular future. Heis explaining continually, to himself and to everyoneelse. In the process of explaining, classifications aredeveloped and more and more meanings success-fully added to them, as other people are persuadedto interpret events in the same way. Gradually eventhe points of the compass get loaded with socialmeanings. For example, the west room in an Irishfarmer’s house used to be the room where the oldcouple retired to, when the eldest son married andbrought his wife to the farm. West meant retirementas well as sundown. In the Buddhist religion, east isthe high status point; Buddha’s statue is on a shelf onthe east wall of the east room; the husband alwayssleeps to the east of his wife. So east means male andsocial superior. Up and down, right and left, sun andmoon, hot and cold, all the physical antitheses areable to carry meanings from social life, and in arich and steady culture there is a steady core of suchagreed classifications. Anyone who is prepared tosupport the social system finds himself impelledto uphold the classification system which gets mean-ing from it. Anyone who wants to challenge the so-cial system finds himself up against a set of manifoldclassifications which will have to be rethought. Thisis why breach of taboo arouses such strong feeling. Itis not because the minor classification is threatened,but because the whole social system (in which agreat investment has been made) looks like tottering,if someone can get away with challenging a taboo.

Classification involves definition; definitioninvolves reducing ambiguity; ambiguity arises inseveral ways and it is wrong to think it can ever beexcluded. To take the classification of animal species,they can be classified according to their obvious fea-tures, and according to the habitat they live in, and

according to how they behave. This gives three waysof classifying animals which could each place thesame beasts in different classes. Classed by behavior,using walking, swimming or flying as basic types,penguins would be nearer to fish; classed by bonestructure and egg laying, penguins would countmore clearly as birds than would flying fish, whichwould be birds in the other classification. Animal lifeis much more untidy and difficult to fit into a regularsystem of classification than at first appears. Humansocial life is even more untidy. Girls behave like boys,there are adults who refuse to grow up, every year afew are born whose physical make-up is not clearlymale or female. The rules of marriage and inheritancerequire clear-cut categories but always there will besome cases which do not fit the regularities of the sys-tem. For human classifications are always too crudefor reality. A system of taboos covers up this weak-ness of the classification system. It points in advanceto defects and insists that no one shall give recogni-tion to the inconvenient facts or behave in such a wayas to undermine the acceptability and clarity of thesystem as a whole. It stops awkward questions andprevents awkward developments.

Sometimes the taboo ban appears in ways thatseem a long way from their point of origin. For exam-ple, among the Lele tribe, in the Kasai district of theCongo, it was taboo to bring fishing equipment directinto the village from the streams or lakes where it hadbeen in use. All round the village fishing traps andbaskets would be hung in trees overnight. Ask theLele why they did this and they replied that coughsand disease would enter the village if the fishingthings were not left out one night. No other answercould be got from them except elaboration of the dan-ger and how sorcerers could enter the village if thisbarrier were not kept up. But another kind of answerlay in the mass of other rules and regulations whichseparated the village and its human social life fromthe forest and streams and animal life. This was thebasic classification at stake; one which never neededto be explained because it was too fundamental tomention.

Injecting Order into Life

The novelist William Burroughs describes the finalexperiences of disgust and depression of some formsof drug addiction. What he calls the “Naked Lunch”




is the point where all illusions are stripped away andevery thing is seen as it really is. When everyone cansee what is on everyone’s fork, nothing is classed asedible. Meat can be animal or human flesh, caterpil-lars, worms, or bugs; soup is equally urine, lentils,scotch broth, or excreta; other people are neitherfriends nor enemies, nor is oneself different fromother people since neither has any very clear defini-tion. Identities and classifications are merged into aseething, shapeless experience. This is the potentialdisorder of the mind which taboo breaks up intoclasses and rules and so judges some activities asright and proper and others as horrifying.

This kind of rationality is the justification for thetaboos which we ourselves observe when we sepa-rate the lavatory from the living room and the bedfrom the kitchen, injecting order into the house. Butthe order is not arbitrary; it derives from social cate-gories. When a set of social distinctions weakens, thetaboos that expressed it weaken too. For this reasonsex taboos used to be sacred in England but are nolonger so strong. It seems ridiculous that womenshould not be allowed in some clubs or professions,whereas not so long ago it seemed obviously right.The same for the sense of privacy, the same forhierarchy. The less we ourselves are forced to adoptunthinking taboo attitudes to breaches of theseboundaries, the easier it becomes to look dispassion-ately at the taboos of other societies and find plentyof meaning in them.

In some tribal societies it is thought that the shed-ding of blood will cause droughts and other environ-mental disasters. Elsewhere any contact with deathis dangerously polluting, and burials are followedby elaborate washing and fumigation. In otherplaces they fear neither homicide nor death pollu-tion but menstrual blood is thought to be very dan-

gerous to touch. And in other places again, adulteryis liable to cause illness. Some people are thicklybeset with taboos so that everything they do ischarged with social symbolism. Others observe onlyone or two rules. Those who are most taboo-mindedhave the most complex set of social boundaries topreserve. Hence their investment of so much energyinto the control of behavior.

A taboo system upholds a cultural system and aculture is a pattern of values and norms; social lifeis impossible without such a pattern. This is thedilemma of individual freedom. Ideally we wouldlike to feel free to make every choice from scratchand judge each case on its merits. Such a freedomwould slow us down, for every choice would have tobe consciously deliberated. On the one hand, educa-tion tries to equip a person with means for exercisingprivate judgment, and on the other hand, the tech-niques of education provide a kind of mechanicaldecision-making, along well-oiled grooves. Theyteach strong reactions of anxiety about anythingwhich threatens to go off the track. As educationtransmits culture, taboos and all, it is a kind of brain-washing. It only allows a certain way of seeing real-ity and so limits the scope for private judgment.Without the taboos, which turn basic classificationsinto automatic psychological reflexes, no thinkingcould be effective, because if every system of classifi-cation was up for revision at every moment, therewould be no stability of thought. Hence there wouldbe no scope for experience to accumulate into knowl-edge. Taboos bar the way for the mind to visualizereality differently. But the barriers they set up are notarbitrary, for taboos flow from social boundaries andsupport the social structure. This accounts for theirseeming irrational to the outsider and beyond chal-lenge to the person living in the society.





77

And he [Jesus] said unto them, Go ye into all theworld, and preach the gospel to every creature.He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved;but he that believeth not shall be damned. Andthese signs shall follow them that believe; In myname shall they cast out devils; they shall speakwith new tongues; they shall take up serpents;and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall nothurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, andthey shall recover.

—Mark 16:15–18 (AV)

The serpent-handlers of West Virginia were originallysimple, poor, white people who formed a group ofsmall, independent Holiness-type churches. Serpent-handlers base their particular religious practices onthe familiar passage from the “long-conclusion” of theGospel of Mark. (They are unaware of the disputednature of this text as the biblical scholars know it.)

The handling of serpents as a supreme act of faithreflects, as in a mirror, the danger and harshness ofthe environment in which most of these people havelived. The land is rugged and uncompromisinglygrim. It produces little except for coal dug from theearth. Unemployment and welfare have been con-stant companions. The dark holes of the deep minesinto which men went to work every day havemaimed and killed them for years. The copperheadand rattlesnake are the most commonly found ser-pents in the rocky terrain. For many years mountainpeople have suffered terrible pain and many havedied from snake bite. Small wonder that it is consid-ered the ultimate fact of faith to reach out and takeup the serpent when one is filled with the HolyGhost. Old timers here in the mountains, before thedays of modern medicine, could only explain thatthose who lived were somehow chosen by God’sspecial mercy and favor.

Today serpent-handlers are experiencing, as areother West Virginians, great economic improvement.Many now live in expensive mobile homes that dotthe mountain countryside. They purchase and own

11

Serpent-Handling as SacramentMary Lee Daugherty

Raised in West Virginia, author Mary Lee Daugherty was a clergywoman, theologian, and scholarwho devoted herself to the study of religion in Appalachia until her death in 2004. In her films andwritings about small Holiness/Pentecostal churches in the region, she maintains that the handlingof snakes as a religious act reflects the social and economic challenges of the community. HereDaugherty argues that snake handling is similar to other Christian rituals, such as communion. Re-ligious behavior that includes the handling of poisonous snakes and the drinking of such poisons asstrychnine and lye has met with legal opposition in the United States. Several states specifically out-law the handling of poisonous snakes in religious settings; West Virginia is not among them.

Other works on snake handling and Holiness churches include Thomas Burton’s Serpent-Handling Believers (University of Tennessee Press, 1993), Dennis Covington’s Salvation onSand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia (Addison-Wesley,1995), and the anthropological classic by Weston La Barre, They Shall Take Up Serpents:Psychology of the Southern Snake-Handling Cult (University of Minnesota Press, 1962).

“Serpent-Handling as Sacrament” by Mary Lee Daughertyfrom THEOLOGY TODAY, Vol. 33, No. 3, October 1976,pp. 232–243. Reprinted by permission of Theology Today.




among their possessions brand new cars and mod-ern appliances. Many of the men now earn fromtwelve to eighteen thousand dollars a year, workingin the revitalized mining industry. Most of the youngpeople are now going to and graduating from highschool. I know of one young man with two years ofcollege who is very active in his church. He handlesserpents and is looked upon as the one who will takeover the pastor’s position sometime in the future.What the effect of middle-class prosperity andhigher education will be among serpent-handlersremains to be seen. It may be another generationbefore the effects can be adequately determined.

Knowing serpent-handlers to be biblical literalists,one might surmise that they, like other sects, havepicked a certain passage of Scripture and built awhole ritual around a few cryptic verses. While thisis true, I am persuaded, after years of observation,that serpent-handling holds for them the signifi-cance of a sacrament.

Tapestry paintings of the Lord’s Supper hang inmost of their churches. Leonardo da Vinci’s LastSupper is the one picture I have seen over and overagain in their churches and in their homes. But inWest Virginia, the serpent-handlers whom I knowpersonally do not celebrate the Lord’s Supper in theirworship services. It is my observation and hypothesisthat the ritual of serpent-handling is their way of cel-ebrating life, death, and resurrection. Time and againthey prove to themselves that Jesus has the power todeliver them from death here and now.

Another clue to the sacramental nature of liftingup the serpents as the symbol of victory over death isto be observed at their funerals. At the request of thefamily of one who has died of snake bite, serpentsmay be handled at a funeral. Even as a Catholicpriest may lift up the host at a mass for the dead, in-dicating belief that in the life and death of Jesus thereis victory over death, so the serpent-handlers, I be-lieve, lift up the serpent. Of course, none of this isformalized, for all is very spontaneous. But I am con-vinced that they celebrate their belief that “in thename of Jesus” there is power over death, and this iswhat the serpent-handling ritual has proved to themover and over again. This is why I believe they willnot give up this ritual because it is at the center oftheir Christian faith, and in West Virginia, unlike allthe other States, it is not illegal.

Many handlers have been bitten numerous times,but, contrary to popular belief, few have died. Theircontinued life, and their sometimes deformed hands,bear witness to the fact that Jesus still has power overillness and death. Even those who have not been bit-ten know many who have, and the living witness isever present in the lives of their friends. If one of themembers should die, it is believed that God allowed itto happen to remind the living that the risk they takeis totally real. Never have I heard any one of them saythat a brother or sister who died lacked faith.

The cultural isolation of these people is still veryreal. Few have traveled more than a few miles fromhome. Little more than the Bible is ever read. Televi-sion is frowned upon; movies are seldom attended.The Bible is communicated primarily through oraltradition in the church or read at home. There is littleawareness of other world religions. Even contactswith Roman Catholics and Jews are rare. Most of theirlives revolve around the local church where theygather for meetings two or three times a week.

When one sees the people handling serpents intheir services, the Garden of Eden story immediatelycomes to mind. In the Genesis story, the serpent repre-sents evil that tempts Adam and Eve and must be con-quered by their descendants. But the serpent meanssomethingfardifferent toWestVirginiamountainpeo-ple; itmeans lifeoverdeath.There isneveranyattemptto kill the snake in Appalachian serpent-handlingservices. Practitioners seldom kill snakes even in theout of doors. They let them go at the end of the summermonths so that they may return to their natural envi-ronment to hibernate for the winter. They catch differ-ent snakes each spring to use in their worship services.When you ask them why, they tell you quite simplythat they do not want to make any of God’s creaturessuffer. The serpent is always handled with both loveand fear in their services, but it is never harmed orkilled. Handlers may be killed from bites, but they willnot kill the snake. Neither do they force the handling ofserpents on any who do not wish to do so.

The snake is seldom handled in private, but usu-ally in the community of believers during a churchservice. Members may encourage each other to takethe risk, symbolically taking on life and testing faith.Their willingness to die for their beliefs gives to theirlives a vitality of faith. Handlers usually refuse med-icine or hospital treatment for snake bite. But they dogo to hospital for other illnesses or if surgery is





DAUGHERTY • SERPENT-HANDLING AS SACRAMENT | 79

needed. In the past, they usually refused welfare.They revere and care for their elderly who have usu-ally survived numerous snake bites. Each time theyhandle the serpents they struggle with life once moreand survive again the forces that traditionally op-pressed mountain people. The poverty, the unem-ployment, the yawning strip mines, death in thedeep mines have all been harsh, uncontrollableforces for simple people. The handling of serpents istheir way of confronting and coping with their veryreal fears about life and the harshness of reality asexperienced in the mountains in years gone by and,for many, even today.

Yet in the face of all this, they seek to live in har-mony with nature, not to destroy it or any of its crea-tures, even the deadly serpent. It is only with theHoly Ghost, however, that they find the sustenanceto survive. They live close to the earth, surroundedby woods, streams, and sky. Most live in communi-ties of only a few hundred people or less.

The deep longing for holiness of these Appalachianpeople stands out in bold relief in the serpent-handling ritual of worship. The search for holiness isdramatized in their willingness to suffer terrible painfrom snake bite, or even death itself, to get the feel-ing of God in their lives. The support of their fellowChristians is still with them. In their experience, Godmay not come if you don’t really pray or ask onlyonce. The person in the group who has been bittenmost often and who has suffered the most pain orsickness is usually the leader. While it is the HolyGhost who gives the power, those who have sur-vived snake bite do get recognition and praise fortheir courage and their faith from the group. Theyhave learned to cope with their anxieties by callingupon the names of Jesus and the power which hefreely offers. Support is given to each memberthrough the laying on of hands in healing cere-monies, through group prayers, and through verbalaffirmations, such as: “Help her Jesus,” “Bless him,Lord,” “That’s right, Lord.” Through group support,anxiety about life is relieved. They feel ennobled asGod becomes manifest in their midst.

The person of the Holy Ghost (they prefer this toHoly Spirit) enables them not only to pick up ser-pents, but to speak in tongues, to preach, to testify, tocure diseases, to cast out demons, and even to drinkstrychnine and lye, or to use fire on their skin when

the snakes are in hibernation during the wintermonths. In these dramatic ways, the mountain folkpursue holiness above all else. They find throughtheir faith both meaning and encouragement. Psy-chological tests indicate that in many ways they aremore emotionally healthy than members of mainlineProtestant churches.

Having internalized my own feelings of insecurityand worthlessness for many years because I was “nocount” having been born from poor white trash onone side of my family, I have in my own being a deepappreciation and understanding of the need of thesepeople to ask God for miracles accompanied withspectacular demonstrations. Thus they are assured oftheir own worth, even if only to God. They have nevergotten this message from the outside world. Theyknow they have been, and many still are, the undesir-able poor, the uneducated mountain folk, locked intotheir little pockets of poverty in a rough, hostile land.So the Holy Ghost is the great equalizer in the churchmeeting. One’s age, sex, years of schooling are all ofless value. Being filled with the Holy Ghost is the onlycredential one needs in this unique society.

The Holy Ghost creates a mood of openness and spon-taneity in the serpent-handling service that is beauti-ful to behold. Even though there is not much freedomin the personal lives of these people, there is a sense ofpower in their church lives. Their religion does seemto heal them inwardly of aches and pains and in manyinstances even of major illnesses. One often sees ex-pressions of dependence as men and women falldown before the picture of Jesus, calling aloud overand over again, “Jesus . . . Jesus . . . Jesus . . .” Thesimple carpenter of Nazareth is obviously a personwith whom mountain people can identify. Jesusworked with his hands, and so do they; Jesus was es-sentially, by our standards, uneducated, and so arethey; Jesus came from a small place, he lived much ofhis life out of doors, he went fishing, he suffered andwas finally done in by the “power structure,” and sohave they been in the past and often are today.

As I think about the mountain women as they falldown before the picture of Jesus, I wonder what hemeans to them. Here is a simple man who treatedwomen with great love and tenderness. In this sense,he is unlike some of the men they must live with.Jesus healed the bodies of women, taught them theBible, never told jokes about their bodies, and even




forgave them their sexual sins. In the mountains,adultery is usually punished with beatings. Maybe itshould not surprise us that in a State where the stripminers have raped the earth that the rape of the peo-ple has also taken place, and the rape of women isoften deeply felt and experienced. Things are nowchanging, and for this we can be grateful.

In the serpent-handlers’ churches, the Bible usuallyremains closed on the pulpit. Since most older mem-bers cannot read very well and have usually felt shyabout their meager education, they did not read theBible aloud in public, especially if some moreeducated people were present. They obviously readthe Bible at home, but most remember it from storiesthey have heard. The Bible is the final authorityfor everything, even the picking up of serpents andthe drinking of poison. It is all literally true, but theNew Testament is read more often than the OldTestament.

In former years, their churches have given thesepoor and powerless people the arena in which theycould act out their frustrations and powerless feel-ings. For a short time, while in church, they couldexperience being powerful when filled with the HolyGhost. Frustrated by all the things in the outsideworld that they could not change, frustrated by theway the powerful people of the world were runningthings, they could nevertheless run their own showin their own churches. So they gathered three or fourtimes a week, in their modest church buildings, andthey stayed for three to five hours for each service.On these occasions, they can feel important, loved,and powerful. They can experience God directly.

I am always struck by the healing love thatemerges at the end of each service when they all seemto love each other, embrace each other, and give eachother the holy kiss. They are free from restrictionsand conventions to love everyone. Sometimes I havethe feeling that I get a glimmer of what the Kingdomof God will be like as we kiss each other, old andyoung, with or without teeth, rich and poor, educatedand uneducated, male and female. So I have learnedmuch and have been loved in turn by the serpent-handlers of West Virginia. As they leave the churchand go back to their daily work, all the frustrations ofthe real world return, but they know they can meetagain tomorrow night or in a few days. So they havefaith, hope, and love, but the greatest message theyhave given to me is their love.

There are thousands of small Holiness churches inthe rural areas of West Virginia. While four-fifths ofall Protestants are members of mainstream denomi-nations, no one knows just how many attend Holi-ness churches. Membership records are not consid-ered important to these people, and although Ipersonally know of about twenty-five serpent-handling churches, there may be others, for those inone church often do not know those in another. Theylaugh and make jokes about churches that give you apiece of paper as you enter the door, telling youwhen to pray and what to sing. They find it difficultto believe that you can “order around” the worshipof the Holy Ghost on a piece of paper.

Those who make up the membership of theserpent-handling churches are often former membersof other Holiness churches or are former Baptists orMethodists. In the Holiness churches, the attainmentof personal holiness and being filled with the Spirit isthe purpose and goal of life. Members view the secu-lar world as evil and beyond hope. Hence they donot take part in any community activities or socialprograms.

Fifty-four percent of all persons in the state of WestVirginia still live in communities of 1,000 people orless. Freedom of worship is the heritage of the Scotch-Irish, who settled these mountains 200 years ago. Inmore recent times, among Holiness groups there wereno trained ministers. So oral tradition, spontaneousworship, and shared leadership are important.

Holiness church members live by a very strict per-sonal code of morality. A large sign in the church atJolo, W. Va., indicates that dresses must be wornbelow the knees, arms must be covered, no lipstick orjewelry is to be worn. No smoking, drinking, or otherworldly pleasures are to be indulged in by “true be-lievers.” Some women do not cut their hair, others donot even buy chewing gum or soft drinks. For years, inthe mountains, people have practiced divine healing,since medical facilities are scarce. Four counties inWest Virginia still do not have a doctor, nurse, clinic,dentist, or ambulance service.

In a typical serpent-handling church service, the“true believers” usually sit on the platform of thechurch together. They are the members who havedemonstrated that they have received the HolyGhost. This is known to them and to others becausethey have manifested certain physical signs in theirown bodies. If they have been bitten from snakes, asmany have, and have not died, they have proved





DAUGHERTY • SERPENT-HANDLING AS SACRAMENT | 81

that they have the Holy Ghost. And those who havebeen bitten many times, and survived, are the “realsaints.” The “true believers” also demonstrate thatthey have the Holy Ghost by speaking in tongues,by the jerking of their bodies, and by their varioustrance-like states. They may dance for long periodsof time or fall on the floor without being hurt. Theymay drink the “salvation cocktail,” a mixture ofstrychnine or lye and water. They may also speak intongues or in ecstatic utterances. Usually this is anutterance between themselves and God. But some-times members seek to interpret the language oftongues. They lay their hands upon each other toheal hurts or even serious illnesses such as cancer.They sometimes pass their hands through fire. I havewitnessed this activity and no burn effects are visi-ble, even though a hand may remain in the flame forsome time. A few years ago, they picked up hot coalsfrom the pot bellied stoves and yet were not burned.They apparently can block out pain totally, when in atrance or deep into the Spirit of God.

One woman who attended church at ScrabbleCreek, W. Va., experienced, on two occasions, thestigmata as blood came out of her hands, feet,side and forehead. This was witnessed by all pre-sent in the church. When asked about this startlingexperience, she said that she had prayed that Godwould allow people to see though her body howmuch Jesus suffered for them by his death andresurrection.

A local church in the rural areas may be known as“Brother So and So’s” or “Sister So and So’s” churchto those who live nearby, but the sign over the doorwill usually indicate that the church belongs to Jesus.Such names as “The Jesus Church,” “The Jesus OnlyChurch,” “The Jesus Saves Church,” and “The LordJesus Christ’s Church” are all common names. Thechurches do not belong to any denomination, andthey have no written doctrines or creeds. The orderof the service is spontaneous and different everynight. Everyone is welcome and people travelaround to each other’s churches, bringing with themtheir musical instruments, snakes, fire equipment,poison mixtures, and other gifts.

Often the service begins with singing which maylast thirty to forty-five minutes. Next, they may allpray out loud together for the Holy Ghost to fallupon them during the service. Singing, testifying,and preaching by anyone who feels God’s spirit mayfollow. Serpents then will be handled while others

are singing. It is possible that serpents will be han-dled two or three times in one service, but usually itis only once. Serpents are only handled when theyfeel God’s spirit within them. After dancing ecstati-cally, a brother or sister will open the box and pullout a serpent. Others will follow if there are othersnakes available. If only one or two serpents are pres-ent, then they may be passed around from believerto believer. Sometimes a circle may be made and thesnakes passed. I have only once seen them throwsnakes to each other. Children are kept far away.

There is much calling on the name of Jesus whilethe serpents are being handled, and once the “sacra-ment” is over, there is a great prayer of rejoicing andoften a dance of thanksgiving that no one was hurt.If someone is bitten, there is prayer for his or herhealing and great care is taken. If the person becomestoo ill to stay in the church, he or she may be takenhome and believers will pray for the person for days,if necessary. Even if the person does not die, andusually he or she doesn’t, the person is usuallyvery sick. Vomiting of blood and swelling are verypainful. Some persons in the churches have lost theuse of a finger or suffered some other deformity. Butin many years of serpent-handling, I believe thereare only about twenty recorded deaths.

The symbolism of the serpent is found in almost allcultures and religions, everywhere, and in all ages. Itsuggests the ambiguity of good and evil, sickness andhealth, life and death, mortality and immortality,chaos and wisdom. Because the serpent lives in theground but is often found in trees, it conveys the no-tion of transcendence, a creature that lives betweenearth and heaven. And because it sheds its skin, itseems to know the secret of eternal life.

In the Bible, the serpent is most obviously associ-ated with theAdam and Eve temptation (Gen. 3:1–13),but we also read of the sticks that Moses and Aaronturned into snakes (Ex. 7:8–12), and of Moses’ bronzeserpent standard (Num. 21:6–9). The two entwinedsnakes in the ancient figure of the caduceus, symbol-izing sickness and health, has been widely adopted asthe emblem of the medical profession. And some-times in early Christian art, the crucifixion is repre-sented with a serpent wound around the cross orlying at the foot of the cross (cf. John 3:14). Here againgood and evil, life over death, are symbolized.

In early liturgical art, John the Evangelist wasoften identified with a chalice from which a serpent





Suggested Readings

Babcock, Barbara, ed. 1978 The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

Press.

Douglas, Mary 1966 Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Praeger.1999 Leviticus as Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dundes, Alan, ed. 1984 Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press.1988 The Flood Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press

Georges, Robert A., ed. 1968 Studies on Mythology. Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press.

Holden, Lynn, ed.2000 Encyclopedia of Taboos. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO.

Lambek, Michael 1992 “Taboo as Cultural Practice Among Malagasy Speakers.” Man 27: 245–66.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1973 “On Key Symbols.” American Anthropologist 75: 1338–46.

Segal, Robert 2004 Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

was departing, a reference to the legend that when hewas forced to drink poison, it was drained away inthe snake. Among the early Gnostics, there was agroup known as Ophites who were said to worshipthe serpent because it brought “knowledge” to Adamand Eve and so to all humanity. They were said tofree a serpent from a box and that it then entwined it-self around the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

But, of course, this ancient history and symboliclore are unknown to the mountain serpent-handlersof West Virginia, and even if they were told, theyprobably would not be interested. Their own tradi-tion is rooted in their literal acceptance of what theyregard as Jesus’ commandment at the conclusion ofMark’s Gospel. The problems of biblical textual criti-cism, relating to the fact that these verses on whichthey depend are not found in the best manuscript ev-idence, does not bother them. Their Bible is the

English King James Version, and they know throughtheir own experience that their faith in the healingand saving power of Jesus has been tested andproven without question. In any case, their ritual isunique in church history.

What the future holds for the serpent-handlers,no one can tell. Although the young people havetended to stay in their local communities, the temp-tation in the past to move out and away to find workhas been very great. Now many of the young peopleare returning home as the mining industry offersnew, high-paying jobs. And a new era of relativeeconomic prosperity is emerging as the energy prob-lem makes coal-mining more important for thewhole Appalachian area. In the meantime, serpent-handling for many mountain people remains aJesus-commanded “sacrament” whereby physicalsigns communicate spiritual reality.


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CHAPTER THREE

Ritual

Ritual is of crucial significance to all human societies, and since the nineteenth century ithas been a major focus for anthropologists interested in the study of religion. There arenumerous definitions of ritual, but nearly all emphasize repetition, formality, the relianceupon symbols, and the capacity to intensify bonds within a community. Ritual is action.Anthony Wallace highlights the elevated role of ritual when he labels it the primary phe-nomenon of religion: “Ritual is religion in action; it is the cutting edge of the tool. Belief,although its recitation may be part of the ritual, or a ritual in its own right, serves to explain,to rationalize, to interpret and direct the energy of the ritual performance. . . . It is ritualwhich accomplishes what religion sets out to do” (1966: 102). While rituals encapsulateideas central to a culture and are often closely tied to myths, they are intended to bringabout specific ends.

Through ritual, religion is able to impress on people a commitment to their system ofreligious beliefs. Participants in a religious ritual are able to express group solidarity andloyalty. History abounds with examples of the importance of the individual experience inreligion, yet there is no denying the overwhelming effect of group participation. As WilliamHowells has pointed out, ritual helps individuals but does so by treating them as a wholegroup: “They are like a tangled head of hair, and ritual is the comb” (1962: 243).

Some anthropologists believe, along with Malinowski and other early functionalists, thatritual helps allay anxiety. Through the shared performance of group dances and ceremonies,humans are able to reduce the fears that often come when life’s events threaten their securityand sense of well-being. Other scholars, such as A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, have taken the oppo-site tack, claiming that ritual may actually create rather than allay anxiety and fears.

Are all rituals religious? Early anthropological theorists assumed that all ritual was sa-cred in nature, most likely because they dealt with societies in which many aspects of dailylife held sacred significance. More-contemporary writers have noted, however, the ritualnature of ceremonies and actions that do not clearly invoke spirits or deities yet still expressthe fundamental beliefs, values, and social foundations of a group. Sally F. Moore andBarbara G. Myerhoff call such actions secular rituals, highlighting their nonsacred status yet

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also drawing attention to their powerful, multifaceted meanings (1977). One example is abirthday party celebrated at a senior citizen center, as documented by Elizabeth Colson. Al-though the party was clearly secular, it transformed participants into a community honor-ing their common characteristic, age (1977).

Most introductory textbooks in anthropology divide religious ritual into rites of passageand rites of intensification. Rites of passage mark transition points in the lives of individuals—for example, birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Rites of intensification occur during acrisis for a group and are thus more important in maintaining group equilibrium and soli-darity. They are typically associated with natural phenomena, such as seasonal changes ora lack of rain, but other events, such as impending warfare, could also trigger a rite of in-tensification. Whatever precipitates the crisis, there is need of a ritual to lessen the anxietythat is felt by the group.

Although the division of rituals into this twofold scheme is useful, it does not adequatelyrepresent the variety of ritual occurring in the world’s cultures. Wallace, for example, hasoutlined five major categories of ritual (1966: 107–66):

1. Technological rituals, designed to control nature for the purpose of human exploitation,comprise three subdivisions:

a. Divination rites, which help predict the future and gain hidden information

b. Rites of intensification, designed to help obtain food and alcohol

c. Protective rites, aimed at coping with the uncertainty of nature (for example, stormyseas, floods, crop disease, and bad luck)

2. Therapy and antitherapy rituals are designed to control human health. Curative ritesexemplify therapy rituals; witchcraft and sorcery, antitherapy.

3. Ideological rituals, according to Wallace, are “intended to control, in a conservative way,the behavior, the mood, the sentiments and values of groups for the sake of thecommunity as a whole.” They consist of four subcategories:

a. Rites of passage, which deal with role change and geographic movement (forexample, marriages)

b. Rites of intensification, to ensure that people adhere to values and customs (forexample, Sunday church service)

c. Taboos (ritual avoidances), courtesies (positive actions), and other arbitraryceremonial obligations, which regulate human behavior

d. Rites of rebellion, which provide a form of “ritualized catharsis” that contributes toorder and stability by allowing people to vent their frustrations

4. Salvation rituals aim at repairing damaged self-esteem and other forms of impairedidentity. Wallace sees three common subdivisions in this category:

a. Possession, in which an individual’s identity is altered by the presence of an alienspirit that occupies the body (exorcism is the usual treatment)

b. Ritual encouragement of an individual to accept an alternate identity, a processsimilar to the ritual procedure shamans undergo upon assuming a shamanic role

c. The mystic experience—loss of personal identity by abandoning the old self andachieving salvation by identifying with a sacred being

5. Revitalization rituals are aimed at what can be described as an identity crisis of an entirecommunity. The revitalization movement may be seen as a religious movement (a ritual)that, through the help of a prophet, strives to create a better culture.



Regardless of the typological system used (and anthropologists have proposed others inaddition to Wallace’s), in practice the various types of ritual frequently overlap and maychange over time.

It is similarly difficult to pinpoint the meaning or significance of ritual, particularly forall participants. This may vary between cultures, over time, and even between individualsin a given setting. Fiona Bowie writes (2000: 154–55):

Reactions to ritual acts cannot be predetermined. Regular attendance at a place of worship,for instance, may reveal a wide range of possible individual responses to a liturgy, fromboredom, anger, and frustration to elevation, joy, the intensity of mystical communion, anda sense of unity with fellow worshipers. The individual may inwardly assent to or dissentfrom the ritual process. Commentators often stress the formulaic aspect of ritual—a ritual isnot simply a spontaneous event created by an individual on the spur of the moment. What,however, about the family burial of a pet rabbit? Spontaneous prayers and actions, andaccumulation of symbols (a flower, a memorial, a tree planted), may dignify the committalof the deceased animal.

There is no reason to assume that the multiple experiences of ritual felt by people in theindustrialized West are any less a part of ritual participation than those of people in lessdeveloped parts of the world.

Some contemporary anthropologists have found it fruitful to compare ritual to theater ordrama and to interpret ritual as a kind of cultural performance. It is intriguing to considerthe possible parallels between ritual and other forms of enactment, including prescribedphysical movements and actions, scripted communication, the use of special costumes orprops, and the demarcation of sacred space as a kind of stage. Outwardly, the similaritiesbetween ritual and theater may appear strong, but the differences become clearer if one con-siders the goals and internal experiences of participants. “Participants in ritual may be ‘act-ing,’ but they are not necessarily ‘just pretending’ ” (Ibid.: 159). Taking part in a ritual canhave consequences for participants. For example, some rites of passage deliver an individ-ual into a new stage of life, with new rights, responsibilities, and privileges.

Like other aspects of culture, ritual changes over time. In the contemporary West, thereare myriad examples of new and revised ritual traditions, including national commemora-tions intended to intensify patriotism. The African-based holiday observance Kwanzaa wasinvented in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, a professor of black studies. Originally intended asa substitute for the European-based customs of the Christmas season, Kwanzaa has grownin acceptance and popularity among diverse communities of Americans. Feminist and NewAge movements have experimented with the creation of new forms of ritual expression,often drawing upon participants’ own interpretations of non-Western religions and myths.These experiments have resulted in various self-help guides to creating one’s own rituals,as well as programs such as those designed to take high school students on rites of passagemodeled after the vision quests of Native North Americans. Such borrowing has been con-troversial, and some Native American groups have begun to protest the use of their mythsand rituals by outsiders, however well intentioned. Catherine Bell writes,

The ubiquitous dynamics of ritual appropriation are historically complex and politicallycharged, especially when socially or politically dominant groups appear to be mining thecultural traditions of the less powerful, taking the images they want and, by placing them invery new contexts, altering their meanings in ways that may sever these images from theirown people. (1997: 240)

Whether we consider long-standing, highly formalized sacred rituals or the more inventiveattempts to enact values in a ritual way, it is clear that ritual serves two functions. Ritualteaches participants—as well as anthropological observers—about the social arrangements

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and values of a community yet also helps construct and create those very arrangements andvalues.

In the six articles in this chapter, we encounter a range of rituals and possible interpreta-tions. Building upon the seminal work of early-twentieth-century anthropologist Arnoldvan Gennep, Victor W. Turner scrutinizes one phase of rites of passage as they are practicedaround the world. The works of both Van Gennep and Turner have been highly influentialin anthropology, and their focus upon rites of passage has undoubtedly contributed to thepopularity of that phrase among the general public.

While Van Gennep and Turner emphasized the structure and process of rituals, MichaelAtwood Mason’s article documents a Santería initiation with an emphasis on bodily experience.

Continuing in the intellectual vein of Victor Turner, Barbara G. Myerhoff’s analysis ofHuichol rituals explores how myth and symbolism create a sacred realm distant fromeveryday reality.

In the fourth article, Roy A. Rappaport takes a very different approach, emphasizingmaterial and environmental explanations for ritual.

Thomas J. Csordas’s article compares rituals that respond to abortions, as carried out inthe Charismatic Renewal movement in North America and in Japan. Csordas is particularlyinterested in how ritual “works” and in the construction of culture-specific emotions anddisorders.

In the final article, Horace Miner examines the body rituals of the Nacirema, a NorthAmerican group that devotes a considerable portion of the day to ritual activity.

References

Bell, Catherine 1997 Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bowie, Fiona 2000 The Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

Colson, Elizabeth 1977 “The Least Common Denominator.” In S. F. Moore and B. G. Myerhoff, eds., Secular

Ritual. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, pp. 189–98.

Howells, William 1962 The Heathens. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Karenga, Maulana 1988 The African-American Holiday of Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community, and

Culture. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press.

Moore, Sally F., and Barbara G. Myerhoff, eds. 1977 Secular Ritual. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum.

Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1966 Religion: An Anthropological View. New York: Random House.



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In this paper, I wish to consider some of the sociocul-tural properties of the “liminal period” in that classof rituals which Arnold van Gennep has definitivelycharacterized as “rites de passage.” If our basic modelof society is that of a “structure of positions,” wemust regard the period of margin or “liminality” asan interstructural situation. I shall consider, notably

in the case of initiation rites, some of the main fea-tures of instruction among the simpler societies. Ishall also take note of certain symbolic themes thatconcretely express indigenous concepts about thenature of “interstructural” human beings.

Rites de passage are found in all societies but tend toreach their maximal expression in small-scale, rela-tively stable and cyclical societies, where change isbound up with biological and meteorological rhythmsand recurrences rather than with technological inno-vations. Such rites indicate and constitute transitionsbetween states. By “state” I mean here “a relativelyfixed or stable condition” and would include in its

12

Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de PassageVictor W. Turner

The following selection could not have been written were it not for the seminal writing on ritual bythe French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957). Van Gennep is recognized by scholarsas the first anthropologist to study the significance of rituals accompanying the transitional stages ina person’s life—birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Ever since the publication of Les Rites dePassage in 1909, the phrase “rites of passage” has become part and parcel of anthropological litera-ture. Van Gennep saw in human rituals three successive but separate stages: separation, margin, andaggregation. In the following selection, Victor Turner singles out the marginal, or liminal, period forexamination. The liminal stage in rites of passage is when the initiates are removed and typicallysecluded from the rest of society—in effect, they become invisible, or, as in the title of this article,“betwixt and between.” It is Turner’s belief that the neophyte at the liminal stage has nothing—nostatus, property rank, or kinship position. He describes this condition as one of “sacred poverty.”Turner concludes his article with an invitation to researchers of ritual to concentrate their efforts onthe marginal stage, believing that this is where the basic building blocks of culture are exposed andtherefore open for cross-cultural comparison. Victor Turner taught at Cornell and the University ofChicago. His major field research was done in Uganda, Zambia, and Mexico.

Reprinted from Victor W. Turner, “Betwixt and Between: TheLiminal Period in Rites de Passages,” The Proceedings ofthe New American Ethnological Society (1964), Symposiumon New Approaches to the Study of Religion, pp. 4–20.



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meaning such social constancies as legal status, pro-fession, office or calling, rank or degree. I hold it todesignate also the condition of a person as deter-mined by his culturally recognized degree of matu-ration as when one speaks of “the married or singlestate” or the “state of infancy.” The term “state” mayalso be applied to ecological conditions, or to thephysical, mental or emotional condition in which aperson or group may be found at a particular time. Aman may thus be in a state of good or bad health; asociety in a state of war or peace or a state of famineor of plenty. State, in short, is a more inclusive con-cept than status or office and refers to any type ofstable or recurrent condition that is culturally recog-nized. One may, I suppose, also talk about “a state oftransition,” since J. S. Mill has, after all, written of “astate of progressive movement,” but I prefer to re-gard transition as a process, a becoming, and in thecase of rites de passage even a transformation—herean apt analogy would be water in process of beingheated to boiling point, or a pupa changing fromgrub to moth. In any case, a transition has differentcultural properties from those of a state, as I hope toshow presently.

Van Gennep himself defined “rites de passage” as“rites which accompany every change of place, state,social position and age.” To point up the contrast be-tween “state” and “transition,” I employ “state” toinclude all his other terms. Van Gennep has shownthat all rites of transition are marked by three phases:separation, margin (or limen), and aggregation. Thefirst phase of separation comprises symbolic behav-ior signifying the detachment of the individual orgroup either from an earlier fixed point in the socialstructure or a set of cultural conditions (a “state”);during the intervening liminal period, the state ofthe ritual subject (the “passenger”) is ambiguous; hepasses through a realm that has few or none of theattributes of the past or coming state; in the thirdphase the passage is consummated. The ritual sub-ject, individual or corporate, is in a stable state oncemore and, by virtue of this, has rights and obliga-tions of a clearly defined and “structural” type, andis expected to behave in accordance with certaincustomary norms and ethical standards. The mostprominent type of rites de passage tends to accom-pany what Lloyd Warner (1959, 303) has called “themovement of a man through his lifetime, from afixed placental placement within his mother’s womb

to his death and ultimate fixed point of his tomb-stone and final containment in his grave as a deadorganism—punctuated by a number of critical mo-ments of transition which all societies ritualize andpublicly mark with suitable observances to impressthe significance of the individual and the group onliving members of the community. These are theimportant times of birth, puberty, marriage, anddeath.” However, as Van Gennep, Henri Junod, andothers have shown, rites de passage are not confinedto culturally defined life-crises but may accompanyany change from one state to another, as when awhole tribe goes to war, or when it attests to the pas-sage from scarcity to plenty by performing a first-fruits or a harvest festival. Rites de passage, too, arenot restricted, sociologically speaking, to move-ments between ascribed statuses. They also concernentry into a new achieved status, whether this be apolitical office or membership of an exclusive club orsecret society. They may admit persons into mem-bership of a religious group where such a group doesnot include the whole society, or qualify them for theofficial duties of the cult, sometimes in a gradedseries of rites.

Since the main problem of this study is the natureand characteristics of transition in relatively stablesocieties, I shall focus attention on rites de passage thattend to have well-developed liminal periods. On thewhole, initiation rites, whether into social maturityor cult membership, best exemplify transition, sincethey have well-marked and protracted marginal orliminal phases. I shall pay only brief heed here torites of separation and aggregation, since these aremore closely implicated in social structure than ritesof liminality. Liminality during initiation is, there-fore, the primary datum of this study, though I willdraw on other aspects of passage ritual where theargument demands this. I may state here, partly asan aside, that I consider the term “ritual” to be morefittingly applied to forms of religious behavior asso-ciated with social transitions, while the term “cere-mony” has a closer bearing on religious behaviorassociated with social states, where politico-legal in-stitutions also have greater importance. Ritual istransformative, ceremony confirmatory.

The subject of passage ritual is, in the liminal pe-riod, structurally, if not physically, “invisible.” Asmembers of society, most of us see only what weexpect to see, and what we expect to see is what we



are conditioned to see when we have learned the de-finitions and classifications of our culture. A society’ssecular definitions do not allow for the existence of anot-boy-not-man, which is what a novice in a malepuberty rite is (if he can be said to be anything). A setof essentially religious definitions co-exist with thesewhich do set out to define the structurally indefin-able “transitional-being.” The transitional-being or“liminal persona” is defined by a name and by a set ofsymbols. The same name is very frequently em-ployed to designate those who are being initiatedinto very different states of life. For example, amongthe Ndembu of Zambia the name mwadi may meanvarious things: it may stand for “a boy novice in cir-cumcision rites,” or “a chief-designate undergoinghis installation rites,” or, yet again, “the first or ritualwife” who has important ritual duties in the domes-tic family. Our own terms “initiate” and “neophyte”have a similar breadth of reference. It would seemfrom this that emphasis tends to be laid on the tran-sition itself, rather than on the particular statesbetween which it is taking place.

The symbolism attached to and surrounding theliminal persona is complex and bizarre. Much of it ismodeled on human biological processes, which areconceived to be what Lévi-Strauss might call “iso-morphic” with structural and cultural processes.They give an outward and visible form to an inwardand conceptual process. The structural “invisibility”of liminal personae has a twofold character. They areat once no longer classified and not yet classified. Inso far as they are no longer classified, the symbolsthat represent them are, in many societies, drawnfrom the biology of death, decomposition, catabo-lism, and other physical processes that have a nega-tive tinge, such as menstruation (frequently regardedas the absence or loss of a fetus). Thus, in some boys’initiations, newly circumcised boys are explicitlylikened to menstruating women. Insofar as a neo-phyte is structually “dead,” he or she may be treated,for a long or short period, as a corpse is customarilytreated in his or her society. See Stobaeus’s quota-tion, probably from a lost work of Plutarch, “initia-tion and death correspond word for word and thingfor thing.” The neophyte may be buried, forced to liemotionless in the posture and direction of customaryburial, may be stained black, or may be forced to livefor a while in the company of masked and mon-strous mummers representing, inter alia, the dead, or

worse still, the un-dead. The metaphor of dissolutionis often applied to neophytes; they are allowed to gofilthy and identified with the earth, the generalizedmatter into which every specific individual is ren-dered down. Particular form here becomes generalmatter; often their very names are taken from themand each is called solely by the generic term for“neophyte” or “initiand.” (This useful neologism isemployed by many modern anthropologists.)

The other aspect, that they are not yet classified, isoften expressed in symbols modeled on processes ofgestation and parturition. The neophytes are likenedto or treated as embryos, newborn infants, or suck-lings by symbolic means which vary from culture toculture. I shall return to this theme presently.

The essential feature of these symbolizations isthat the neophytes are neither living nor dead fromone aspect, and both living and dead from another.Their condition is one of ambiguity and paradox, aconfusion of all the customary categories. JakobBoehme, the German mystic whose obscure writingsgave Hegel his celebrated dialectical “triad,” liked tosay that “In Yea and Nay all things consist.” Liminal-ity may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positivestructural assertions, but as in some sense the sourceof them all, and, more than that, as a realm ofpure possibility whence novel configurations of ideasand relations may arise. I will not pursue this pointhere but, after all, Plato, a speculative philosopher, ifthere ever was one, did acknowledge his philosophi-cal debt to the teachings of the Eleusinian and Orphicinitiations of Attica. We have no way of knowingwhether primitive initiations merely conserved lore.Perhaps they also generated new thought and newcustom.

Dr. Mary Douglas, of University College, London,has recently advanced (in a magnificent book Purityand Danger [1966]) the very interesting and illuminat-ing view that the concept of pollution “is a reaction toprotect cherished principles and categories from con-tradiction.” She holds that, in effect, what is unclearand contradictory (from the perspective of social def-inition) tends to be regarded as (ritually) unclean.The unclear is the unclean: e.g., she examines the pro-hibitions on eating certain animals and crustaceans inLeviticus in the light of this hypothesis (these beingcreatures that cannot be unambiguously classified interms of traditional criteria). From this standpoint,one would expect to find that transitional beings are

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particularly polluting, since they are neither onething nor another; or may be both; or neither herenor there; or may even be nowhere (in terms of anyrecognized cultural topography), and are at the veryleast “betwixt and between” all the recognized fixedpoints in space-time of structural classification. Infact, in confirmation of Dr. Douglas’s hypothesis,liminal personae nearly always and everywhere areregarded as polluting to those who have never been,so to speak, “inoculated” against them, through hav-ing been themselves initiated into the same state. Ithink that we may perhaps usefully discriminatehere between the statics and dynamics of pollutionsituations. In other words, we may have to distin-guish between pollution notions which concernstates that have been ambiguously or contradictorilydefined, and those which derive from ritualizedtransitions between states. In the first case, we aredealing with what has been defectively defined orordered, in the second with what cannot be definedin static terms. We are not dealing with structuralcontradictions when we discuss liminality, but withthe essentially unstructured (which is at once de-structured and prestructured) and often the peoplethemselves see this in terms of bringing neophytesinto close connection with deity or with superhumanpower, with what is, in fact, often regarded as theunbounded, the infinite, the limitless. Since neo-phytes are not only structurally “invisible” (thoughphysically visible) and ritually polluting, they arevery commonly secluded, partially or completely,from the realm of culturally defined and orderedstates and statuses. Often the indigenous term forthe liminal period is, as among Ndembu, the locativeform of a noun meaning “seclusion site” (kunkunka,kung’ula). The neophytes are sometimes said to “bein another place.” They have physical but not social“reality,” hence they have to be hidden, since it is aparadox, a scandal, to see what ought not to be there!Where they are not removed to a sacred place of con-cealment they are often disguised, in masks orgrotesque costumes or striped with white, red, orblack clay, and the like.

In societies dominantly structured by kinship in-stitutions, sex distinctions have great structural im-portance. Patrilineal and matrilineal moieties andclans, rules of exogamy, and the like, rest and are builtup on these distinctions. It is consistent with this tofind that in liminal situations (in kinship-dominated

societies) neophytes are sometimes treated or sym-bolically represented as being neither male norfemale. Alternatively, they may be symbolically as-signed characteristics of both sexes, irrespective oftheir biological sex. (Bruno Bettelheim [1954] has col-lected much illustrative material on this point frominitiation rites.) They are symbolically either sexlessor bisexual and may be regarded as a kind of humanprima materia—as undifferentiated raw material. Itwas perhaps from the rites of the Hellenic mystery re-ligions that Plato derived his notion expressed in hisSymposium that the first humans were androgynes. Ifthe liminal period is seen as an interstructural phasein social dynamics, the symbolism both of androgynyand sexlessness immediately becomes intelligiblein sociological terms without the need to importpsychological (and especially depth-psychological)explanations. Since sex distinctions are importantcomponents of structural status, in a structurelessrealm they do not apply.

A further structurally negative characteristic oftransitional beings is that they have nothing. Theyhave no status, property, insignia, secular clothing,rank, kinship position, nothing to demarcate themstructurally from their fellows. Their condition is in-deed the very prototype of sacred poverty. Rightsover property, goods, and services inhere in posi-tions in the politico-jural structure. Since they do notoccupy such positions, neophytes exercise no suchrights. In the words of King Lear they represent“naked unaccommodated man.”

I have no time to analyze other symbolic themesthat express these attributes of “structural invisibil-ity,” ambiguity and neutrality. I want now to drawattention to certain positive aspects of liminality.Already we have noted how certain liminal processesare regarded as analogous to those of gestation, par-turition, and suckling. Undoing, dissolution, decom-position are accompanied by processes of growth,transformation, and the reformulation of old ele-ments in new patterns. It is interesting to note how,by the principle of the economy (or parsimony) ofsymbolic reference, logically antithetical processesof death and growth may be represented by the sametokens, for example, by huts and tunnels that are atonce tombs and wombs, by lunar symbolism (for thesame moon waxes and wanes), by snake symbolism(for the snake appears to die, but only to shed its oldskin and appear in a new one), by bear symbolism



(for the bear “dies” in autumn and is “reborn” inspring), by nakedness (which is at once the mark of anewborn infant and a corpse prepared for burial),and by innumerable other symbolic formations andactions. This coincidence of opposite processes andnotions in a single representation characterizes thepeculiar unity of the liminal: that which is neitherthis nor that, and yet is both.

I have spoken of the interstructural character ofthe liminal. However, between neophytes and theirinstructors (where these exist), and in connectingneophytes with one another, there exists a set ofrelations that compose a “social structure” of highlyspecific type. It is a structure of a very simple kind:between instructors and neophytes there is oftencomplete authority and complete submission; amongneophytes there is often complete equality. Betweenincumbents of positions in secular politico-jural sys-tems there exist intricate and situationally shiftingnetworks of rights and duties proportioned to theirrank, status, and corporate affiliation. There aremany different kinds of privileges and obligations,many degrees of superordination and subordination.In the liminal period such distinctions and grada-tions tend to be eliminated. Nevertheless, it must beunderstood that the authority of the elders over theneophytes is not based on legal sanctions; it is in asense the personification of the self-evident authorityof tradition. The authority of the elders is absolute,because it represents the absolute, the axiomaticvalues of society in which are expressed the “com-mon good” and the common interest. The essence ofthe complete obedience of the neophytes is to submitto the elders but only in so far as they are in charge,so to speak, of the common good and represent intheir persons the total community. That the authorityin question is really quintessential tradition emergesclearly in societies where initiations are not collectivebut individual and where there are no instructors orgurus. For example, Omaha boys, like other NorthAmerican Indians, go alone into the wilderness tofast and pray (Hocart, 1952: 160). This solitude isliminal between boyhood and manhood. If theydream that they receive a woman’s burden-strap,they feel compelled to dress and live henceforth in every way as women. Such men are known as mixuga. The authority of such a dream in such asituation is absolute. Alice Cummingham Fletchertells of one Omaha who had been forced in this way

to live as a woman, but whose natural inclinationsled him to rear a family and to go on the warpath.Here the mixuga was not an invert but a man boundby the authority of tribal beliefs and values. Amongmany Plains Indians, boys on their lonely VisionQuest inflicted ordeals and tests on themselves thatamounted to tortures. These again were not basicallyself-tortures inflicted by a masochistic temperamentbut due to obedience to the authority of tradition inthe liminal situation—a type of situation in whichthere is no room for secular compromise, evasion,manipulation, casuistry, and maneuver in the field ofcustom, rule, and norm. Here again a cultural expla-nation seems preferable to a psychological one. Anormal man acts abnormally because he is obedientto tribal tradition, not out of disobedience to it. Hedoes not evade but fulfills his duties as a citizen.

If complete obedience characterizes the relation-ship of neophyte to elder, complete equality usuallycharacterizes the relationship of neophyte to neo-phyte, where the rites are collective. This comradeshipmust be distinguished from brotherhood or siblingrelationship, since in the latter there is always the in-equality of older and younger, which often achieveslinguistic representation and may be maintained bylegal sanctions. The liminal group is a community orcomity of comrades and not a structure of hierarchi-cally arrayed positions. This comradeship transcendsdistinctions of rank, age, kinship position, and, insome kinds of cultic group, even of sex. Much of thebehavior recorded by ethnographers in seclusion sit-uations falls under the principle: “Each for all, and allfor each.” Among the Ndembu of Zambia, for exam-ple, all food brought for novices in circumcisionseclusion by their mothers is shared equally amongthem. No special favors are bestowed on the sons ofchiefs or headmen. Any food acquired by novices inthe bush is taken by the elders and apportionedamong the group. Deep friendships between novicesare encouraged, and they sleep around lodge fires inclusters of four or five particular comrades. How-ever, all are supposed to be linked by special tieswhich persist after the rites are over, even into oldage. This friendship, known as wubwambu (from aterm meaning “breast”) or wulunda, enables a man toclaim privileges of hospitality of a far-reaching kind.I have no need here to dwell on the lifelong ties thatare held to bind in close friendship those initiatedinto the same age-set in East African Nilo-Hamitic




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and Bantu societies, into the same fraternity or soror-ity on an American campus, or into the same class ina naval or military academy in Western Europe.

This comradeship, with its familiarity, ease and, Iwould add, mutual outspokenness, is once more theproduct of interstructural liminality, with its scarcityof jurally sanctioned relationships and its emphasison axiomatic values expressive of the common weal.People can “be themselves,” it is frequently said,when they are not acting institutionalized roles.Roles, too, carry responsibilities and in the liminalsituation the main burden of responsibility is borneby the elders, leaving the neophytes free to developinterpersonal relationships as they will. They con-front one another, as it were, integrally and not incompartmentalized fashion as actors of roles.

The passivity of neophytes to their instructors,their malleability, which is increased by submissionto ordeal, their reduction to a uniform condition, aresigns of the process whereby they are ground downto be fashioned anew and endowed with additionalpowers to cope with their new station in life. Dr.Richards, in her superb study of Bemba girls’ pu-berty rites, Chisungu, has told us that Bemba speak of“growing a girl” when they mean initiating her(1956: 121). This term “to grow” well expresses howmany peoples think of transition rites. We are in-clined, as sociologists, to reify our abstractions (it isindeed a device which helps us to understand manykinds of social interconnection) and to talk aboutpersons “moving through structural positions in ahierarchical frame” and the like. Not so the Bembaand the Shilluk of the Sudan who see the status orcondition embodied or incarnate, if you like, in theperson. To “grow” a girl into a woman is to effectan ontological transformation; it is not merely toconvey an unchanging substance from one positionto another by a quasi-mechanical force. Howitt sawKuringals in Australia and I have seen Ndembu inAfrica drive away grown-up men before a circumci-sion ceremony because they had not been initiated.Among Ndembu, men were also chased off becausethey had only been circumcised at the Mission Hos-pital and had not undergone the full bush seclusionaccording to the orthodox Ndembu rite. These bio-logically mature men had not been “made men” bythe proper ritual procedures. It is the ritual and theesoteric teaching which grows girls and makes men.It is the ritual, too, which among Shilluk makes a

prince into a king, or, among Luvale, a cultivator intoa hunter. The arcane knowledge or “gnosis” obtainedin the liminal period is felt to change the inmostnature of the neophyte, impressing him, as a sealimpresses wax, with the characteristics of his newstate. It is not a mere acquisition of knowledge, but achange in being. His apparent passivity is revealedas an absorption of powers which will become activeafter his social status has been redefined in the ag-gregation rites.

The structural simplicity of the liminal situationin many initiations is offset by its cultural complex-ity. I can touch on only one aspect of this vast subjectmatter here and raise three problems in connectionwith it. This aspect is the vital one of the communi-cation of the sacra, the heart of the liminal matter.

Jane Harrison has shown that in the GreekEleusinian and Orphic mysteries this communica-tion of the sacra has three main components (1903:144–60). By and large, this threefold classificationholds good for initiation rites all over the world.Sacra may be communicated as: (1) exhibitions,“what is shown”; (2) actions, “what is done”; and (3)instructions, “what is said.”

“Exhibitions” would include evocatory instru-ments or sacred articles, such as relics of deities,heroes or ancestors, aboriginal churingas, sacreddrums or other musical instruments, the contents ofAmerindian medicine bundles, and the fan, cist andtympanum of Greek and Near Eastern mystery cults.In the Lesser Eleusinian Mysteries of Athens, sacraconsisted of a bone, top, ball, tambourine, apples,mirror, fan, and woolly fleece. Other sacra includemasks, images, figurines, and effigies; the potteryemblem (mbusa) of the Bemba would belong to thisclass. In some kinds of initiation, as for example theinitiation into the shaman-diviner’s profession amongthe Saora of Middle India, described by VerrierElwin (1955), pictures and icons representing thejourneys of the dead or the adventures of supernat-ural beings may be shown to the initiands. A strikingfeature of such sacred articles is often their formalsimplicity. It is their interpretation which is complex,not their outward form.

Among the “instructions” received by neophytesmay be reckoned such matters as the revelation of thereal, but secularly secret, names of the deities or spir-its believed to preside over the rites—a very frequentprocedure in African cultic or secret associations



(Turner, 1962: 36). They are also taught the main out-lines of the theogony, cosmogony, and mythicalhistory of their societies or cult, usually with refer-ence to the sacra exhibited. Great importance is at-tached to keeping secret the nature of the sacra, theformulas chanted and instructions given aboutthem. These constitute the crux of liminality, forwhile instruction is also given in ethical and socialobligations, in law and in kinship rules, and in tech-nology to fit neophytes for the duties of future office,no interdiction is placed on knowledge thus im-parted since it tends to be current among uninitiatedpersons also.

I want to take up three problems in consideringthe communication of sacra. The first concerns theirfrequent disproportion, the second their monstrous-ness, and the third their mystery.

When one examines the masks, costumes, fig-urines, and such displayed in initiation situations,one is often struck, as I have been when observingNdembu masks in circumcision and funerary rites, bythe way in which certain natural and cultural featuresare represented as disproportionately large or small.A head, nose, or phallus, a hoe, bow, or meal mortarare represented as huge or tiny by comparison withother features of their context which retain their nor-mal size. (For a good example of this, see “The ManWithout Arms” in Chisungu [Richards, 1956: 211], afigurine of a lazy man with an enormous penis butno arms.) Sometimes things retain their customaryshapes but are portrayed in unusual colors. What isthe point of this exaggeration amounting sometimesto caricature? It seems to me that to enlarge or dimin-ish or discolor in this way is a primordial mode of ab-straction. The outstandingly exaggerated feature ismade into an object of reflection. Usually it is not aunivocal symbol that is thus represented but a multi-vocal one, a semantic molecule with many compo-nents. One example is the Bemba pottery emblemCoshi wa ng’oma, “The Nursing Mother,” described byAudrey Richards in Chisungu. This is a clay figurine,nine inches high, of an exaggeratedly pregnantmother shown carrying four babies at the same time,one at her breast and three at her back. To this figurineis attached a riddling song:

My mother deceived me!Coshi wa ng’oma!So you have deceived me;I have become pregnant again.

Bemba women interpreted this to Richards asfollows:

Coshi wa ng’oma was a midwife of legendary fameand is merely addressed in this song. The girlcomplains because her mother told her to wean herfirst child too soon so that it died; or alternatively,told her that she would take the first child if herdaughter had a second one. But she was trickingher and now the girl has two babies to look after.The moral stressed is the duty of refusingintercourse with the husband before the baby isweaned, i.e., at the second or third year. This is acommon Bemba practice.

In the figurine the exaggerated features are thenumber of children carried at once by the womanand her enormously distended belly. Coupled withthe song, it encourages the novice to ponder upontwo relationships vital to her, those with her motherand her husband. Unless the novice observes theBemba weaning custom, her mother’s desire forgrandchildren to increase her matrilineage and herhusband’s desire for renewed sexual intercourse willbetween them actually destroy and not increase heroffspring. Underlying this is the deeper moral that toabide by tribal custom and not to sin against it eitherby excess or defect is to live satisfactorily. Even toplease those one loves may be to invite calamity, ifsuch compliance defies the immemorial wisdom ofthe elders embodied in the mbusa. This wisdom isvouched for by the mythical and archetypal midwifeCoshi wa ng’oma.

If the exaggeration of single features is not irra-tional but thought-provoking, the same may also besaid about the representation of monsters. Earlierwriters—such as J. A. McCulloch (1913) in his articleon “Monsters” in Hastings Encyclopaedia of Religionand Ethics—are inclined to regard bizarre andmonstrous masks and figures, such as frequently ap-pear in the liminal period of initiations, as the prod-uct of “hallucinations, night-terrors and dreams.”McCulloch goes on to argue that “as man drew littledistinction (in primitive society) between himself andanimals, as he thought that transformation from oneto the other was possible, so he easily ran human andanimal together. This in part accounts for animal-headed gods or animal-gods with human heads.” Myown view is the opposite one: that monsters are man-ufactured precisely to teach neophytes to distinguishclearly between the different factors of reality, as it is




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conceived in their culture. Here, I think, WilliamJames’s so-called law of dissociation may help usto clarify the problem of monsters. It may be statedas follows: when a and b occurred together as partsof the same total object, without being discriminated,the occurrence of one of these, a, in a new combina-tion ax, favors the discrimination of a, b, and x fromone another. As James himself put it, “What is associ-ated now with one thing and now with another, tendsto become dissociated from either, and to grow intoan object of abstract contemplation by the mind. Onemight call this the law of dissociation by varying con-comitants” (1918: 506).

From this standpoint, much of the grotesquenessand monstrosity of liminal sacra may be seen to beaimed not so much at terrorizing or bemusing neo-phytes into submission or out of their wits as at mak-ing them vividly and rapidly aware of what may becalled the “factors” of their culture. I have myselfseen Ndembu and Luvale masks that combine fea-tures of both sexes, have both animal and human at-tributes, and unite in a single representation humancharacteristics with those of the natural landscape.One ikishi mask is partly human and partly repre-sents a grassy plain. Elements are withdrawn fromtheir usual settings and combined with one anotherin a totally unique configuration, the monster ordragon. Monsters startle neophytes into thinkingabout objects, persons, relationships, and features oftheir environment they have hitherto taken forgranted.

In discussing the structural aspect of liminality, Imentioned how neophytes are withdrawn from theirstructural positions and consequently from the val-ues, norms, sentiments, and techniques associatedwith those positions. They are also divested of theirprevious habits of thought, feeling, and action. Dur-ing the liminal period, neophytes are alternatelyforced and encouraged to think about their society,their cosmos, and the powers that generate and sus-tain them. Liminality may be partly described as astage of reflection. In it those ideas, sentiments, andfacts that had been hitherto for the neophytes boundup in configurations and accepted unthinkingly are,as it were, resolved into their constituents. Theseconstituents are isolated and made into objects of re-flection for the neophytes by such processes as com-ponental exaggeration and dissociation by varyingconcomitants. The communication of sacra and other

forms of esoteric instruction really involves threeprocesses, though these should not be regarded as inseries but as in parallel. The first is the reduction ofculture into recognized components or factors; thesecond is their recombination in fantastic or mon-strous patterns and shapes; and the third is theirrecombination in ways that make sense with regardto the new state and status that the neophytes willenter.

The second process, monster- or fantasy-making,focuses attention on the components of the masksand effigies, which are so radically ill-assorted thatthey stand out and can be thought about. The mon-strosity of the configuration throws its elements intorelief. Put a man’s head on a lion’s body and youthink about the human head in the abstract. Per-haps it becomes for you, as a member of a givenculture and with the appropriate guidance, an em-blem of chieftainship; or it may be explained as rep-resenting the soul as against the body; or intellect ascontrasted with brute force, or innumerable otherthings. There could be less encouragement to reflecton heads and headship if that same head werefirmly ensconced on its familiar, its all too familiar,human body. The man-lion monster also encour-ages the observer to think about lions, their habits,qualities, metaphorical properties, religious signifi-cance, and so on. More important than these, therelation between man and lion, empirical andmetaphorical, may be speculated upon, and newideas developed on this topic. Liminality herebreaks, as it were, the cake of custom and enfran-chises speculation. That is why I earlier mentionedPlato’s self-confessed debt to the Greek mysteries.Liminality is the realm of primitive hypothesis,where there is a certain freedom to juggle with thefactors of existence. As in the works of Rabelais,there is a promiscuous intermingling and juxtapos-ing of the categories of event, experience, andknowledge, with a pedagogic intention.

But this liberty has fairly narrow limits. The neo-phytes return to secular society with more alert fac-ulties perhaps and enhanced knowledge of howthings work, but they have to become once moresubject to custom and law. Like the Bemba girl Imentioned earlier, they are shown that ways of act-ing and thinking alternative to those laid down bythe deities or ancestors are ultimately unworkableand may have disastrous consequences.



Moreover, in initiation, there are usually held to becertain axiomatic principles of construction, and cer-tain basic building blocks that make up the cosmosand into whose nature no neophyte may inquire. Cer-tain sacra, usually exhibited in the most arcaneepisodes of the liminal period, represent or may beinterpreted in terms of these axiomatic principles andprimordial constituents. Perhaps we may call thesesacerrima, “most sacred things.” Sometimes they areinterpreted by a myth about the world-making activ-ities of supernatural beings “at the beginning ofthings.” Myths may be completely absent, however,as in the case of the Ndembu “mystery of the threerivers.” . . . This mystery (mpang’u) is exhibited atcircumcision and funerary cult association rites.Three trenches are dug in a consecrated site andfilled respectively with white, red, and black water.These “rivers” are said to “flow from Nzambi,” theHigh God. The instructors tell the neophytes, partlyin riddling songs and partly in direct terms, whateach river signifies. Each “river” is a multivocal sym-bol with a fan of referents ranging from life values,ethical ideas, and social norms, to grossly physiolog-ical processes and phenomena. They seem to beregarded as powers which, in varying combination,underlie or even constitute what Ndembu conceiveto be reality. In no other context is the interpretationof whiteness, redness, and blackness so full; andnowhere else is such a close analogy drawn, evenidentity made, between these rivers and bodily fluidsand emissions: whiteness � semen, milk; redness �menstrual blood, the blood of birth, blood shed by aweapon, etc.; blackness � feces, certain products ofbodily decay, etc. This use of an aspect of humanphysiology as a model for social, cosmic, and reli-gious ideas and processes is a variant of a widely dis-tributed initiation theme: that the human body is amicrocosm of the universe. The body may be pic-tured as androgynous, as male or female, or in termsof one or other of its developmental stages, as child,mature adult, and elder. On the other hand, as in theNdembu case, certain of its properties may be ab-stracted. Whatever the mode of representation, thebody is regarded as a sort of symbolic template forthe communication of gnosis, mystical knowledgeabout the nature of things and how they came tobe what they are. The cosmos may in some cases beregarded as a vast human body; in other beliefsystems, visible parts of the body may be taken to

portray invisible faculties such as reason, passion,wisdom and so on; in others again, the differentparts of the social order are arrayed in terms of ahuman anatomical paradigm.

Whatever the precise mode of explaining realityby the body’s attributes, sacra which illustrates thisare always regarded as absolutely sacrosanct, as ulti-mate mysteries. We are here in the realm of whatWarner (1959: 3–4) would call “nonrational or non-logical symbols” which

arise out of the basic individual and culturalassumptions, more often unconscious than not,from which most social action springs. They supplythe solid core of mental and emotional life of eachindividual and group. This does not mean that theyare irrational or maladaptive, or that man cannotoften think in a reasonable way about them, butrather that they do not have their source in hisrational processes. When they come into play, suchfactors as data, evidence, proof, and the facts andprocedures of rational thought in action are apt tobe secondary or unimportant.

The central cluster of nonlogical sacra is then thesymbolic template of the whole system of beliefs andvalues in a given culture, its archetypal paradigmand ultimate measure. Neophytes shown these areoften told that they are in the presence of formsestablished from the beginning of things. . . . I haveused the metaphor of a seal or stamp in connectionwith the ontological character ascribed in many initi-ations to arcane knowledge. The term “archetype”denotes in Greek a master stamp or impress, andthese sacra, presented with a numinous simplicity,stamp into the neophytes the basic assumptions oftheir culture. The neophytes are told also that theyare being filled with mystical power by what theysee and what they are told about it. According to thepurpose of the initiation, this power confers on themcapacities to undertake successfully the tasks of theirnew office, in this world or the next.

Thus, the communication of sacra both teaches theneophytes how to think with some degree of abstrac-tion about their cultural milieu and gives them ulti-mate standards of reference. At the same time, it isbelieved to change their nature, transform them fromone kind of human being into another. It intimatelyunites man and office. But for a variable while, therewas an uncommitted man, an individual rather thana social persona, in a sacred community of individuals.




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It is not only in the liminal period of initiationsthat the nakedness and vulnerability of the ritualsubject receive symbolic stress. Let me quote fromHilda Kuper’s description of the seclusion of theSwazi chief during the great Incwala ceremony. TheIncwala is a national First-Fruits ritual, performed inthe height of summer when the early crops ripen.The regiments of the Swazi nation assemble at thecapital to celebrate its rites, “whereby the nationreceives strength for the new year.” The Incwala is atthe same time “a play of kingship.” The king’s well-being is identified with that of the nation. Bothrequire periodic ritual strengthening. Lunar symbol-ism is prominent in the rites, as we shall see, and theking, personifying the nation, during his seclusionrepresents the moon in transition between phases,neither waning nor waxing. Dr. Kuper, ProfessorGluckman, and Professor Wilson have discussed thestructural aspects of the Incwala which are clearlypresent in its rites of separation and aggregation.What we are about to examine are the interstructuralaspects.

During his night and day of seclusion, the king,painted black, remains, says Dr. Kuper, “painted inblackness” and “in darkness”; he is unapproachable,dangerous to himself and others. He must cohabitthat night with his first ritual wife (in a kind of “mys-tical marriage”—this ritual wife is, as it were, conse-crated for such liminal situations).

The entire population is also temporarily in a stateof taboo and seclusion. Ordinary activities andbehavior are suspended; sexual intercourse isprohibited, no one may sleep late the followingmorning, and when they get up they are notallowed to touch each other, to wash the body, to siton mats, to poke anything into the ground, or evento scratch their hair. The children are scolded if theyplay and make merry. The sound of songs that hasstirred the capital for nearly a month is abruptlystilled; it is the day of bacisa (cause to hide). The kingremains secluded; . . . all day he sits naked on a lionskin in the ritual hut of the harem or in the sacredenclosure in the royal cattle byre. Men of his innercircle see that he breaks none of the taboos . . . onthis day the identification of the people with theking is very marked. The spies (who see to it thatthe people respect the taboos) do not say, “You aresleeping late” or “You are scratching,” but “Youcause the king to sleep,” “You scratch him (theking)”; etc. (Kuper, 1947: 219–220).

Other symbolic acts are performed which exem-plify the “darkness” and “waxing and waningmoon” themes, for example, the slaughtering of ablack ox, the painting of the queen mother with ablack mixture—she is compared again to a half-moon, while the king is a full moon, and both are ineclipse until the paint is washed off finally with doc-tored water, and the ritual subject “comes once againinto lightness and normality.”

In this short passage we have an embarrassmentof symbolic riches. I will mention only a few themesthat bear on the argument of this paper. Let us look atthe king’s position first. He is symbolically invisible,“black,” a moon between phases. He is also underobedience to traditional rules, and “men of his innercircle” see that he keeps them. He is also “naked,” di-vested of the trappings of his office. He remains apartfrom the scenes of his political action in a sanctuaryor ritual hut. He is also, it would seem, identifiedwith the earth which the people are forbidden to stab,lest the king be affected. He is “hidden.” The king, inshort, has been divested of all the outward attributes,the “accidents,” of his kingship and is reduced to itssubstance, the “earth” and “darkness” from whichthe normal, structured order of the Swazi kingdomwill be regenerated “in lightness.”

In this betwixt-and-between period, in this fruitfuldarkness, king and people are closely identified. Thereis a mystical solidarity between them, which contrastssharply with the hierarchical rank-dominated struc-ture of ordinary Swazi life. It is only in darkness, si-lence, celibacy, in the absence of merriment andmovement that the king and people can thus be one.For every normal action is involved in the rights andobligations of a structure that defines status andestablishes social distance between men. Only intheir Trappist sabbath of transition may the Swaziregenerate the social tissues torn by conflicts arisingfrom distinctions of status and discrepant structuralnorms.

I end this study with an invitation to investigatorsof ritual to focus their attention on the phenomenaand processes of mid-transition. It is these, I hold,that paradoxically expose the basic building blocksof culture just when we pass out of and before we re-enter the structural realm. In sacerrima and their in-terpretations we have categories of data that mayusefully be handled by the new sophisticated tech-niques of cross-cultural comparison.



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Bright light shines from the next room, and musicpours into the dark living room where a young

Euro-American sits alone. As he waits, he watchesthe pattern of the blinking Christmas lights in hisgodmother’s suburban Maryland home. A 1990 cal-endar advertises Botánica San Lázaro, which hisgodmother, Idaberta, owns and manages. GeorgeCarter knows that the songs honor the orichas that

13

“I bow my head to the ground”:Creating Bodily ExperienceThrough InitiationMichael Atwood Mason

According to Michael Atwood Mason, the author of the following selection, the religious systemknown as Santería is rooted in West African beliefs and practices, as brought to Cuba through theAtlantic slave trade. Since the 1940s, Cuban immigrants have introduced the religion to the UnitedStates, where it has flourished in large cities among Latinos, as well as some African- and Euro-Americans. Because of the historical experience of slavery and repression, African-derived religion inCuba was long protected through secrecy, a practice continued in the United States today by someimmigrants who want to assimilate into American society (Mason 2002:8–9). Santería recognizes acreator god or High God, who has placed the everyday workings of the universe and humans in thehands of divinities called orichas. The rituals of Santería involve worshipping and making sacrificesto orichas. Practitioners may be involved at a variety of levels, from neophyte to priestess or priest.

Mason’s richly descriptive ethnographic study, extracted from a book-length work on Santeríarituals, focuses on an American man as he goes through his first rites of initiation. The author is es-pecially interested in the bodily experience of ritual, which in this case involves washing the head,taking part in an animal sacrifice, and bowing to the ground in respect. How does the initiate per-ceive, experience, and learn through the non-verbal enactment of the ritual? By using his body inspecific ways, Mason argues, the initiate learns to be a part of the community. Mason’s emphasis onbodily experience—what anthropologists call embodiment—is a significant addition to structuralanalyses of ritual, such as Van Gennep’s tripartite model of rites of passage (see preceding article byTurner).

The author identifies vocabulary from Lucumí, the ritual dialect of the West-African languageYoruba, as (Lu.), and from Spanish as (Sp.). Fieldwork for the study was conducted in the 1990s.

From LIVING SANTERÍA: RITUALS AND EXPERIENCESIN AN AFRO-CUBAN RELIGION, 2002, pp. 27–42.Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.



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constitute the pantheon of Santería;1 his padrinos(Sp. godparents) are creating the sacred herbalwater, osain (Lu.). Soon they will use it to cleanse himand baptize the divinities that he is to receive. He isseparated because only the fully initiated can wit-ness the making of the osain. As a new godchild ofthe same house, I sit with him and wait.

He is called into the room and kneels over a largebasin in the middle of the floor. I too am called in andwatch as the ceremony unfolds. He hangs his neckon the edge of the basin and water pours over hishead. “Get his neck,” says a voice from behind him;his godfather, José, splashes the liquid onto theman’s neck and rubs vigorously. “Good.” The osainflows through his hair and across his closed eyes. Heis lifted up and sent into a nearby bathroom. Againhe kneels; this time he is next to the bathtub. Againhe closes his eyes, and again the osain is poured overhis head; his godfather washes the back of his neckwith soap and sings to the seat of his being, his head.The man is told to wash himself from head to toewith the osain and is left alone.

When he returns to the room, a cluster of objectsstands in the middle of the floor. A cement head withcowrie shells for eyes, nose, and mouth sits in a smallterracotta saucer, and next to it sits a smaller imagethat resembles it; these are Elegguá, the trickster, thelord of the crossroads and the ruler of destiny. Be-hind these stand a small, black iron cauldron; here isOgún, the fierce and independent oricha of iron andwarfare. With Ogún lives his brother Ochosi, thearcher and god of the hunt; his power resides in themetal bow and arrow inside the cauldron. Next tothe cauldron stands a metal cup that is closed andtopped with a small rooster. This is Osun, a guardianwho represents the neophyte’s head; in it are theherbs used to make the osain. Osain pools in the

saucers and in the cauldron, and drips down themetal shaft that elevates Osun. These orichas, theGuerreros, are the beginning of a person’s “road inthe saint.” The man has come to “receive” them.2

Boxes are brought in from the patio. The godfatherreaches into a box and pulls out a black rooster. Hewashes its underwings, the bottom of its feet, and itsbeak with clear water. He holds it by the legs, and itswings flap. The aleyo is told to turn slowly in a circle;as he rotates, he is brushed with the rooster in longsweeping motions from his head toward his feet.This is repeated until he has rotated completely. Hishands are turned palm up and brushed with thebird’s wings, then turned over and brushed again,and finally turned palm up and brushed a thirdtime. The bird is stretched out and its neck cut. Theblood flows onto Elegguá. Its head is placed next toElegguá and its neck touches his saucers; the birdkicks, and the padrino pushes down hard to squeezethe air from the bird’s lungs in order to quiet the an-imal. It kicks again and squeals; this time, the aleyoreaches down and forces the air from the bird andsilences it. The slaughtering process is repeated withthree doves, one each for Ogún, Ochosi, and Osun,and then again with a Guinea hen.

Following the matanza (Sp. slaughter), the aleyo istold to “do moforibale” (Lu. prostration). A mat isspread out in front of the orichas; his godfatherstands next to them. The man lies down on the mat,first on his left side and then on his right. His kneesare bent and his arm curls beneath his head as he“goes to the ground.” “¿Bueno?” he asks. “Is this allright?” “Yes.” He does moforibale to show his re-spect to the orichas that he has just received and tothe oricha that “lives” in his godfather’s head. Hisgodfather touches his shoulders with his fingers andhelps him up. The aleyo crosses his arms across hischest and is drawn to his elder’s cheek, first on oneside and then on the other. His padrino says softly,“Santo. Ocha. Alafia” (Lu. and Sp. saint, oricha, andpeace, respectively). This gesture is repeated as hegreets all of his elders and receives their blessings.George now belongs to their ritual family.

In an eastern city of the United States, this youngman enters a new religious community; he is receiving

1. I witnessed the ritual described here in December 1990.Since 1988 I have worked extensively with the communitythat performed the ceremony. This group of practitionersis led by Cuban priests and priestesses but includes peopleof various social, economic, and cultural backgrounds.Because of this diversity I have limited my analysis to thereligious system. I have also limited the detailed personalinformation about the participants. Santería is still notwidely accepted, and so these people have asked that Inot make their identities public or recognizable. I createda pseudonym for each person and used it consistentlythroughout the book.

2. “The road in the saint” is a common expression inSantería that refers to a person’s destiny in the religion.This initiation is referred to as “receiving the Warriors.”



a group of important deities and entering into ritualkin relationships with his initiators. He must have hishead washed, his body cleaned by animals, and mustperform the moforibale; to enter this tradition, he useshis body in ways that are new to him. As he receivesthe gods, he learns new patterns of body use. The cre-ation of these new bodily patterns in the Guerrerosinitiation ritual presents an interesting case: the signsused in the ritual have meanings that can be commu-nicated verbally, but here the signs are experientiallyapprehended through the body; they are not simplyunderstood but also enacted. As he uses his body innew ways, his subjectivity is transformed.

In recent years, studies of cultural performanceshave demonstrated clearly that meaning is not latentin ritual signs and awaiting discovery; instead peo-ple involved in ritual performances engage signsand activate them (Schieffelin 1985:707). Throughperformance, people communicate cultural mean-ings; by employing the various culturally relevantand available communicative resources, includingspecific generic and gestural forms, people producetheir culture. This production takes place in all cul-tured behavior, and ritual—any ritual—effectivelyopens the door to understanding the entire culture(V. Turner 1967).3 Cultural performances “are occa-sions in which as a culture or society we reflect uponand define ourselves, dramatize our collective mythsand history . . .” (MacAloon 1984a:1). Although com-municative resources such as ritual do carry specificexpectations for all involved, only through enact-ment and negotiation can meaning be establishedand understood. As Richard Bauman (1986:3) haswritten, “Performance, like all human activity, is sit-uated, its form, meaning, and functions rooted inculturally defined scenes or events—bounded seg-ments of the flow of behavior and experience thatconstitute meaningful contexts for action, interpre-tation, and evaluation.” Cultural performances—performances of cultural forms—can have mean-ing and functions only when enacted (Abrahams1977:95), and enactments often produce heightenedexperiences for participants.

Because this initiate, George, was not born intoSantería, these experiences are new to him. These

new bodily activities, quite common to the tradi-tion, represent a change for George. To enter the tra-dition fully he must learn to use his body in newways; he must master certain gestures and series ofactions. As he experiences himself enacting newgestures and cultural forms of behavior, he realizesthat his body is both a sign communicating mean-ings in a new way and simultaneously a locus ofnew experiences (Cowan 1990:4; cf. B. Turner1984:1). His body is not simply a constructed signthat links him to the group (Douglas 1978:87); in-stead, the individual’s body mediates all of the rit-ual signs, for he can only act by employing his body(cf. Ekman 1977). The enacting of these forms by thebody represents the “modes of construction” of aculturally specific and useful body (Feher 1989:11).George needs to be able to enact each of the threegestures that I will explore in order to enter the reli-gion more fully. He must understand and experi-ence the importance of his head, he must learn thedetailed gestures of sacrifice, and he must enact re-spect by prostrating himself in front of his elders.George learns to be a part of the community byusing his body in specific ways.

The initiation ritual begins the establishment of new “habitual body sets, patterns of practical activity, and forms of consciousness” (Jackson1989:119–120). The activities of the ritual and themeanings therein are inseparable. In social action, anessential communicative form in Santería, pragmaticand semantic dimensions fuse; ideology is not an ex-plicit discourse but an embodied, lived experience(Comaroff 1985:5). Because meaning merges with ac-tions, the ritual represents the creation of a new habi-tus in the initiate; it is an enactment of some of the“principles of the generation and structuring of prac-tices and representations” (Bourdieu 1989:72). Prac-titioners rarely provide detailed evaluations of socialactions or of ceremonies, but they do refer to certainrituals as bien hecha (Sp. well done) or linda (Sp. beau-tiful). This choice of language suggests that thesought-after quality is aesthetic and nonanalytical—a kind of satisfaction or well-being. The manipula-tion of physical objects, those used on altars and insacrifices as well as bodies, produces the elusive butdesirable beautiful ceremony.4

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3. Certainly ritual does not simply “reflect” the entire culture (cf. Benedict 1935), but it does provide a useful and edifying entry point for cultural analysis.

4. I plan to explore these valuative, aesthetic categories infuture work.



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This habitus represents a new social position forthe neophyte in the case described earlier. This ritualis an important initiation on the road to the priest-hood; it creates new bodily patterns for the initiateand thus inscribes the body into the new discourse.Previously abstract, verbal knowledge is enactedand incorporated. Never before has he had his headwashed in osain; never before has he been cleanedby the sweepings of birds’ wings; nor has he per-formed the moforibale. The giving and receiving ofthe Guerreros, repeated many times and in manyplaces each year, assimilates people more fully intothe community and gives them limited access to thesupernatural world, and this example is no differ-ent. Here, however, the medium for assimilation is George. He must enact respect and embody thetradition.

This embodiment of tradition in the ritual contextstructures George’s experience. As he uses his bodyin new ways and places it in new positions, he makesphysical certain relationships and experiences thembodily; the initiation, then, regulates experience“through its capacity to reorganize the actor’s expe-rience of the situation” (Munn 1973:605). Althoughinitiations vary according to the performers in-volved and these variations affect the structure of theritual (Hanks 1984:131), the aleyo’s body alwaysstructures the experience.

In Santería, the teaching of ritual skills and moralbehavior happens informally and nonverbally, andthus embodiment is especially important. Ritual el-ders tire quickly of answering questions and sug-gest that the best method of learning is involvement.By paying attention and attending many rituals, analeyo becomes known as “serio” (Sp. a serious [stu-dent of the religion]; see Friedman 1982). People dolearn this religion through the exegesis of importantconcepts, but they learn primarily through observa-tion and enactment. Because learning centers onpractice and entering actively into this tradition, thebody naturally emerges as central to any analysis ofthis kind of ritual (cf. Wafer 1991 on the body). Thislearning takes place slowly, so it is extremely diffi-cult to document. The body exists in a complex rela-tionship with social knowledge and interpretation.The informal learning style of Santería makes socialknowledge a kind of esoteric power. People whoknow certain ceremonies exercise power in the com-munity. My analysis reflects the social realities of

this community. Ritual focuses on the body and itsmanipulation, and personal experience representsthe primary method for understanding; when apractitioner integrates experience with more com-monly held, culturally produced expressive formssuch as divination stories, social knowledge is ex-panded. “The essential part of the modus operandiwhich defines practical mastery is transmitted inpractice . . . without attaining the level of discourse”(Bourdieu 1989:87). The aleyo here clearly graspsthis emphasis on practice and the use of the body; asGeorge Carter remarks, “Although I had never donetoo much in Santería before, I, I guess I wanted to bepart of the community which I was joining, to actlike they do. I wanted to be involved and do whatthey did so I could learn the religion” (1990). In-volvement must be physical to be complete; al-though George knows a great deal about the beliefsand sacred stories of Santería, he greatly values en-tering the habitus of the community and expects tolearn from his experience.

It is important to note that neophytes who un-dergo rituals are not somehow miraculously trans-formed by some inexplicable and awesome power.Rather, ritualizations in Santería frequently place theindividual in a series of ceremonies that engagemany aspects of the individual’s subjectivity. Virtuallyall initiations—including receiving the Warriors—result from divination rituals; as the previous chap-ter explains, these ceremonies evoke the specificaspects of the multiplex subjectivity of the client andthen recontextualize them within the religious sys-tem. Divination almost always results in the pre-scription of additional ceremonies to address specificneeds in the client’s life; these rituals often over-whelm the human subject with repeated gestures,unfamiliar smells, alien sights, and unusual songsand other sounds. The sensory force of the ritualaugments the emotional investment in the ceremonythat results from the divination. After the ceremoniesare completed, practitioners routinely socialize theirexperiences of transformation through narrativesthat focus on particular but patterned aspects of theprocess and on the role of the spirits and orichas intheir lives. These narratives represent an importantbut uninvestigated area of mythological informa-tion within the religion, an area that is constantlyrenewing itself through social action and lived experience.



Washing the Head

Because no expressive bodily activity happens with-out real bodies and no meanings can be assigned togestures without reference to a specific event (Poole1975:101), the specific example at hand best revealsGeorge’s bodily practice. The community of ritualspecialists washes George’s head as he prepares toenter the community. He leans over with eyes closedto receive their attention and blessings. The herbalmixture “cools” his head and “refreshes” him. Hishead is washed over the basin and then again in thebathtub. Each time the priest rubs the osain and theherbs floating in it into his skin and scalp.

In the bathroom cleansing, which I have witnessedmany times, the gestures of the ritual are highly styl-ized. The aleyo leans over the tub and places the cheston the edge; the hands rest on the bottom, one on topof the other. I have seen this priest, whom I will callJosé, demonstrate to people how they should posi-tion themselves as they receive the despojo (Sp. clean-ing). Through this instruction in how properly toperform the gesture, José shows that he has an aes-thetic by which he evaluates it. Similarly, José washesthe head with a specific pattern of movements. Hetakes the osain from its basin in a small gourd andpours it first over the crown of the head and then overthe neck. Again starting at the crown, he lathers thesoap by moving it around the head in growing circlesuntil he reaches the neck, which he scrubs vigorously.He then rinses the head with more osain andsqueezes the water from the hair with a motion simi-lar to the one with which he lathers it. These highlystylized gestures reveal a culturally structured pat-tern of bodily movement, and, although they areperformed by the padrino, they suggest that thedespojo does contain gestures that the aleyo learnsand experiences through his body.

The head, which receives most of the attention inthe cleaning, carries complex and multiple symbolicmeanings in Santería. First, the head, called either oríor eledá, is the spiritual faculty and central locus of ahuman being (Murphy 1981:287). Before birth, eachorí goes before the Creator and receives its essentialcharacter. This character, which people closely asso-ciate with an individual’s destiny, can be either “hot”or “cool” (Cabrera 1980:121). Although practitionersdisagree about how mutable the head’s character is,the ritual washing here in refreshing herbs and water

helps to cool a hot head. The head also idiomaticallyrefers to the oricha that rules a person; an individualand the deity also establish this relationship in frontof the Creator before birth (see Bascom 1991:115).

This central deity, often called “the owner of thehead,” represents an important part of the individ-ual’s character. For example, the white, calm, andgenerous oricha Obatalá rules the head of George’spadrino, and so people assume that José is slow toanger, relatively intellectual, benevolent, and, othersmight add, “big-headed.” In fact, at times practition-ers confuse the “owner of the head” and the individ-ual; “an Obatalá” refers to a child of Obatalá who inritual may act in the role of that oricha. The eledá canbe identified through various divination systems,and a growing relationship between an individualand the eledá often leads to initiations, after whichthe aché of the oricha literally resides inside the initi-ate’s head; after a full initiation, the oricha can“mount” the initiate in trance possession and thustake control of the body that they share.5

In the Guerreros initiation, the aleyo, with thehelp of the oloricha, cleans and refreshes his head.Thus, the ritual attention to the head marks it as so-cially and religiously important. The osain is both anempowering and a cleaning agent; when applied tothe head, it strengthens the spirit that dwells there.By cleaning the head, the ritual cools and refreshesthe whole person. As the night goes on, after thealeyo departs from the site of the initiation, theleaves of the mixture, entwined in his hair, oftenbegin to scratch and cause itching. George Carter re-calls, “I felt a little strange scratching my head afterJosé [his godfather] had spent so much time attend-ing to it. He prayed and I scratched; it, it seemed so,so strange to treat what had been made sacred assomething annoying, but my scalp really itched.Later, I said a prayer to my head [ruling oricha] inthanksgiving and slept with a white cloth over it”6

(1990). This attention to the head, moreover, represents


5. For an extended discussion of the sexual implications ofmounting in Brazil, see Wafer 1991.6. Carter has been involved in this ritual house since be-fore I started studying it. He, like most new Americanpractitioners, has a mixture of book learning and practicalexperience within the religion. I am not certain where helearned the prayer to which he refers here.



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the beginning of a new cultural pattern. Many of thereligion’s rituals and customs underscore the cen-trality of the head. People entering Santería oftenstart their affiliation when they need healing, andfrequently the first ritual they undergo is the rogaciónde la cabeza (Sp. prayers for the head), where coconut,water, and cotton are applied to the head to “feed” it.Similarly, most practitioners cover their heads withhats (Sp. gorros) or handkerchiefs (Sp. pañuelos) dur-ing ritual activities. If their destinies include initia-tion, and they often do (Rogers 1973:28–29), theirheads will receive still more attention.

Through various initiatory rites, the head is afocal point. Santería must be understood as an ini-tiatory religion; initiations punctuate the changesand elevation of a person in the tradition. In one ofthe first initiations that a person receives, a priest-ess places necklaces (Lu. eleke, Sp. collares), conse-crated, like the Guerreros, with herbal waters andthe blood of sacrificial animals, over the neophyte’shead and onto the shoulders. Each necklace has adifferent pattern of colored beads and conveys thepower of one of the deities. An initiate most oftenreceives the necklaces of the five most powerful andpopular orichas; the necklaces, spiritually powerfuland ritually charged, reflect the aché of each ofthem. The necklaces are both manifestations of theparticular power of each deity and a channel forcommunication between the neophyte and thedeities (Brandon 1983:355–356). They rest on theshoulders and reinforce the spiritual agent living inthe head. Their form reflects the belief that thedeities reside in the head. When the necklaces arereceived, the aleyo must again bow over a bathtuband have the head washed by the oloricha; all initi-ations include this bodily action of submission andreception of blessings.

The initiation of a full priest, capable of beingmounted by an oricha, reiterates the attention on thehead, that centralized idiom of spiritual power andlife. In this ritual, the initiators wash the head of theneophyte and then shave it completely. The eldersthen mark the neophyte again, cutting a small crossinto the top of the head; into this incision the initia-tors rub the most sacred herbs that contain the achéof the principal oricha. The head is covered withcloth, which will be worn for many hours to come.Finally the primary initiator crowns the neophytewith the tureens that contain the sacred stones that

are the “spirit of the orichas” (Brandon 1983:397–401;see Ecún 1985 for examples of the variations withindifferent initiations); the head, again, is the focus ofthe ritual.

During the ritual of receiving the Warriors,George receives Osun, an equivalent of his head. AsI mentioned earlier, Osun contains the same herbsthat are used to make the osain. When he receivesOsun, he learns a simple ritual to call upon theoricha; thus he now has a simple but effectivemethod of communication with a central part ofhimself.7 If the aleyo continues in the religion andundergoes the full initiation, if he “makes the saint”(Sp. hacer santo), the practitioners will place an herbalmixture, called aché de santo (Lu. power of the saint),in the head and also place it within the Osun, whichhas a cup to receive this mixture. Thus, the Guerrerosinitiation, too, emphasizes the head beyond thecleansings. After this ritual the neophyte has animage of his head with which he can communicate. Ifthe Osun falls, for example, the aleyo knows thatdanger is at hand.

The head, then, represents the bodily center of thespiritual life in Santería. Its import reveals itselfthroughout a variety of initiation ceremonies. More-over, because other initiations repeat the culturalforms of this ritual, the Guerreros initiation antici-pates a whole social and religious commitment to theSantería community. The head receives respect be-cause “the head carries the body.”8 As the seat ofspiritual power and possibility, as the place that theruling oricha dwells, people associate the head withdestiny or “the road of life.” Elder priests and priest-esses clean the head, feed it, and sing to it. WhileGeorge experiences these things he is literally incor-porating important values in Santería. Although he may reflect upon them as the actions happenthrough his physical involvement and the attention

7. I have not described the Osun ritual because in thehouse that I am studying I was asked not to divulge it; fora similar ritual, see Murphy 1988. There are interestingcorrelations between Ocha’s emphasis on the head andVodou ritual practice; see K. Brown 1991:67, 350–351.8. “The head carries the body” is an often quoted proverb(Sp. refrán) that is associated with the divination figurecalled Eyeunle, which is ruled by the white deity Obatalá,the owner of all heads.



to his head, he joins a wider practice that is commonto all people involved in Santería. Similarly, it antici-pates other cleanings, sacrifices, and initiations thatare socially constituted and bodily enacted andlearned.

The social actions that focus on the head do notreveal the meanings of the initiation. The meanings,communicated through signs, do not lie in a separateplane outside the immediate domain of actions(Jackson 1989:122). The actions of these people asthey enact the ritual bespeak a commonality.

It is because actions speak louder and moreambiguously than words that they are more likelyto lead us to common truths; not semantic truths,established by others at other times, but experientialtruths which seem to issue from within our ownBeing [sic] when we break the momentum of thediscursive mind or throw ourselves into somecollective activity in which we each find our ownmeaning yet at the same time sustain the impressionof having a common cause and giving commonconsent (Jackson 1989:133).

This passage argues the extreme importance andpower of signs and their messages for the participantsof ritual; participants, by both framing events per-sonally and conforming to the larger social and cos-mological order that the ritual communicates, cometo embody the very contrast of structure and agency.By enacting the ritual, the initiate accepts sociallyand publicly the order that the ritual signifies(Rappaport 1989:469). George and his padrinos acttogether and, regardless of any other conflicts thatthey have, they serve his head and thus care for hisessence. George expresses that attention as he leansover the basins to make his head available, and hispadrinos show it in gestures of washing. Here,through these actions, as George accepts this culturalemphasis on the head, he begins to accept the newhabitus of the religion.

“Making Sacrifice”

By receiving the Guerreros, George Carter “opensthe roads” for himself by “making sacrifice” (Lu.rubó, Sp. hacer ebó). He is committing himself notsimply to the members of ritual house, nor is he sim-ply attending to his head; he is also committing him-self to a life-long relationship with the Warriorsthemselves, and this relationship will include, at a

minimum, a regular weekly offering to the orichas.However, it is likely that he will have to sacrificeother animals in the future. The initiation is the firsttime that George has witnessed the sacrifice of birds,and he now is religiously bound to make regular sac-rifices himself. Thus, sacrifice represents anotherform of behavior in which George participates at hisinitiation but that he must also learn to enact himself.

In the sacrifice, the birds are washed. Holdingthem by the feet, José brushes each animal across thealeyo to sweep off any negative influences that maybe lingering on George. Slowly José sweeps from thehead down toward the feet. An oloricha draws backthe birds’ wings and holds their feet; with theGuinea hen and the rooster, José pulls the neck to ex-tend it, then pierces it with a knife, and the bloodruns down the knife and onto the awaiting orichas.The doves receive similar treatment; however, in-stead of cutting their necks, José bends their necksto the side and then plucks them off. Because a spe-cial initiation confers the right to use a sacrificialknife, the aleyo will have to pull the heads off anybirds he sacrifices to feed his Warriors. These for-mal processes, which George is witnessing andlearning, will represent an essential aspect of his re-ligious life in the future.

Whenever divination suggests the need, Georgewill feed his Warriors. He will gather the necessarybirds and perform this ceremony, which is central tothe religion. Just as he has witnessed at his initiation,he will wash the birds’ underwings, their heads, andtheir feet. He will say the prayers and sing the cantos(Sp. chants) that he has heard and learned. Althoughhe may not understand the Lucumí words that heuses, he will stretch out the birds and pull theirheads off to slaughter them. He will mimic the wayhe has seen matanzas performed and thus will con-stitute his own tradition within the tradition. Becausehe has never before witnessed sacrifice, the initiationrepresents a crucial moment of learning for George.He watches, and he learns new behaviors. As he saidof the experience, “I was anxious because I hadnever seen a matanza before, but I guess, well, I wasalso, I think I wanted to see how to do it so I couldfeed my Elegguá and give him the blood and doworks. I had read the songs and the prayers in dif-ferent places, and I had read about sacrifices, but Iknew that seeing one would teach me even more.Only if I saw a sacrifice would I know how to do




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one” (1990). By watching, George learns what hecannot learn elsewhere; he understands what ges-tures to perform in a sacrifice.

Perhaps the most striking example of this learn-ing lies not in the future sacrifices that George willmake but in the event itself. When the rooster con-tinues to move and make noise after its head is sev-ered, José leans on it to force the air from its lungs.When the bird again kicks and squeals, George, imi-tating what he has just seen, quiets the bird. “Iwanted to try and see how to do it. I wanted to quietthat bird with my own two hands” (Carter 1990). Thismoment represents the essence of the initiationprocess. Here George is observing the “techniques ofthe body” that Santería employs (Mauss 1973), buthe goes beyond simple observation and uses hisbody in ways that are new to him: he enacts cultur-ally specific behavior and practices his performance.

By forcing the air from the rooster, he shows thecommunity around him not only that he wants to be amember but also that he will act in appropriate ways.He begins to assert his competence (Bauman 1977:11),although, as a person with the status of a child, herisks failing. But he has successfully acquired an un-derstanding of how this gesture is used (see Hymes1974:75) and thus begins to act socially within this re-ligious community. Because social action has a kind ofpower in the community, George asserts himself as aserio. By mimicking his padrino, George performs arelatively unimportant ritual task; the ritual in no wayrevolves around quieting the rooster, but is a bit morepleasant for everyone because of it. Quieting the birdalso demonstrates that George is willing and capableof entering the tradition. Here he performs his mem-bership in the group; the tradition diffuses as peopleenact specific gestures, and the aleyo follows the leadof his godfather:9 “Carter is a serious guy and he is notafraid to jump into things. If I do something in a ritual,he repeats. . . . He will be a good santero when the

time comes. He will be a good santero because heputs himself into a ceremony and doesn’t hesitate”(González 1992).

Just as the sacrifice itself is an important practicethat George learns in the initiation, the sweeping ofthe body by animals for cleansing purposes repre-sents another traditional behavior that he begins toenact. Rubbing rituals use animals or fruit to removenegative influences, and they represent an entiresubclass of ritual offerings to the deities. Divinersfrequently suggest these “works” (Lu. ebó, Sp. trabajos).Here George is learning the correct speed to turn andthe gestures that are done with the hands. As he goesthrough these acts, he again learns culturally specificbehavior. As he turns and is swept by the wings,George is again acquiring the practical and bodilypatterns of Santería ritual.

Moforibale: I Bow My Head to the Ground

Although previous work on cultural performanceshas focused on the role of individuals as signs (seeStoeltje 1988) and the presentation of social structurefor reflection (for example, see Stoeltje and Bauman1989), authors have not embraced an ongoing exam-ination of the process of learning a social and cosmo-logical order through performance. Performancestudies must account for the production and mainte-nance of social relationships by actors in the socialfield (McArthur 1989:115); “ritual action effects so-cial transitions or spiritual transformations; it doesnot merely mark or accompany them” (MacAloon1984b:250). The ritual causes change simply by itsoccurrence; it expresses and communicates its mean-ings with or without the participants’ consent orknowledge (Myerhoff 1984:170).

The moforibale represents an important religiousbehavior that George acquires during his initiationand through which he performs his social obliga-tions.10 After the washing and after the divinities eat,

9. It is worth noting that a priestess present at the ritualalso squeezed the air from the rooster when it squealed.Thus, this particular instance does not represent the acquisition of gendered behavior. It seems probable thatan investigation of Santería and gender would be helpedby this rich ethnographic example where a man gives“macho” (Sp. masculine, male) divinities to another man. It should be noted that women also receive the Guerreros,and always from a man.

10. The word moforibale is Lucumí, and its translation is re-vealing: It is an elision of the phrase mo fi orí ba ilé. Mo isthe first person pronoun “I”; fi is an operative marking in-dicating the use of something, in this case orí, “the head.”Ba is the verb “to touch,” and ilé is “the ground” or “theearth.” Thus, a more literal translation would be “I use myhead to touch the ground.”



he must “put his head to the ground” in front of hispadrino and the other members of his ritual family.Because the oricha that “owns his head” is female, hemust go down on each side with his head facing thedirection of the oricha he is honoring. If the aleyo’shead were male, the moforibale would have a differ-ent form; instead of reclining on each side, a personruled by a male oricha must prostrate with the fore-head on the floor and the arms and legs extendedstraight out. Here the body gesture marks the genderof the ruling oricha and not the person; the gender ofthe oricha defines the way the person must bow.Again, as in the previous discussion of the despojo,the stylization of these gestures reiterates their cul-tural significance. José explains how to go down, andthen George lies down; he asks if he is doing it cor-rectly. His padrino raises him and blesses him. Thisseries of gestures is central to the kinship that the rit-ual creates.

I had seen people do the moforibale before, and I knew that it was an important form of respect.Respect is important in Santería. We have to respectthe elders because we receive the orichas from theirhands. The dead gave birth to the orichas. That’s aproverb that means we have to show respect. . . .My head doesn’t have a saint in it so I have to put iton the floor in front of my padrino, whose headdoes have an oricha in it (Carter 1990).

Here George articulates the complexity of the mo-foribale, which indexes a series of important rela-tionships. One head honors another by going to thefloor. A new initiate shows respect to a ritual elder.By going to the floor, George enacts spatial, social,and cosmic relationships.

By receiving the Guerreros, the aleyo becomesattached to the initiator’s ritual family and begins aserious commitment to the religious community. Byreceiving the Warriors, neophytes commit them-selves to a life-long relationship with not only theoloricha but also the ritual house, the wider religiouscommunity that congregates at important festivals.Inside this community exists a complex family of ritualkin (Brandon 1983:480; cf. D. Brown 1989:162–186).The initiating priest, after the ritual, becomes thepadrino and the neophyte the ahijado or ahijada (Sp.godson, goddaughter). This relationship entails mu-tual commitment, and both parties are expected totreat the other as a family member (Murphy 1988:83;cf. D. Brown 1989:174–186). Just as parents raise a

child, so too will the godparents enculturate thealeyo; they demonstrate the proper behavior, and thealeyo learns by following their example; they “speakwithout a voice” (Flores 1990:49).

Ritual kinship is construed in terms of casas or ilé(Sp., Lu. houses) and ramas (Sp. branches, lineages).A house is a single oloricha and the people initiatedby that person. Filial relationships occur at every ini-tiation, and thus a person can have many ahijadosand many padrinos simultaneously. Those previ-ously initiated by José become George’s brothers andsisters “in the saint.” To differentiate between differ-ent kinds of godchildren, José refers to individualsby the initiations that they have received from him;for example, after this initiation George becomes hisahijado de Guerreros (Sp. godson of the Warriors).These lines of relationship are traced through gener-ations of living and dead ritual forebears. Thus,José’s godmother de asiento (Sp. of the full initiation)becomes George’s grandmother in the saint (Sp. abuelade santo).11 These larger groups are the ramas that con-nect people across time. Just as an aleyo descendsfrom a godparent and ritual ancestors, the orichas arealso “born” from each other. George’s Warriors areborn from José’s. Ritual elders (Sp. mayores) expect re-spect, and moforibale expresses that honor concretelyand directly (D. Brown 1989:170).

The moforibale reiterates social order as it existsand as sanctioned by the morality of Santería tradi-tion. For example, an aleyo, when needing help fromthe orichas, employs a godparent as intermediary or,at the very least, as a guide. This relationship subor-dinates the uninitiated to those with experiencewithin the religion. The godparents have knowl-edge, spiritual power, and, according to Santeríamorality, a social responsibility. In the Guerreros ini-tiation, George must approach the orichas with theaid of his ritual family.

By working the orichas—that is, being initiated,attending as many rituals as possible, and servingthe community—the aleyo gains knowledge; how-ever, that knowledge remains, by definition, social(Gregory 1986:141). Increased skill with the orichasincreases his responsibility both to the orichas and to


11. Ritual kin, relatives de santo, are usually contrasted bypractitioners with blood kin, relatives de sangre (Sp. ofblood).



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his ritual house. Initiation creates access to ritualknowledge; it attaches the neophyte to the house’smembers, both living and dead. Although the hierar-chical system of initiations limits and regulates theaccess to ritual skill, people learn the skills them-selves in social interaction within the ritual house.Degree and seniority of initiation determine the rit-ual status and social responsibility of a practitioner;to act within these boundaries is to act “coolly.”

In the moforibale, the touching of the head to thefloor, a ritually younger person salutes the “head” ofthe elder. Thus, George honors José’s oricha; hephysically submits his oricha to the oricha of hiselder. By enacting this social and religious hierarchy,George publicly shows his acceptance of his newrelationship with José and the submission that it im-plies. This public display makes the body a focus ofinteraction, and so it becomes an important locus ofself-definition in the social context (see Glassner1990:222; Mead 1938:292). Although he will “have”the Warriors after this initiation, he still needs hisgodparents to help him solve problems and teachhim how to interact with the orichas. The moforibaleis a bodily performance of this relationship.12

After “going down,” George is raised by hispadrino and blessed. The reciprocal relationship iscomplete. George honors José’s head and receives ablessing: “The raising is a blessing which elevates,strengthens, and honors the junior . . . a sign of ritualrecognition: symbolically conveying, affirming andsupporting membership in a relationship” (YvetteBurgess-Polcyn, quoted in D. Brown 1989:171). Thebody physically learns and enacts this ritual greetingand display of honor. The body and its position com-municate the respect, and the raising changes the re-lationship. But this relationship is not just projectedonto the body; the body’s gesture constructs andcommunicates it. George conceives of the moforibaleas an important act: “I was glad and excited to

[mo]foribale in front of José and my Guerreros. It feltstrange to be, to be on the floor in the middle of aroom with people all around, but . . . I just felt that Ihad to do it to show my respect and fit into the ilé. Itseemed even weirder to go down for the otherolorichas that I didn’t even know” (Carter 1990).George must perform the moforibale repeatedly toshow his respect for all who are his elders in thesaint; despite its distinct and foreign feel, he goesdown because he wants to show his respect to thepeople who have brought him into the religion.13

What is perhaps more important, he goes down toact as other people in the ilé act, “to fit in.” By repro-ducing an important cultural form in a noticeable so-cial space, he embodies a social position and contin-ues to maintain the status relationships.

Embodied Meanings and Living Traditions

This initiation is, indeed, a rite of passage. But an ap-proach that relies on such a structural analysis,which isolates form and social function from morepersonal meaning, ignores an entire aspect of the rit-ual. Rather than focus on the patterns in the ritualstructure, highlighting the forms the aleyo mustenact alters the emphasis of interpretation. If we areto understand how transformations of subjectivityand social status are accomplished and experienced,the initiate’s body must remain central to the analy-sis. The experience of transformation in rites of pas-sage surely includes something more complicatedand more delicate than the tripartite structure as putforth (see Van Gennep 1909; V. Turner 1969:94–130).People and their experiences always overflow theconcepts and categories that social scientists use tocomprehend them. I am advocating a more individ-ual approach to this kind of material. How does the

12. In fact, the moforibale is performed in many other contexts as a form of respect. Most important, it is done in front of elaborate altars called tronos (Sp. thrones) thatare offered to the orichas. See Friedman 1982:198–214 for a lengthy discussion of mutual respect in Santería. See D. Brown 1989, especially chapters 5 and 7, for excellentand extended discussions of tronos and the attendant rituals of respect. See also D. Brown 2003.

13. It is important to note that George is not thoroughlyseparating the orichas and his ritual elders. When he doesmoforibale, he is technically honoring the physical orichasas well as the orichas that are crowned in the heads of theelders. David Brown (1989:170–171) quotes Melba Carrillo,an oloricha in New Jersey, as reiterating that the moforibalesalutes the “oricha crowned on the head of the person, notthe person.” George’s experience of the ritual does not include this highly differentiated semantic meaning for the moforibale.



initiate use the body before and after the ritual?What effect does the change have on other aspects oflife? Is the new habitus limited to one context, ordoes it spill into other parts of the person’s life? (Forexcellent examples of body-focused analyses of ritesof passage, see V. Turner 1967, 1969:1–93.)

The meaning of this initiation cannot be under-stood without reference to the bodily practices of theinitiate. It is by using his body in new ways and per-forming specific gestures that George enters into thereligion. Through performing these specific culturalforms, through attending to his head in variousways, through sacrificing and all its gestures,through going to the floor in the moforibale, he en-acts his membership in his new religious context andvenerates the gods. Under the guidance of his initia-tors, he transforms his subjectivity. The bodily repro-duction of socially prescribed behaviors keys theemergent meanings of the initiation; through enact-ment practitioners display their relationships witheach other and the forces of the universe. Moreover,the meaning of the signs in these rituals lies not somuch in their abstract meanings but in how they are

experienced through the body of the aleyo. Themeanings of the signs are only accessible and sensi-ble through the use of the body. As Pierre Bourdieuobserves, “Rites, more than any other type of prac-tice, serve to underline the mistake of enclosing themin concepts a logic made to dispense with concepts;of treating movements of the body and practical ma-nipulations as purely logical operations” (1989:116,italics mine).

People learn the bodily and social practice ofSantería through initiation; by experiencing a newhabitus, the aleyo joins his new tradition. Althoughhe has understood the tradition in an intellectualway and has studied a great deal, by joining a ritualfamily and offering a sacrifice, he places himselfinto the practical life of the religion. He knows thetradition in a different way now, and he feels differ-ent as well. Now he understands the worship of theorichas and some of their stories, and he also knowshow to worship them. In Santería, personal iden-tity, social relationships, and ritual knowledge areperformed by people as they bow their heads to theground.




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14

Return to Wirikuta: RitualReversal and SymbolicContinuity on the Peyote Huntof the Huichol IndiansBarbara G. Myerhoff

Persuasively illustrating the close integration of myth and symbolism within ritual, the following ar-ticle by Barbara G. Myerhoff explores symbolic reversals and oppositions within the annual peyotehunt of the Huichol, an indigenous population of north-central Mexico. Based on fieldwork in 1965and 1966, Myerhoff’s work exemplifies the anthropological analysis of symbolism within a ritualcontext. A shaman leads small groups to Wirikuta, which is both an actual geographic location and amyth-based spiritual state, where everything ordinary is inverted. These reversals occur in naming,interpersonal behavior, ritual behavior, and emotional states. Through such ritual reversals, the authorargues, a number of functions are served. Everyday existence is set apart from the sacred. The ordinaryis turned into something extraordinary yet continuous. Peyote-seekers become supernatural deitiesand, in the dramatization that is ritual, act and behave within the realm of the sacred.

Although Barbara Myerhoff’s early field research took place in Mexico, later in her career she doc-umented Jewish communities in southern California. She paid special attention to rituals in the livesof elderly Jews. Her research is highlighted in two documentary films, both of which are excellentillustrations of a skilled ethnographer at work: “Number Our Days” (1983) and “In Her Own Time”(1985), both produced by Direct Cinema Ltd.

God is day and night, winter summer, warpeace, satiety hunger—all opposites, this is themeaning.

—Heraclitus

The Peyote Hunt of the Huichol Indians

Rituals of opposition and reversal constitute a criti-cal part of a lengthy religious ceremony, the peyotehunt, practiced by the Huichol Indians of north-central Mexico.1 In order to understand the function

Reprinted from Barbara G. Myerhoff, “Return to Wirikuta:Ritual Reversal and Symbolic Continuity on the Peyote Huntof the Huichol Indians” from REVERSIBLE WORLD:SYMBOLIC INVERSION IN ART AND SOCIETY, ed. byBarbara A. Babcock. Copyright © 1978 by Cornell University.Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

1. The Huichol Indians are a quasi-tribe of about 10,000living in dispersed communities in north-central Mexico.They are among the least acculturated Mexican Indians and



of these rituals it is necessary to adumbrate the majorfeatures and purposes of the peyote hunt. Annually,small groups of Huichols, led by a shaman-priest ormara’akáme, return to Wirikuta to hunt the peyote.Wirikuta is a high desert several hundred milesfrom the Huichols’ present abode in the SierraMadre Occidentál. Mythically and in all likelihoodhistorically, it is their original homeland, the placeonce inhabited by the First People, the quasi-deifiedancestors. But Wirikuta is much more than a geo-graphical location; it is illud tempus, the paradisicalcondition that existed before the creation of theworld and mankind, and the condition that willprevail at the end of time.

In Wirikuta, as in the paradise envisioned in manycreation myths, all is unity, a cosmic totality withoutbarriers of any kind, without the differentations thatcharacterize the mundane mortal world. In Wirikuta,separations are obliterated—between sexes, betweenleader and led, young and old, animals and man,plants and animals, and man and the deities. The so-cial order and the natural and supernatural realmsare rejoined into their original state of seamless con-tinuity. Wirikuta is the center of the four directionswhere, as the Huichol describe it, “All is unity, all isone, all is ourselves.”

In Wirikuta, the three major symbols of Huicholworld view are likewise fused. These are the Deer,representing the Huichols’ past life as nomadichunters; the Maize, representing their present life assedentary agriculturalists; and peyote, signifying theprivate, spiritual vision of each individual. To reenterWirikuta, the peyote pilgrims must be transformedinto the First People. They assume the identity of par-ticular deities and literally hunt the peyote whichgrows in Wirikuta, tracking and following it in theform of deer footprints, stalking and shooting it withbow and arrow, consuming it in a climactic cere-mony of total communion. Once the peyote has beenhunted, consumed, and sufficient supplies havebeen gathered for use in the ceremonies of the com-ing year, the pilgrims hastily leave and return totheir homes and to their mortal condition. The entire

peyote hunt is very complex, consisting of many rit-uals and symbols; here I will only concentrate on oneset of rituals, those which concern reversal and op-position, and the part they play in enabling the pil-grims to experience the sense of totality and cosmicunity that is their overarching religious goal.

Mythological and Ritual Aspects of Reversals

“In Wirikuta, we change the names of every-thing . . . everything is backwards.” Ramón MedinaSilva, the officiating mara’akáme, who led the PeyoteHunt of 1966 in which I participated, thus explainedthe reversals that obtain during the pilgrimage. “Themara’akáme tells [the pilgrims], ‘Now we willchange everything, all the meanings, because that isthe way it must be with the hikuritámete [peyote pil-grims]. As it was in Ancient Times, so that all can beunited.’ ”

The reversals to which he refers occur on four dis-tinct levels: naming, interpersonal behavior, ritualbehavior, and emotional states. The reversals innaming are very specific. Ideally, everything is itsopposite and everything is newly named each year.But in fact, for many things there are often no clearopposites, and substitutions are made, chosen forreasons that are not always clear. Frequently the sub-stitutions seem dictated by simple visual associa-tion—thus the head is a pot, the nose a penis, hair iscactus fiber. A great many of these substitutionsrecur each year and are standardized. Nevertheless,they are defined as opposites in this context and aretreated as if they were spontaneous rather thanpatterned.

On the interpersonal-behavioral level, direct op-positions are more straightforward. One says yeswhen he or she means no. A person proffers a footinstead of a hand. Conversations are conducted withconversants standing back to back, and so forth. Be-havior is also altered to correspond with the ritualidentity of the participant. Thus the oldest man,transformed into a nunutsi or little child for the jour-ney, is not permitted to gather firewood because“this work is too heavy and strenuous for one soyoung.”

The deities are portrayed as the opposite of mor-tals in that the former have no physiological needs.Thus the pilgrims, as the First People, disguise,

MYERHOFF • RETURN TO WIRIKUTA | 109

in part their resistance to outside influence is attributable tothe complex and extraordinarily rich ritual and symboliclife they lead. A detailed presentation of the peyote hunt ispresented in Myerhoff 1974. The fieldwork on which thepresent paper was based took place in 1965 and 1966.



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minimize, and forego their human physiological ac-tivities as much as possible. Sexual abstinence ispracticed. Washing is forsworn. Eating, sleeping,and drinking are kept to an absolute minimum.Defecation and urination are said not to occur andare practiced covertly. All forms of social distinctionand organization are minimized, and even themara’akáme’s leadership and direction are extremelyoblique. The ordinary division of labor is suspendedand altered in various ways. All forms of discord arestrictly forbidden, and disruptive emotions such asjealousy and deceit, usually tolerated as part of thehuman condition, are completely proscribed forthe pilgrims. No special treatment is afforded tochildren; no behavioral distinctions between thesexes are allowed. Even the separateness of themara’akáme from his group is minimized, and hisassistant immediately performs for him all ritualsthat the mara’akáme has just performed for the restof the party.

In terms of ritual actions, reversals are quiteclear. The cardinal directions, and up and down, areswitched in behaviors which involve offeringsacred water and food to the four corners and thecenter of the world. The fire is circled in a counter-clockwise direction instead of clockwise as onnormal ceremonial occasions. In Wirikuta, themara’akáme’s assistant sits to the latter’s left in-stead of to his right.

Emotions as well as behaviors are altered on thebasis of the pilgrims’ transformation into deities.Since mortals would be jubilant, presumably, on re-turning to their pre-creation, mythical homeland,and grief-stricken on departing from it, the pilgrimsweep as they reenter Wirikuta and are exultant ondeparting. This reflects the fact that they are deitiesleaving paradise, not mortals returning from it.

I should note also some of the attitudes andvalues toward the reversals that I observed. For ex-ample, there seems to be an aesthetic dimensionsince they regard some reversals as more satisfyingthan others. Humorous and ironic changes are asource of much laughter and delight. Thus thename of the wife of the mara’akáme was changedto “ugly gringa.” The mara’akáme himself was thepope. The anthropologists’ camper was a burro thatdrank much tequila. They also delight in com-pounding the reversals: “Ah what a pity that we havecaught no peyote. Here we sit, sad, surrounded by

baskets of flowers under a cold sun.” Thus said onepilgrim after a successful day of gathering basketsfull of peyote, while standing in the moonlight.Mistakes and humorous improvisations are also thesource of new reversals. When in a careless mo-ment Los Angeles was referred to as “home,”everyone was very pleased and amused; from thenon home was Los Angeles and even in sacredchants and prayers this reversal was maintained.Accidental reversals such as this are just as obliga-tory as the conventional ones and the new ones“dreamed” by the mara’akáme. Mistakes are cor-rected with good will but firmly, and everyoneshares in the responsibility for keeping track ofthe changes, reminding each other repeatedly ofthe changes that have been instituted. The morechanges the better, and each day, as more are estab-lished, more attention by all is required to keepthings straight. Normal conversation and behaviorbecome more difficult with each new day’s accu-mulation of changes. Sunsets are ugly. No one istired. Peyote is sweet. The pilgrimage is a failure.There is too much food to eat, and so forth.

The reversals were not instituted or removed byany formal rituals, although it is said that there aresuch. It became apparent that the reversals were ineffect at the periphery of Wirikuta when someonesneezed. This was received by uproarious laughter,for, the nose had become a penis and a sneeze, ac-cordingly, was an off-color joke. After the peyotehunt, the reversals were set aside gradually as thegroup moved away from Wirikuta. On returninghome, the pilgrims regaled those who had remainedbehind with descriptions of the reversals and theconfusions they had engendered.

The Functions and Symbolism of the Reversals

How should these ideas and actions concerning re-versal and opposition be understood? In the Huicholcontext, they achieve several purposes simultane-ously. Perhaps most familiar and straightforwardis their function in transforming the mundane intothe sacred by disguising the everyday features ofenvironment, society, and behavior, and in the Dur-keimian sense “setting it apart.” As Ramón MedinaSilva explained, “One changes everything . . . when[we] cross over there to the Peyote Country . . .



because it is a very sacred thing, it is the most sacred.It is our life, as one says. That is why nowadaysone gives things other names. One changes every-thing. Only when they return home, then they calleverything again what it is.” Here the totality andscope of the reversals are important—actions,names, ritual, and everyday behaviors are altered sothat participants are conscious at all times of the ex-traordinary nature of their undertaking. Nothing isnatural, habitual, or taken for granted. The bound-aries between the ordinary and the sacred aresharply defined and attention to this extraordinarystate of affairs cannot lag when one has to be perpet-ually self-conscious and vigilant against lapses. Re-versals promote the essential attitude of the sacred,the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

The transformation of mortals into deities isrelated to this purpose. Again and again in theologi-cal, mythological, and ethnographic literature oneencounters the impossibility of mortals entering asupernatural realm in their normal condition. Theshaman transforms himself into a spirit in order toperform his duties as soul guide or psychopomp.This is the essence of the Symplegades motif inshamanism—the passage into the other worldthrough the crashing gates, as Eliade (1964) pointsout. The “paradoxical passage” to the supernaturaldomain is open only to those who have been trans-formed from their human state into pure spirit. Anapotheosis is required of those who would “crossover” and achieve the “breakthrough in planes.” Thepeyote hunt opens Wirikuta to all proper pilgrims,but they, like the shaman, cannot enter in mortalform. To enter Wirikuta, the Huichol peyote-seekersdo not merely impersonate the deities by assumingtheir names and garb. Ritually and symbolically,they become supernatural, disguising the mortal coil,abrogating human functions and forms.

This “backwardness” operates on two levels:as the deities, they are the obverse of mortals; asdeities, they are going back, going backwards, andsignifying this by doing everything backwards. Back-wardness is found frequently in connection withsupernatural states, and with the denial of humanity.Lugbara witches are inverted beings who walk ontheir heads (Middleton 1960). And in Genesis wefind that “the inhabitants of paradise stand on theirheads and walk on their hands; as do all the dead”(Graves and Patai 1966:73, citing Gen. 24:65). The

examples could be expanded indefinitely. Eliadesuggests this widespread association of backward-ness and the supernatural when he comments,“Consequently to do away with this state of [hu-manity] even if only provisionally, is equivalent toreestablishing the primordial condition of man, inother words, to banish time, to go backwards, to re-cover the ‘paradisial’ illud tempus” (1960:72).

A third function of these reversals is their provi-sion of mnemonic, or aid to the imagination andmemory, for conception and action. For a time thepeyote pilgrims in the Huichol religion live in the su-pernatural. They go beyond invoking and discussingit, for Wirikuta exists in ritual as well as mythicalterms. Ritual, unlike myth, requires action. Ritual is adramatization. Pilgrims must not only imagine theunimaginable, they must behave within it. It isthrough its action dimension that ritual makes reli-gious values “really real,” and fuses the “lived-in”and the “dreamed-of order,” as Geertz puts it. Fullstaging is necessary. The unfathomable—illud tempus,the primordial state before time—is the setting.Props, costumes, etiquette, vocabulary, emotions—allmust be conceived and specified. The theme of oppo-sition provides the details that are needed to makethe drama credible and convincing; the metaphor ofbackwardness makes for a concretization and ampli-fication of the ineffable. Again Eliade’s writings offeran insight along these lines. He points out that thetheme of coincidentia oppositorum is an “eschatologicalsymbol par excellence, which denotes that Time andHistory have come to an end—in the lion lying downwith the lamb” (1962:121). It is in the Garden of Edenthat “opposites lie down together,” it is there thatconflicts and divisions are ultimately abolishedand man’s original innocence and wholeness areregained.

Separation, transformation, and concretizationthen are three purposes achieved by the reversals inWirikuta. There is a fourth, perhaps the most impor-tant and common function of rituals of this nature.That is the capacity of reversals to invoke continuitythrough emphasis on opposition. How this operatesin the Huichol case was explained in very preciseterms by Ramón Medina Silva in a text he dictatedabout the 1966 peyote hunt five years later. He waselaborating on the beauties of Wirikuta and for the firsttime indicated that it was the state that would prevailat the end of time as well as that which characterized




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the beginning. When the world ends, the First Peoplewould return. “All will be in unity, all will be one, allwill be as you have seen it there, in Wirikuta.” Thepresent world, it became clear, was but a shallow andmisleading interlude, a transient period characterizedby difference and separations, bracketed by an endur-ing condition of totality and continuity.

When the world ends it will be like when thenames of things are changed during the PeyoteHunt. All will be different, the opposite of whatit is now. Now there are two eyes in the heavens,the Sun and the Moon. Then, the Moon will openhis eye and become brighter. The sun willbecome dimmer. There will be no more differencebetween them. Then, no more men and no morewomen. No more child and no more adult. Allwill change places. Even the mara’akáme will nolonger be separate. That is why there mustalways be a nunutsi when we go to Wirikuta.Because the old man and the tiny baby, they arethe same.

—Personal communication, Los Angeles, 1971

Polarity reaffirms continuity. The baby and theadult ultimately are joined, ends of a single contin-uum. Watts states it as follows: “What exactly is po-larity? It is something much more than simple dual-ity or opposition. For to say that opposites are polaris to say much more than that they are joined . . . ,that they are the terms, ends, or extremities of a sin-gle whole. Polar opposites are therefore inseparableopposites, like the poles of the earth or of a magnet,or the ends of a stick or the faces of a coin” (1970:45).

Surely the vision of an original condition of unity,before the world and mankind began, is one of themost common themes in religions of every natureand place. Again to draw on Eliade, “Among the‘primitive’ peoples, just as among the Saints andthe Christian theologians, mystic ecstasy is a returnto Paradise, expressed by the overcoming of Timeand History . . . , and [represents] a recovery of theprimordial state of Man” (1960:72).

The theme of nostalgia for lost paradise recurs sooften as to be counted by some as panhuman. The-ories attribute this yearning to various causes: a lin-gering memory of the undifferentiated state in thewomb, the unfilled wish for a happy childhood, afantasy of premortal blessedness and purity, a form

of what the Jungians call uroboric incest, a fataldesire for nonbeing, and so forth (see Neumann1954). Many theologians have viewed this vision ofcosmic oneness as the essence of the mystical expe-rience and of religious ecstasy. The particulars varyfrom one religion to the next but the ingredientsare stable: paradise is that which existed beforethe beginning of time, before life and death, beforelight and darkness. Here animals and man livedin a state of easy companionship, speaking the samelanguage, untroubled by thirst, hunger, pain, weari-ness, loneliness, struggle, or appetite. Humans knewneither discord nor distinction among themselves—they were sexless, without self-awareness, and in-deed undifferentiated from the very gods. Then anirreversible and cataclysmic sundering took placeand instead of wholeness there was separation, theseparation that was Creation. Henceforth, the humanorganism was no longer indistinguishable fromthe cosmos. The primordial splitting left mankindas we know it now, forever haunted by remem-brance of and attraction for an original condition ofwholeness.

The reversals, then, express the most lamentablefeatures of the human condition by emphasizingthe loss of the paradisical state of oneness. Humansare fragmented, incomplete, and isolated from thedeities; they are vulnerable and literally mortal,which is to say helpless before the ravages of pain,time, and death. At the same time, the reversals re-mind mankind of the primordial wholeness that willagain prevail when paradise is regained. Here is thetheme expressed in a cultural form familiar to mostof us, the Gospel according to Thomas:

They said to Him: Shall we then, being childrenenter the Kingdom? Jesus said to them:When you make the two one, andwhen you make the inner as the outerand the outer as the inner and the aboveas the below, and whenyou make the male and the female into a single one,so that the male will not be male andthe female [not] be female, when you makeeyes in the place of an eye, a handin the place of a hand, and a foot in the placeof a foot, an image in the place of an image,then shall you enter [the Kingdom].

—Logia 23–35, cited in Guillaumont et al.1959:17–19



Conclusions

The theme of reversal, in all its permutations andcombinations—opposition (complementary and bi-nary), inversion, and dualism—has always been ofgreat interest to anthropologists, mythographers,theologians, psychologists, linguists, and artists.The subject seems inexhaustible. In anthropologyalone, we continue to unravel additional layers ofmeaning, to discover more and more functions ful-filled by reversals in various contexts. Recent stud-ies especially have shown how reversals can beused to make statements about the social order—to affirm it, attack it, suspend it, redefine it, op-pose it, buttress it, emphasize one part of it at thecost of another, and so forth. We see a magnifi-cently fruitful image put to diverse purposes, ca-pable of an overwhelming range of expression.Obviously there is no question of looking for thetrue or correct meaning in the use of reversals. Weare dealing with a symbolic referent that has newmeanings in every new context and within a sin-gle context embraces multiple and contradictorymeanings simultaneously. In Wirikuta, the rever-sals accomplish many purposes and contain amajor paradox. They emphasize the differencebetween Wirikuta and the mundane life, and thedifferentiated nature of the human condition. Alsothey stress the nondifferentiated nature ofWirikuta. The reversals thus portray differentiationand continuity at the same time. Both are true,separation and oneness, though this is contradic-tory and paradoxical. But this should come as nosurprise, for paradox is the very quick of ritual. Inritual, as in the Garden, opposites are made to liedown together.

Appendix: How the Names AreChanged on the Peyote Journey

Text dictated by Ramón Medina Silva, mara’akáme of SanSebastián, Mexico, to explain the reversals used on thepeyote hunt.

Well, let’s see now. I shall speak about how we dothings when we go and seek the peyote, howwe change the names of everything. How we call thethings we see and do by another name for all those

days. Until we return. Because all must be done as itmust be done. As it was laid down in the beginning.How it was when the mara’akáme who is Tatewarí2

led all those great ones to Wirikuta. When theycrossed over there, to the peyote country. Becausethat is a very sacred thing, it is the most sacred. It isour life, as one says. That is why nowadays one givesthings other names. One changes everything. Onlywhen they return home, then they call everythingagain that it is.

When everything is ready, when all the symbolswhich we take with us, the gourd bowls, the yarndiscs, the arrows, everything has been made, whenall have prayed together we set out. Then we mustchange everything, all the meanings. For instance: apot which is black and round, it is called a head. It isthe mara’akáme who directs everything. He is theone who listens in his dream, with his power and hisknowledge. He speaks to Tatewarí, he speaks toKauyumari.3 Kauyumari tells him everything, how itmust be. Then he says to his companions, if he is theleader of the journey to the peyote, look, this thingis this way, and this is how it must be done. He tellsthem, look, now we will change everything, all themeanings, because that is the way it must be with thehikuritámete (peyote pilgrims). As it was in ancienttimes, so that all can be united. As it was long ago,before the time of my grandfather, even before thetime of his grandfather. So the mara’akáme has tosee to everything, so that as much as possible all thewords are changed. Only when one comes home,then everything can be changed back again to theway it was.

“Look,” the mara’akáma says to them, “it is whenyou say ‘good morning,’ you mean ‘good evening,’everything is backwards. You say ‘goodbye, I amleaving you,’ but you are really coming. You do notshake hands, you shake feet. You hold out your rightfoot to be shaken by the foot of your companion. Yousay ‘good afternoon,’ yet it is only morning.”

So the mara’akáme tells them, as he has dreamedit. He dreams it differently each time. Every year they


2. Huichol name for the deity with whom the shaman hasa special affinity, roughly translatable as Our GrandfatherFire.3. Kauyumari is a trickster hero, quasi-deified and roughlytranslatable as Sacred Deer Person.



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change the names of things differently because everyyear the mara’akáme dreams new names. Even if it isthe same mara’akáme who leads the journey, he stillchanges the names each time differently.

And he watches who makes mistakes becausethere must be no error. One must use the names themara’akáme has dreamed. Because if one makes anerror it is not right. That is how it is. It is a beautifulthing because it is right. Daily, daily, the mara’akámegoes explaining everything to them so that they donot make mistakes. The mara’akáme says to a com-panion, “Look, why does that man over there watchus, why does he stare at us?” And then he says,“Look, what is it he has to stare at us?” “His eyes,”says his companion. “No,” the mara’akáme answers,“they are not his eyes, they are tomatoes.” That ishow he goes explaining how everything should becalled.

When one makes cigarettes for the journey, oneuses the dried husks of maize for the wrappings.And the tobacco, it is called the droppings of ants.Tortillas one calls bread. Beans one calls fruit froma tree. Maize is wheat. Water is tequila. Instead ofsaying, “Let us go and get water to drink,” yousay, “Ah, let us take tequila to eat.” Atole [maizebroth], that is brains. Sandals are cactus. Fingersare sticks. Hair, that is cactus fiber. The moon, thatis a cold sun.

On all the trails on which we travel to the peyotecountry, as we see different things we make thischange. That is because the peyote is very sacred,very sacred. That is why it is reversed. Therefore,when we see a dog, it is a cat, or it is a coyote. Ordi-narily, when we see a dog, it is just a dog, but whenwe walk for the peyote it is a cat or a coyote or evensomething else, as the mara’akáme dreams it. Whenwe see a burro, it is not a burro, it is a cow, or a horse.And when we see a horse, it is something else. Whenwe see a dove or a small bird of some kind, is it asmall bird? No, the mara’akáme says, it is an eagle, itis a hawk. Or a piglet, it is not a piglet, it is an ar-madillo. When we hunt the deer, which is very sa-cred, it is not a deer, on this journey. It is a lamb, or acat. And the nets for catching deer? They are calledsewing thread.

When we say come, it means go away. When wesay “shh, quiet,” it means to shout, and when wewhistle or call to the front we are really calling to aperson behind us. We speak in this direction here.

That one over there turns because he alreadyknows how it is, how everything is reversed. Tosay, “Let us stay here,” means to go, “let us go,”and when we say “sit down,” we mean, “standup.” It is also so when we have crossed over, whenwe are in the country of the peyote. Even the pey-ote is called by another name, as the mara’akámedreamed. Then the peyote is flower or somethingelse.

It is so with Tatewarí, with Tayaupa.4 Themara’akáme, we call him Tatewarí. He is Tatewarí,he who leads us. But there in Wirikuta, one sayssomething else. One calls him “the red one.” AndTayaupa, he is “the shining one.” So all is changed.Our companion who is old, he is called the child.Our companion who is young, he is the old one.When we want to speak of the machete, we say“hook.” When one speaks of wood, one really meansfish. Begging your pardon, instead of saying “to eat,”we say “to defecate.” And, begging your pardon, “Iam going to urinate” means “I am going to drinkwater.” When speaking of blowing one’s nose, onesays “give me the honey.” “He is deaf” means “howwell he hears.” So everything is changed, everythingis different or backwards.

The mara’akáme goes explaining how every-thing should be said, everything, many times, or hiscompanions would forget and make errors. In thelate afternoon, when all are gathered aroundTatewarí, we all pray there, and the mara’akámetells how it should be. So for instance he says, “Donot speak of this one or that one as serious. Say heis a jaguar. You see an old woman and her face is allwrinkled, coming from afar, do not say, ‘Ah, there isa man,’ say ‘Ah, here comes a wooden image.’ Yousay, ‘Here comes the image of Santo Cristo.’ Or if itis a woman coming, say ‘Ah, here comes the imageof Guadalupe.’”

Women, you call flowers. For the woman’s skirts,you say, “bush,” and for her blouse you say “palmroots.” And a man’s clothing, that too is changed.His clothing, you call his fur. His hat, that is a mush-room. Or it is his sandal. Begging your pardon, butwhat we carry down here, the testicles, they arecalled avocados. And the penis, that is his nose. Thatis how it is.

4. Our Father Sun.



When we come back with the peyote, the peyotewhich has been hunted, they make a ceremony andeverything is changed back again. And those whoare at home, when one returns they grab one andask, “What is it you called things? How is it that nowyou call the hands hands but when you left you


called them feet?” Well, it is because they havechanged the names back again. And they all want toknow what they called things. One tells them, andthere is laughter. That is how it is. Because it must beas it was said in the beginning, in ancient times[Adapted from Myerhoff 1974].



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Most functional studies of religious behavior in an-thropology have as an analytic goal the elucidation ofevents, processes, or relationships occurring within a

social unit of some sort. The social unit is not alwayswell defined, but in some cases it appears to be achurch, that is, a group of people who entertain simi-lar beliefs about the universe, or a congregation, agroup of people who participate together in the per-formance of religious rituals. There have been excep-tions. Thus Vayda, Leeds, and Smith (1961) and

15

Ritual Regulation ofEnvironmental RelationsAmong a New Guinea PeopleRoy A. Rappaport

In this article, originally published in 1967, Roy A. Rappaport takes issue with anthropologists whoemphasize only the symbolic and emotional aspects of ritual. To Rappaport, ritual may have observ-able, measurable, practical results, even if those results are not recognizable to the participants. Byexpanding his focus of study to include the ecosystem of which humans are a part, the author arguesthat the true functions of ritual may be understood.

Rappaport documents the Tsembaga, a small, politically egalitarian population in one of the inte-rior valleys of New Guinea. The author presents a detailed description of the Tsembaga ecosystem andsubsistence methods, emphasizing the place of pigs. Tsembaga carefully control the size of their pigherds, limiting reproduction and slaughtering pigs only for ritual purposes. After considering thecycle of rituals involving pig slaughter—which relates to warfare and maintaining relationshipswith allies—Rappaport concludes that the size of a pig herd actually determines the timing of somerituals, especially the kaiko, or “pig festival,” which redistributes pork to a large number of peoplein the territory. When the cost of maintaining a large number of pigs becomes too great, social forcescall for the ritual. Therefore, the timing of Tsembaga rituals is connected to the natural environment,including other humans in the region. In clear opposition to such anthropologists as Mary Douglas,Clifford Geertz, and Victor Turner, Rappaport concludes that “[r]eligious ritual may do much morethan symbolize, validate, and intensify relationships.”

A key feature of Rappaport’s argument is his distinction between the “operational environment,”which can be observed by the anthropologist, and the “cognized environment,” or the Tsembaga’s per-ceived environment—including their reasons for rituals and beliefs about their effects. Rappaportmaintains that the Tsembaga, like other peoples, do not see all the empirical effects of their rituals.

“Ritual Regulation of Environmental Relations among a NewGuinea People,” ETHNOLOGY 6:17–30, 1967. Reprinted bypermission.



O. K. Moore (1957) have clearly perceived that the func-tions of religious ritual are not necessarily confinedwithin the boundaries of a congregation or even achurch. By and large, however, I believe that the fol-lowing statement by Homans (1941: 172) representsfairly the dominant line of anthropological thoughtconcerning the functions of religious ritual:

Ritual actions do not produce a practical result onthe external world—that is one of the reasons whywe call them ritual. But to make this statement isnot to say that ritual has no function. Its function isnot related to the world external to the society butto the internal constitution of the society. It gives themembers of the society confidence, it dispels theiranxieties, it disciplines their social organization.

No argument will be raised here against the soci-ological and psychological functions imputed byHomans, and many others before him, to ritual. Theyseem to me to be plausible. Nevertheless, in somecases at least, ritual does produce, in Homans’ terms,“a practical result on the world” external not only tothe social unit composed of those who participate to-gether in ritual performances but also to the largerunit composed of those who entertain similar beliefsconcerning the universe. The material presentedhere will show that the ritual cycles of the Tsembaga,and of other local territorial groups of Maring speak-ers living in the New Guinea interior, play an impor-tant part in regulating the relationships of thesegroups with both the nonhuman components oftheir immediate environments and the human com-ponents of their less immediate environments, thatis, with other similar territorial groups. To be morespecific, this regulation helps to maintain the bioticcommunities existing within their territories, redis-tributes land among people and people over land,and limits the frequency of fighting. In the absence ofauthoritative political statuses or offices, the ritualcycle likewise provides a means for mobilizing allieswhen warfare may be undertaken. It also provides amechanism for redistributing local pig surpluses inthe form of pork throughout a large regional popula-tion while helping to assure the local population of asupply of pork when its members are most in need ofhigh quality protein.

Religious ritual may be defined, for the purposesof this paper, as the prescribed performance ofconventionalized acts manifestly directed towardthe involvement of nonempirical or supernatural

agencies in the affairs of the actors. While this defini-tion relies upon the formal characteristics of theperformances and upon the motives for undertakingthem, attention will be focused upon the empiricaleffects of ritual performances and sequences of ritualperformances. The religious rituals to be discussedare regarded as neither more nor less than part of thebehavioral repertoire employed by an aggregate oforganisms in adjusting to its environment.

The data upon which this paper is based were col-lected during fourteen months of field work amongthe Tsembaga, one of about twenty local groups ofMaring speakers living in the Simbai and Jimi Valleysof the Bismarck Range in the Territory of NewGuinea. The size of Maring local groups varies from alittle over 100 to 900. The Tsembaga, who in 1963numbered 204 persons, are located on the south wallof the Simbai Valley. The country in which they livediffers from the true highlands in being lower, gener-ally more rugged, and more heavily forested. Tsem-baga territory rises, within a total surface area of3.2 square miles, from an elevation of 2,200 feet at theSimbai river to 7,200 feet at the ridge crest. Gardensare cut in the secondary forests up to between 5,000and 5,400 feet, above which the area remains in pri-mary forest. Rainfall reaches 150 inches per year.

The Tsembaga have come into contact with theoutside world only recently; the first government pa-trol to penetrate their territory arrived in 1954. Theywere considered uncontrolled by the Australian gov-ernment until 1962, and they remain unmissionizedto this day.

The 204 Tsembaga are distributed among fiveputatively patrilineal clans, which are, in turn, orga-nized into more inclusive groupings on two hierar-chical levels below that of the total local group.Internal political structure is highly egalitarian. Thereare no hereditary or elected chiefs, nor are there even“big men” who can regularly coerce or command thesupport of their clansmen or co-residents in eco-nomic or forceful enterprises.

It is convenient to regard the Tsembaga as a pop-ulation in the ecological sense, that is, as one of thecomponents of a system of trophic exchanges takingplace within a bounded area. Tsembaga territory andthe biotic community existing upon it may be conve-niently viewed as an ecosystem. While it would bepermissible arbitrarily to designate the Tsembaga asa population and their territory with its biota as an

RAPPAPORT • RITUAL REGULATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL RELATIONS AMONG A NEW GUINEA PEOPLE | 117



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ecosystem, there are also nonarbitrary reasons fordoing so. An ecosystem is a system of materialexchanges, and the Tsembaga maintain against otherhuman groups exclusive access to the resourceswithin their territorial borders. Conversely, it is fromthis territory alone that the Tsembaga ordinarilyderive all of their foodstuffs and most of the othermaterials they require for survival. Less anthro-pocentrically, it may be justified to regard Tsembagaterritory with its biota as an ecosystem in view of therather localized nature of cyclical material exchangesin tropical rainforests.

As they are involved with the nonhuman bioticcommunity within their territory in a set of trophicexchanges, so do they participate in other materialrelationships with other human groups external totheir territory. Genetic materials are exchanged withother groups, and certain crucial items, such as stoneaxes, were in the past obtained from the outside.Furthermore, in the area occupied by the Maringspeakers, more than one local group is usually in-volved in any process, either peaceful or warlike,through which people are redistributed over landand land redistributed among people.

The concept of the ecosystem, though it providesa convenient frame for the analysis of interspecifictrophic exchanges taking place within limited geo-graphical areas, does not comfortably accommodateintraspecific exchanges taking place over wider geo-graphic areas. Some sort of geographic populationmodel would be more useful for the analysis of therelationship of the local ecological population to thelarger regional population of which it is a part, butwe lack even a set of appropriate terms for such amodel. Suffice it here to note that the relations of theTsembaga to the total of other local human popula-tions in their vicinity are similar to the relations oflocal aggregates of other animals to the totality oftheir species occupying broader and more or less con-tinuous regions. This larger, more inclusive aggregatemay resemble what geneticists mean by the termpopulation, that is, an aggregate of interbreeding or-ganisms persisting through an indefinite number ofgenerations and either living or capable of living inisolation from similar aggregates of the same species.This is the unit which survives through long peri-ods of time while its local ecological (sensu stricto)subunits, the units more or less independently in-volved in interspecific trophic exchanges such as theTsembaga, are ephemeral.

Since it has been asserted that the ritual cycles ofthe Tsembaga regulate relationships within whatmay be regarded as a complex system, it is necessary,before proceeding to the ritual cycle itself, to de-scribe briefly, and where possible in quantitativeterms, some aspects of the place of the Tsembaga inthis system.

The Tsembaga are bush-following horticultural-ists. Staples include a range of root crops, taro(Colocasia) and sweet potatoes being most important,yams and manioc less so. In addition, a great varietyof greens are raised, some of which are rich in pro-tein. Sugar cane and some tree crops, particularlyPandanus conoideus, are also important.

All gardens are mixed, many of them containingall of the major root crops and many greens. Twonamed garden types are, however, distinguished bythe crops which predominate in them. “Taro-yamgardens” were found to produce, on the basis ofdaily harvest records kept on entire gardens for closeto one year, about 5,300,000 calories1 per acre duringtheir harvesting lives of 18 to 24 months; 85 percentof their yield is harvested between 24 and 76 weeksafter planting. “Sugar–sweet potato gardens” pro-duce about 4,600,000 calories per acre during theirharvesting lives, 91 percent being taken between24 and 76 weeks after planting. I estimated thatapproximately 310,000 calories per acre is expendedon cutting, fencing, planting, maintaining, harvest-ing, and walking to and from taro-yam gardens.Sugar–sweet potato gardens required an expendi-ture of approximately 290,000 calories per acre.2

These energy ratios, approximately 17 :1 on taro-yam

1. Because the length of time in the field precluded the pos-sibility of maintaining harvest records on single gardensfrom planting through abandonment, figures were based, inthe case of both “taro-yam” and “sugar–sweet potato” gar-dens, on three separate gardens planted in successive years.Conversions from the gross weight to the caloric value ofthe yield were made by reference to the literature. Thesources used are listed in Rappaport (1966: Appendix VIII).2. Rough time and motion studies of each of the tasks in-volved in making, maintaining, harvesting, and walkingto and from gardens were undertaken. Conversion to en-ergy expenditure values was accomplished by reference toenergy expenditure tables prepared by Hipsley and Kirk(1965: 43) on the basis of gas exchange measurementsmade during the performance of garden tasks by theChimbu people of the New Guinea highlands.



gardens and 16:1 on sugar–sweet potato gardens,compare favorably with figures reported for swid-den cultivation in other regions.3

Intake is high in comparison with the reporteddietaries of other New Guinea populations. On thebasis of daily consumption records kept for tenmonths on four households numbering in total six-teen persons, I estimated the average daily intake ofadult males to be approximately 2,600 calories, andthat of adult females to be around 2,200 calories. Itmay be mentioned here that the Tsembaga are smalland short-statured. Adult males average 101 poundsin weight and approximately 58.5 inches in height;the corresponding averages for adult females are85 pounds and 54.5 inches.4

Although 99 percent by weight of the food con-sumed is vegetable, the protein intake is high byNew Guinea standards. The daily protein consump-tion of adult males from vegetable sources was esti-mated to be between 43 and 55 grams, of adultfemales 36 to 48 grams. Even with an adjustment forvegetable sources, these values are slightly in excessof the recently published WHO/FAO daily require-ments (Food and Agriculture Organization ofthe United Nations 1964). The same is true of theyounger age categories, although soft and discol-ored hair, a symptom of protein deficiency, wasnoted in a few children. The WHO/FAO protein re-quirements do not include a large “margin forsafety” or allowance for stress; and, although noclinical assessments were undertaken, it may besuggested that the Tsembaga achieve nitrogen bal-ance at a low level. In other words, their proteinintake is probably marginal.

Measurements of all gardens made during 1962and of some gardens made during 1963 indicatethat, to support the human population, between .15and .19 acres are put into cultivation per capita peryear. Fallows range from 8 to 45 years. The area in

secondary forest comprises approximately 1,000acres, only 30 to 50 of which are in cultivation atany time. Assuming calories to be the limiting fac-tor, and assuming an unchanging population struc-ture, the territory could support—with no reduc-tion in lengths of fallow and without cutting intothe virgin forest from which the Tsembaga extractmany important items—between 290 and 397 peo-ple if the pig population remained minimal. Thesize of the pig herd, however, fluctuates widely.Taking Maring pig husbandry procedures into con-sideration, I have estimated the human carrying ca-pacity of the Tsembaga territory at between 270 and320 people.

Because the timing of the ritual cycle is bound upwith the demography of the pig herd, the place of thepig in Tsembaga adaptation must be examined.

First, being omnivorous, pigs keep residentialareas free of garbage and human feces. Second, limi-ted numbers of pigs rooting in secondary growthmay help to hasten the development of that growth.The Tsembaga usually permit pigs to enter their gar-dens one and a half to two years after planting, bywhich time second-growth trees are well establishedthere. The Tsembaga practice selective weeding; fromthe time the garden is planted, herbaceous species areremoved, but tree species are allowed to remain. Bythe time cropping is discontinued and the pigs are letin, some of the trees in the garden are already ten tofifteen feet tall. These well-established trees are rela-tively impervious to damage by the pigs, which, inrooting for seeds and remaining tubers, eliminatemany seeds and seedlings that, if allowed to develop,would provide some competition for the establishedtrees. Moreover, in some Maring-speaking areasswiddens are planted twice, although this is not thecase with the Tsembaga. After the first crop is almostexhausted, pigs are penned in the garden, where theirrooting eliminates weeds and softens the ground,making the task of planting for a second time easier.The pigs, in other words, are used as cultivatingmachines.

Small numbers of pigs are easy to keep. They runfree during the day and return home at night toreceive their ration of garbage and substandardtubers, particularly sweet potatoes. Supplying thelatter requires little extra work, for the substandardtubers are taken from the ground in the course of har-vesting the daily ration for humans. Daily consump-tion records kept over a period of some months show


3. Marvin Harris, in an unpublished paper, estimates theratio of energy return to energy input on Dyak (Borneo)rice swiddens at 10:1. His estimates of energy ratios onTepotzlan (Meso-America) swiddens range from 13:1 onpoor land to 29:1 on the best land.4. Heights may be inaccurate. Many men wear their hair inlarge coiffures hardened with pandanus grease, and it wasnecessary in some instances to estimate the location of thetop of the skull.



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that the ration of tubers received by the pigs approxi-mates in weight that consumed by adult humans, i.e.,a little less than three pounds per day per pig.

If the pig herd grows large, however, the substan-dard tubers incidentally obtained in the course ofharvesting for human needs become insufficient,and it becomes necessary to harvest especially forthe pigs. In other words, people must work for thepigs and perhaps even supply them with food fit forhuman consumption. Thus, as Vayda, Leeds, andSmith (1961: 71) have pointed out, there can be toomany pigs for a given community.

This also holds true of the sanitary and cultivatingservices rendered by pigs. A small number of pigsis sufficient to keep residential areas clean, to sup-press superfluous seedlings in abandoned gardens,and to soften the soil in gardens scheduled for secondplantings. A larger herd, on the other hand, may betroublesome; the larger the number of pigs, thegreater the possibility of their invasion of producinggardens, with concomitant damage not only to cropsand young secondary growth but also to the relationsbetween the pig owners and garden owners.

All male pigs are castrated at approximately threemonths of age, for boars, people say, are dangerousand do not grow as large as barrows. Pregnancies,therefore, are always the result of unions of domesticsows with feral males. Fecundity is thus only a frac-tion of its potential. During one twelve-month periodonly fourteen litters resulted out of a potential 99 ormore pregnancies. Farrowing generally takes place inthe forest, and mortality of the young is high. Only 32of the offspring of the above-mentioned fourteenpregnancies were alive six months after birth. Thisnumber is barely sufficient to replace the number ofadult animals which would have died or been killedduring most years without pig festivals.

The Tsembaga almost never kill domestic pigsoutside of ritual contexts. In ordinary times, whenthere is no pig festival in progress, these rituals arealmost always associated with misfortunes or emer-gencies, notably warfare, illness, injury, or death.Rules state not only the contexts in which pigs are tobe ritually slaughtered, but also who may partake ofthe flesh of the sacrificial animals. During warfare itis only the men participating in the fighting whoeat the pork. In cases of illness or injury, it is only thevictim and certain near relatives, particularly his co-resident agnates and spouses, who do so.

It is reasonable to assume that misfortune andemergency are likely to induce in the organisms ex-periencing them a complex of physiological changesknown collectively as “stress.” Physiological stressreactions occur not only in organisms which are in-fected with disease or traumatized, but also in thoseexperiencing rage or fear (Houssay et al. 1955: 1096),or even prolonged anxiety (National Research Coun-cil 1963: 53). One important aspect of stress is theincreased catabolization of protein (Houssay et al.1955: 451; National Research Council 1963: 49), witha net loss of nitrogen from the tissues (Houssay et al.1955: 450). This is a serious matter for organismswith a marginal protein intake. Antibody productionis low (Berg 1948: 311), healing is slow (Large andJohnston 1948: 352), and a variety of symptoms ofa serious nature are likely to develop (Lund andLevenson 1948: 349; Zintel 1964: 1043). The status ofa protein-depleted animal, however, may be signifi-cantly improved in a relatively short period of timeby the intake of high quality protein, and high pro-tein diets are therefore routinely prescribed forsurgical patients and those suffering from infectiousdiseases (Burton 1959: 231; Lund and Levenson 1948:350; Elman 1951: 85ff.; Zintel 1964: 1043ff.).

It is precisely when they are undergoing physio-logical stress that the Tsembaga kill and consumetheir pigs, and it should be noted that they limit theconsumption to those likely to be experiencing stressmost profoundly. The Tsembaga, of course, knownothing of physiological stress. Native theories ofthe etiology and treatment of disease and injury im-plicate various categories of spirits to whom sacri-fices must be made. Nevertheless, the behaviorwhich is appropriate in terms of native understand-ings is also appropriate to the actual situation con-fronting the actors.

We may now outline in the barest of terms theTsembaga ritual cycle. Space does not permit a de-scription of its ideological correlates. It must sufficeto note that the Tsembaga do not necessarily per-ceive all of the empirical effects which the anthropol-ogist sees to flow from their ritual behavior. Suchempirical consequences as they may perceive, more-over, are not central to their rationalizations of theperformances. The Tsembaga say that they performthe rituals in order to rearrange their relationshipswith the supernatural world. We may only reiteratehere that behavior undertaken in reference to their



“cognized environment”—an environment whichincludes as very important elements the spirits ofancestors—seems appropriate in their “operationalenvironment,” the material environment specifiedby the anthropologist through operations of obser-vation, including measurement.

Since the rituals are arranged in a cycle, descrip-tion may commence at any point. The operation ofthe cycle becomes clearest if we begin with the ritualsperformed during warfare. Opponents in all casesoccupy adjacent territories, in almost all cases on thesame valley wall. After hostilities have broken out,each side performs certain rituals which place the op-posing side in the formal category of “enemy.” Anumber of taboos prevail while hostilities continue.These include prohibitions on sexual intercourse andon the ingestion of certain things—food prepared bywomen, food grown on the lower portion of the terri-tory, marsupials, eels, and while actually on the fight-ing ground, any liquid whatsoever.

One ritual practice associated with fighting whichmay have some physiological consequences de-serves mention. Immediately before proceeding tothe fighting ground, the warriors eat heavily saltedpig fat. The ingestion of salt, coupled with the tabooon drinking, has the effect of shortening the fightingday, particularly since the Maring prefer to fight onlyon bright sunny days. When everyone gets unbear-ably thirsty, according to informants, fighting is bro-ken off.

There may formerly have been other effects if thenative salt contained sodium (the production of saltwas discontinued some years previous to the fieldwork, and no samples were obtained). The Maringdiet seems to be deficient in sodium. The ingestion oflarge amounts of sodium just prior to fighting wouldhave permitted the warriors to sweat normally with-out a lowering of blood volume and consequentweakness during the course of the fighting. The porkbelly ingested with the salt would have providedthem with a new burst of energy two hours or soafter the commencement of the engagement. Afterfighting was finished for the day, lean pork wasconsumed, offsetting, at least to some extent, the ni-trogen loss associated with the stressful fighting (per-sonal communications from F. Dunn, W. McFarlane,and J. Sabine, 1965).

Fighting could continue sporadically for weeks.Occasionally it terminated in the rout of one of the

antagonistic groups, whose survivors would takerefuge with kinsmen elsewhere. In such instances, thevictors would lay waste their opponents’ groves andgardens, slaughter their pigs, and burn their houses.They would not, however, immediately annex the ter-ritory of the vanquished. The Maring say that theynever take over the territory of an enemy for, even if ithas been abandoned, the spirits of their ancestors re-main to guard it against interlopers. Most fights, how-ever, terminated in truces between the antagonists.

With the termination of hostilities a group whichhas not been driven off its territory performs a ritualcalled “planting the rumbim.” Every man puts hishand on the ritual plant, rumbim (Cordyline fruticosa(L.), A. Chev; C. terminalis, Kunth), as it is planted inthe ground. The ancestors are addressed, in effect, asfollows:

We thank you for helping us in the fight andpermitting us to remain on our territory. We placeour souls in this rumbim as we plant it on ourground. We ask you to care for this rumbim. We willkill pigs for you now, but they are few. In the future,when we have many pigs, we shall again give youpork and uproot the rumbim and stage a kaiko (pigfestival). But until there are sufficient pigs to repayyou the rumbim will remain in the ground.

This ritual is accompanied by the wholesaleslaughter of pigs. Only juveniles remain alive. Alladult and adolescent animals are killed, cooked, anddedicated to the ancestors. Some are consumed bythe local group, but most are distributed to allieswho assisted in the fight.

Some of the taboos which the group suffered dur-ing the time of fighting are abrogated by this ritual.Sexual intercourse is now permitted, liquids may betaken at any time, and food from any part of the ter-ritory may be eaten. But the group is still in debt toits allies and ancestors. People say it is still the timeof the bamp ku, or “fighting stones,” which are actualobjects used in the rituals associated with warfare.Although the fighting ceases when rumbim isplanted, the concomitant obligations, debts to alliesand ancestors, remain outstanding; and the fightingstones may not be put away until these obligationsare fulfilled. The time of the fighting stones is a timeof debt and danger which lasts until the rumbim isuprooted and a pig festival (kaiko) is staged.

Certain taboos persist during the time of thefighting stones. Marsupials, regarded as the pigs of




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the ancestors of the high ground, may not be trappeduntil the debt to their masters has been repaid. Eels,the “pigs of the ancestors of the low ground,” mayneither be caught nor consumed. Prohibitions on allintercourse with the enemy come into force. Onemay not touch, talk to, or even look at a member ofthe enemy group, nor set foot on enemy ground.Even more important, a group may not attack an-other group while its ritual plant remains in theground, for it has not yet fully rewarded its ancestorsand allies for their assistance in the last fight. Untilthe debts to them have been paid, further assistancefrom them will not be forthcoming. A kind of “truceof god” thus prevails until the rumbim is uprootedand a kaiko completed.

To uproot the rumbim requires sufficient pigs.How many pigs are sufficient, and how long does ittake to acquire them? The Tsembaga say that, if aplace is “good,” this can take as little as five years;but if a place is “bad,” it may require ten years orlonger. A bad place is one in which misfortunes arefrequent and where, therefore, ritual demands forthe killing of pigs arise frequently. A good place isone where such demands are infrequent. In a goodplace, the increase of the pig herd exceeds the on-going ritual demands, and the herd grows rapidly.Sooner or later the substandard tubers incidentallyobtained while harvesting become insufficient tofeed the herd, and additional acreage must be putinto production specifically for the pigs.

The work involved in caring for a large pig herdcan be extremely burdensome. The Tsembaga herdjust prior to the pig festival of 1962–63, when it num-bered 169 animals, was receiving 54 percent of all thesweet potatoes and 82 percent of all the manioc har-vested. These comprised 35.9 percent by weight ofall root crops harvested. This figure is consistentwith the difference between the amount of landunder cultivation just previous to the pig festival,when the herd was at maximum size, and that im-mediately afterwards, when the pig herd was at min-imum size. The former was 36.1 percent in excess ofthe latter.

I have estimated, on the basis of acreage yield andenergy expenditure figures, that about 45,000 calo-ries per year are expended in caring for one pig120–150 pounds in size. It is upon women that mostof the burden of pig keeping falls. If, from a woman’sdaily intake of about 2,200 calories, 950 calories are

allowed for basal metabolism, a woman has only1,250 calories a day available for all her activities,which include gardening for her family, child care,and cooking, as well as tending pigs. It is clear thatno woman can feed many pigs; only a few had asmany as four in their care at the commencement ofthe festival; and it is not surprising that agitation touproot the rumbim and stage the kaiko starts with thewives of the owners of large numbers of pigs.

A large herd is not only burdensome as far asenergy expenditure is concerned; it becomes increas-ingly a nuisance as it expands. The more numerouspigs become, the more frequently are gardens in-vaded by them. Such events result in serious distur-bances of local tranquillity. The garden owner oftenshoots, or attempts to shoot, the offending pig; andthe pig owner commonly retorts by shooting, or at-tempting to shoot, either the garden owner, his wife,or one of his pigs. As more and more such eventsoccur, the settlement, nucleated when the herd wassmall, disperses as people try to put as much distanceas possible between their pigs and other people’s gar-dens and between their gardens and other people’spigs. Occasionally this reaches its logical conclusion,and people begin to leave the territory, taking up res-idence with kinsmen in other local populations.

The number of pigs sufficient to become intolera-ble to the Tsembaga was below the capacity of the ter-ritory to carry pigs. I have estimated that, if the sizeand structure of the human population remainedconstant at the 1962–1963 level, a pig populationof 140 to 240 animals averaging 100 to 150 poundsin size could be maintained perpetually by theTsembaga without necessarily inducing environ-mental degradation. Since the size of the herd fluctu-ates, even higher cyclical maxima could be achieved.The level of toleration, however, is likely always tobe below the carrying capacity, since the destructivecapacity of the pigs is dependent upon the popula-tion density of both people and pigs, rather thanupon population size. The denser the human popu-lation, the fewer pigs will be required to disruptsocial life. If the carrying capacity is exceeded, it islikely to be exceeded by people and not by pigs.

The kaiko or pig festival, which commences withthe planting of stakes at the boundary and the up-rooting of the rumbim, is thus triggered by either theadditional work attendant upon feeding pigs or thedestructive capacity of the pigs themselves. It may



be said, then, that there are sufficient pigs to stagethe kaiko when the relationship of pigs to peoplechanges from one of mutualism to one of parasitismor competition.

A short time prior to the uprooting of the rumbim,stakes are planted at the boundary. If the enemy hascontinued to occupy its territory, the stakes areplanted at the boundary which existed before thefight. If, on the other hand, the enemy has aban-doned its territory, the victors may plant their stakesat a new boundary which encompasses areas previ-ously occupied by the enemy. The Maring say, to besure, that they never take land belonging to anenemy, but this land is regarded as vacant, since norumbim was planted on it after the last fight. We maystate here a rule of land redistribution in terms of theritual cycle: If one of a pair of antagonistic groups is ableto uproot its rumbim before its opponents can plant theirrumbim, it may occupy the latter’s territory.

Not only have the vanquished abandoned theirterritory; it is assumed that it has also been aban-doned by their ancestors as well. The surviving mem-bers of the erstwhile enemy group have by this timeresided with other groups for a number of years, andmost if not all of them have already had occasion tosacrifice pigs to their ancestors at their new resi-dences. In so doing they have invited these spirits tosettle at the new locations of the living, where theywill in the future receive sacrifices. Ancestors of van-quished groups thus relinquish their guardianshipover the territory, making it available to victoriousgroups. Meanwhile, the de facto membership of theliving in the groups with which they have takenrefuge is converted eventually into de jure member-ship. Sooner or later the groups with which they havetaken up residence will have occasion to plant rumbim,and the refugees, as co-residents, will participate,thus ritually validating their connection to the newterritory and the new group. A rule of populationredistribution may thus be stated in terms of ritualcycles: A man becomes a member of a territorial group byparticipating with it in the planting of rumbim.

The uprooting of the rumbim follows shortly afterthe planting of stakes at the boundary. On this par-ticular occasion the Tsembaga killed 32 pigs out oftheir herd of 169. Much of the pork was distributedto allies and affines outside of the local group.

The taboo on trapping marsupials was also termi-nated at this time. Information is lacking concerning

the population dynamics of the local marsupials, butit may well be that the taboo which had prevailedsince the last fight—that against taking them intraps—had conserved a fauna which might other-wise have become extinct.

The kaiko continues for about a year, during whichperiod friendly groups are entertained from time totime. The guests receive presents of vegetable foods,and the hosts and male guests dance togetherthroughout the night.

These events may be regarded as analogous toaspects of the social behavior of many nonhumananimals. First of all, they include massed epigamic,or courtship, displays (Wynne-Edwards 1962: 17).Young women are presented with samples of the eli-gible males of local groups with which they may nototherwise have had the opportunity to become fa-miliar. The context, moreover, permits the youngwomen to discriminate amongst this sample in termsof both endurance (signaled by how vigorously andhow long a man dances) and wealth (signaled by therichness of a man’s shell and feather finery).

More importantly, the massed dancing at theseevents may be regarded as epideictic display, com-municating to the participants information concern-ing the size or density of the group (Wynne-Edwards1962: 16). In many species such displays take place asa prelude to actions which adjust group size or den-sity, and such is the case among the Maring. Themassed dancing of the visitors at a kaiko entertain-ment communicates to the hosts, while the rumbimtruce is still in force, information concerning theamount of support they may expect from the visitorsin the bellicose enterprises that they are likely toembark upon soon after the termination of the pigfestival.

Among the Maring there are no chiefs or otherpolitical authorities capable of commanding the sup-port of a body of followers, and the decision to assistanother group in warfare rests with each individualmale. Allies are not recruited by appealing for helpto other local groups as such. Rather, each memberof the groups primarily involved in the hostilitiesappeals to his cognatic and affinal kinsmen in otherlocal groups. These men, in turn, urge other of theirco-residents and kinsmen to “help them fight.” Thechannels through which invitations to dance are ex-tended are precisely those through which appeals formilitary support are issued. The invitations go not




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from group to group, but from kinsman to kinsman,the recipients of invitations urging their co-residentsto “help them dance.”

Invitations to dance do more than exercise thechannels through which allies are recruited; theyprovide a means for judging their effectiveness.Dancing and fighting are regarded as in some senseequivalent. This equivalence is expressed in the sim-ilarity of some pre-fight and pre-dance rituals, andthe Maring say that those who come to dance cometo fight. The size of a visiting dancing contingent isconsequently taken as a measure of the size of thecontingent of warriors whose assistance may beexpected in the next round of warfare.

In the morning the dancing ground turns into atrading ground. The items most frequently ex-changed include axes, bird plumes, shell ornaments,an occasional baby pig, and, in former times, nativesalt. The kaiko thus facilitates trade by providing amarket-like setting in which large numbers oftraders can assemble. It likewise facilitates the move-ment of two critical items, salt and axes, by creatinga demand for the bird plumes which may be ex-changed for them.

The kaiko concludes with major pig sacrifices.On this particular occasion the Tsembaga butchered105 adult and adolescent pigs, leaving only 60 juve-niles and neonates alive. The survival of an additionalfifteen adolescents and adults was only temporary,for they were scheduled as imminent victims. Thepork yielded by the Tsembaga slaughter was esti-mated to weigh between 7,000 and 8,500 pounds, ofwhich between 4,500 and 6,000 pounds were distrib-uted to members of other local groups in 163 sepa-rate presentations. An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 peoplein seventeen local groups were the beneficiaries ofthe redistribution. The presentations, it should bementioned, were not confined to pork. Sixteen Tsem-baga men presented bridewealth or child-wealth,consisting largely of axes and shells, to their affinesat this time.

The kaiko terminates on the day of the pig slaugh-ter with the public presentation of salted pig belly toallies of the last fight. Presentations are made throughthe window in a high ceremonial fence built speciallyfor the occasion at one end of the dance ground.The name of each honored man is announced to theassembled multitude as he charges to the window toreceive his hero’s portion. The fence is then ritually

torn down, and the fighting stones are put away. Thepig festival and the ritual cycle have been completed,demonstrating, it may be suggested, the ecologicaland economic competence of the local population.The local population would now be free, if it were notfor the presence of the government, to attack itsenemy again, secure in the knowledge that the assis-tance of allies and ancestors would be forthcomingbecause they have received pork and the obligationsto them have been fulfilled.

Usually fighting did break out again very soonafter the completion of the ritual cycle. If peace stillprevailed when the ceremonial fence had rottedcompletely—a process said to take about three years,a little longer than the length of time required toraise a pig to maximum size—rumbim was planted asif there had been a fight, and all adult and adolescentpigs were killed. When the pig herd was largeenough so that the rumbim could be uprooted, peacecould be made with former enemies if they were alsoable to dig out their rumbim. To put this in formalterms: If a pair of antagonistic groups proceeds throughtwo ritual cycles without resumption of hostilities theirenmity may be terminated.

The relations of the Tsembaga with their environ-ment have been analyzed as a complex system com-posed of two subsystems. What may be called the“local subsystem” has been derived from the rela-tions of the Tsembaga with the nonhuman compo-nents of their immediate or territorial environment. Itcorresponds to the ecosystem in which the Tsembagaparticipate. A second subsystem, one which corre-sponds to the larger regional population of whichthe Tsembaga are one of the constituent units andwhich may be designated as the “regional subsys-tem,” has been derived from the relations of theTsembaga with neighboring local populations simi-lar to themselves.

It has been argued that rituals, arranged in repeti-tive sequences, regulate relations both within each ofthe subsystems and within the larger complex systemas a whole. The timing of the ritual cycle is largely de-pendent upon changes in the states of the compo-nents of the local subsystem. But the kaiko, which isthe culmination of the ritual cycle, does more than re-verse changes which have taken place within thelocal subsystem. Its occurrence also affects relationsamong the components of the regional subsystem.During its performance, obligations to other local



populations are fulfilled, support for future militaryenterprises is rallied, and land from which enemieshave earlier been driven is occupied. Its completion,furthermore, permits the local population to initiatewarfare again. Conversely, warfare is terminated byrituals which preclude the reinitiation of warfareuntil the state of the local subsystem is again suchthat a kaiko may be staged and completed. Ritualamong the Tsembaga and other Maring, in short, op-erates as both transducer, “translating” changes inthe state of one subsystem into information whichcan effect changes in a second subsystem, and home-ostat, maintaining a number of variables which insum comprise the total system within ranges of via-bility. To repeat an earlier assertion, the operation ofritual among the Tsembaga and other Maring helpsto maintain an undegraded environment, limitsfighting to frequencies which do not endanger theexistence of the regional population, adjusts man-landratios, facilitates trade, distributes local surpluses of


pig throughout the regional population in the formof pork, and assures people of high quality proteinwhen they are most in need of it.

Religious rituals and the supernatural orders to-ward which they are directed cannot be assumeda priori to be mere epiphenomena. Ritual may, anddoubtless frequently does, do nothing more than val-idate and intensify the relationships which integratethe social unit, or symbolize the relationships whichbind the social unit to its environment. But the inter-pretation of such presumably sapiens-specific phe-nomena as religious ritual within a framework whichwill also accommodate the behavior of other speciesshows, I think, that religious ritual may do muchmore than symbolize, validate, and intensify relation-ships. Indeed, it would not be improper to refer to theTsembaga and the other entities with which theyshare their territory as a “ritually regulated ecosys-tem,” and to the Tsembaga and their human neigh-bors as a “ritually regulated population.”



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16

A Handmaid’s Tale: The Rhetoricof Personhood in American andJapanese Healing of AbortionsThomas J. Csordas

Thomas J. Csordas is an influential cultural and psychological anthropologist whose interests in-clude the relationships between religion, mental health, emotions, and the body. Much of his researchhas been with the Charismatic Renewal movement, a non-mainstream group within Roman Catholi-cism that incorporates features of charismatic or Pentecostal Protestant worship. Reflecting hisinterest in both the therapeutic efficacy of ritual and the construction of emotions and disordersunique to particular cultures, Csordas here examines religious rituals for women who have under-gone abortions. The author utilizes a comparative approach to consider the Charismatic Renewalpost-abortion rituals and similar rituals in Japan.

Given the different ideological contexts of abortion in the North America and Japan, what do thesesuperficially similar rituals tell us about how their respective cultures perceive the fetus? Cross-cultural evidence indicates that societies around the world have profoundly different ideas aboutwhen a fetus becomes a person (despite various confident answers in the United States about “whenlife begins”), what a “person” is, and about the relationship between fetuses and the divine.

Csordas focuses his analysis on the rituals themselves, and how they accomplish the emotionalhealing that their particular cultures call for. The Charismatic Renewal movement carries out work-shops and retreats in which, through guided visualization, participants aim to heal painful memories.Women who have undergone abortions envision the aborted fetus as a person who can be named, bap-tized, and entrusted to Jesus; in a sense, they undo the abortion, and maintain the gender ideology oftheir religious community. A very different ritual response occurs in Japan, where abortion is not thecontentiously political public issue that it is in the United States. Fetuses lost through miscarriage,stillbirth, or abortion are propitiated through prayer and the offering of child-shaped statues. Theserituals, mizuko kuyo, are Buddhist in nature but—like the post-abortion rituals of CharismaticCatholics—developed in the last decades of the 20th century.

Like many present-day anthropologists, Csordas does not hide his own position behind a façade ofneutrality. Early in the article, he discloses his discomfort with some aspects of the community understudy. Abortion is a controversial issue in contemporary North America, and as Csordas points out,responses to it stretch the limits of cultural relativism. He provocatively concludes: “. . .cultures cancreate and define the very problems to which they then develop therapeutic solutions,” and this in-cludes the possibility of oppression.



This chapter has to do with religious rituals directedat the experience of women in North America andJapan who have undergone abortions. In each case,they are rituals aimed at the healing of a particularcultural construction of grief and guilt predicatedupon a particular ethnopsychology of the person. Iwill first present the North American ritual and thencontrast it with a parallel ritual in contemporaryJapan.

The North American ritual, or more precisely theritual technique, is disturbing in the way it taps intoone of the most emotionally, ethically, and politicallyprovocative issues in contemporary society. It is dis-turbing in the same sense as is Margaret Atwood’spowerful novel, A Handmaid’s Tale, from which I’veborrowed my title. Atwood describes a North Amer-ican society in the very near and almost-presentfuture in which fundamentalist Christianity hasacceded to political power and created a totalitarianstate. In this psychic, the act of performing abortionis punishable by death and the public exhibition ofone’s humiliated corpse. Because environmental pol-lution has decreased the population’s fertility to adangerously low level, the Commanders who consti-tute a ruling elite are assigned Handmaids. Thesefertile young women complement the Commanders’privileged Wives as reproductive servants withintheir sanctified households.

When I first encountered Atwood’s work, I wasfrankly jolted by the similarity of terminology tothat prevalent in some of the Catholic Charismatic“covenant communities” I had been studying.“Household” was indeed a specialized term for aChristian living arrangement that included moremembers than a nuclear family. There was an officeof “handmaid,” admittedly without reproductivefunction, but understood as a role in which somewomen had additional responsibilities for commu-nity service, particularly regarding the well-being ofother women, but always under direct male “head-ship” or authority. Somewhat ominously, in theleading covenant community, the office of handmaid

was itself suspended for a period of several years,presumably because those who held it were arrogat-ing more authority than was regarded as biblicallywarranted by the male ruling elite. The ruling elite ofthese communities, which considered themselvesvanguard outposts of a coming kingdom of God (thelogical extension of which seemed to me to beAtwood’s Republic of Gilead), styled themselves notas Commanders within a religious police state, but ina slightly more bureaucratic vein, as “Coordinators”(Csordas 1997).

The possibility of seeing the Charismatics as“proto-Gileadean” was entranced during my study oftheir system of ritual healing when I discovered therite I will describe below. Let me note from the outsetthat some Catholic Charismatics are quite active in thepolitical opposition to abortion, prompted by the dou-ble influence of embracing the conservative positionof the Roman Catholic hierarchy and embracing thefundamentalist conservatism of neo-Pentecostalism.Some are additionally active in a campaign to achievemedical recognition of what they call “post-abortionsyndrome,” a fabricated psychiatric syndrome mod-eled very closely on the definition of “post-traumaticstress disorder” found in the American PsychiatricAssociation’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Sucha disorder is, strictly speaking, a culture-bound disor-der in the sense that it is relevant only within a Charis-matic culture that defines the experience of abortionas necessarily traumatic.

Leaving that point aside for the present, note thatthe healing practices we have been discussingamong Catholic Charismatics show a remarkableuniformity across regions and locales, at least withinNorth America. This is in part due to a highly devel-oped distribution system for movement publicationsincluding books, magazines, and audiotapes, as wellas the existence of a class of teachers and healers whotravel to workshops, conferences, retreats, and “daysof renewal” at which such practices and their ratio-nales are disseminated. Again, the three principalforms of healing are prayer for healing of physical ormedical problems, Deliverance or casting out of evilspirits, and inner healing or Healing of Memories.1

The Healing of Memories is the ritual transforma-tion of the consequences of emotional trauma or

CSORDAS • A HANDMAID’S TALE | 127

Originally appeared in GENDER AND HEALTH: ANINTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE, eds. Carolyn Sargentand Caroline Brettell. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall (1996), pp. 227–41. Article also appears in Csordas’s book, BODY/MEANING/HEALING. Palgrave/Macmillan (2002), asChapter 3.

1. For comprehensive treatments of Catholic Charismatichealing, see Csordas (1994a) and McGuire (1982, 1983).



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“woundedness” by means of prayer. This prayeroften includes imaginal processes in the form ofguided imagery initiated by the healer or the sponta-neous enactment of a scenario by the patient. Attimes the memory identified as in need of transfor-mation is that of having had an abortion. In Charis-matic culture, undergoing an abortion is presumedtraumatic to the pregnant woman, entailing theemotional consequences of guilt and the grief of be-reavement, and is also presumed to produce a deathtrauma for the aborted fetus.2

Healing of memories for the mother and fetus isdescribed in a book by the highly popular Charis-matic Jesuit priests Dennis and Matthew Linn andtheir collaborator Sheila Fabricant (1985:105–139).Their book treats miscarriages, stillbirths, and abor-tions as a single class, beginning with a theologicaldiscussion emphasizing that while these unbaptizeddo not necessarily end up in the “limbo” of Catholiclore and can go to heaven, they are in need of heal-ing. The authors go on to a psychological discussionof prenatal research, arguing for the emotional via-bility, and hence vulnerability of these beings. Thenfollows a discussion of grief among mothers, whichquickly turns to focus on abortion and argues for thecommonality of grief and guilt among women whochoose abortions.

The authors narrate two cases of praying for suchwomen. The first was a woman who had had oneabortion, and had also attempted to abort her now-18-year-old daughter who was having frequentviolent outbursts against family members. During amass offered for the aborted fetus and for “any partof” the living daughter that had died during theabortion attempt, the adult woman collapsed on thefloor and experienced all the pains and contractionsof labor, following which the healers initiated hersymbolically “to give her baby to Jesus and Mary tobe cared for.” Subsequently the woman claimed thather chronic back pain improved, as did her daugh-ter’s violent outbursts, both changes interpreted bythe healers as evidence of relief of “the trauma of theabortion.” The second case was a woman for whomhealing hurt and self-hatred from having an abortion

nine years previously caused a variety of other hurtsto emerge, including the perinatal effects of grief ex-perienced by her own mother over the death of herfather and anger at her relatives who refused toallow the pregnant woman a deathbed visit, as wellas the effects of being born with her umbilical cordwrapped around her neck, and of having been phys-ically and sexually abused during childhood.

These examples exhibit an ethnopsychology inwhich abortion (in a degree greater than miscarriageor stillbirth) is a powerful pathogenic agent, and inwhich ritual healing is a powerful and occasionallydramatic antidote. The rite often includes specificimaginal techniques. Linn, Linn, and Fabricant de-scribe four steps: (1) the patient visualizes Jesus andMary holding the child, and the patient holds it withthem, asking forgiveness from the deity and thechild for any way in which he or she hurt the child,and is instructed to imaginally “see what Jesus or thechild says or does in response to you,” and withthem to forgive anyone else who may have hurt thechild; (2) the patient chooses a name for the deadfetus and symbolically baptizes it, with the instruc-tion to “feel the water cleansing and making allthings anew,” thus granting the fetus the cultural sta-tus of a person and, in effect, ritually “undoing” theabortion; (3) the patient prays that the fetus receivedivine love, and is instructed to imaginally “place itin the arms of Jesus and Mary and see them do all thethings you can’t do,” and to ask the fetus to becomean intercessor for the patient and the patient’s fam-ily; (4) the patient has a mass offered for the child,and while receiving the Eucharist is instructed to “letJesus’ love and forgiving blood flow through you tothe child and to all other deceased members of yourfamily tree” (1985:138–139).

Person, Gender, and Efficacy

The degree of multisensory vividness that can be at-tained in what we can call this embodied imaginalperformance (see also Csordas 1994a) is evident inthe following case narrated by a team of two Charis-matic healers (G and H):

G: . . . one lady that we had prayed over for anabortion [was so upset that] she turned purple atone point. . . . Anyway, we asked the Lord if shecould have the vision of her baby, aborted baby.

2. For a cultural analysis of the loss of wanted pregnancythat includes religious and symbolic responses see Layne(1992).



And she physically cupped her hands, arms andhands, as if she was holding a baby. And if you sawher, if you saw any of us, [you’d] probably think wewere all nuts. But if you saw her, it looked like shewas holding a baby. I mean she was there like this.And talking to it. Of course there was nothing therethat anyone could see. But we had just asked theLord if He would allow her to hold the baby. Andthe next moment she was holding her baby.

TC: You asked aloud with her or you asked [God]silently whether she could . . .

G: No, we asked her first, out loud. And she said shewanted to. Then she wouldn’t give it up. So we werequite a while until she was able to let the baby go.

H: And we would just remain silent and just keeppraying silently and with our hands on her. So thatHe [God] would go into her . . .

G: Real physical manifestation . . .

H: And you could just feel it all around, in the air, ofthe Lord just loving her.

C: Did she have the physical experience of holdingthe baby?

G: Oh, yeah.

TC: And what did the purple in her face mean?

G: Well that was before [the imagery sequence]. Ijust think it was the guilt and the mourning over it.

H: See the thing is she didn’t want to come to theacceptance that she had anything to do with theabortion. It was “all her husband’s fault.” Andwhen she finally came to realize that she had to takea responsibility to . . .

G: She started screaming.

H: Then it was kind of scary, ya know. But [we] justloved her through that. And He was there with us.So it was a beautiful experience.

G: And something very interesting on that was,when we deal with the healing for an abortion, wealways ask them if they have a sense of whatgender the baby is, and if they have any sense of aname . . . if they even hear a name or see a name orthe Lord places a name in their heart. And I forgotwhat the name was, but it was a girl. And both . . .we dealt with them separately. Both had a sense itwas a girl and both came up with the same name.Husband and wife. And they did not consult witheach other. Because we saw her first, and then weushered her out of the room. There was no

communication between the two. And both sensedthat it was a girl, and both came up with the exactsame name. And neither one had talked about thissince the day that the abortion occurred. Neverbrought it up again. So I mean there was nopossible way that they could have named it . . . thatbefore the abortion they had even thought it.

I will organize my analysis of this text around thefour elements that I identified [. . .] as essential to ther-apeutic process in ritual healing. Regarding disposition,it is evident that the supplicant must be culturallydisposed not only to accept the possibility of divinehealing but also to regard having undergone anabortion as a problem in need of healing. Thehealer’s presumption that the supplicant’s “turningpurple” indicated states of guilt and mourning arepart of the taken-for-granted nature of the latter dis-position, apparently never challenged by partici-pants. The presence of both dispositions is suggestedby the apparent fact that the healing was directedspecifically toward the abortion experience and thatthe woman’s husband was included in a systematicway, separate from his wife. The disposition to ma-ternal attachment enacted in the woman’s refusal torelinquish her imaginal baby is consistent with par-ticipation in the healing system.

Nevertheless it is necessary to recognize that thepresumption of guilt as an emotion in the supplicantcan, through performance, act as an induction ofguilt. This is especially the case when guilt is re-garded not only as an emotional but an objectivestate—that is, a state of sin. Characteristically forCharismatics, there is no explicit discussion of sinand repentance, which remain implicit in the refer-ence to “taking responsibility for” the action. In noway does this phrase mean that healing is consti-tuted by “coming to terms with having made a re-sponsible, though difficult, decision.” Instead, itmeans that emotional healing requires “acknowl-edging that by consenting to your husband’sdemand you too are responsible for a sin,” and ac-cepting divine forgiveness.

Experience of the sacred is actualized bymultisensory imagery in several cultural forms.Gendering and naming the fetus is achieved throughrevelatory imagery, and the conviction of divineempowerment is reinforced by the concurrence ofhusband’s and wife’s images in the absence ofconsultation. Divinely granted haptic, kinesthetic,




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and visual imagery of an exceedingly vivid, eideticquality is evident in the woman’s holding the imagi-nal baby and talking to it. The experience of divinepresence as a phenomenon of embodiment is at-tested by the healers’ account that, for their ownpart, they could “feel it all around, in the air,” andthat the supplicant’s imagery sequence was a “realphysical manifestation” of divine power enteringher. Finally, although not specifically recounted inthis text, it is likely that the supplicant with her childwas led through a complete imaginal performance ofbaptizing the baby and finally letting it go into thehands of Jesus.

While the imaginal form and eidetic quality ofthese experiences define them as sacred, their content achieves the third therapeutic function ofelaboration of alternatives. Two such alternatives areimplicit in this episode. First is that of actually hav-ing a baby, elaborated in the imaginal holding of thebaby and its cultural thematic of maternal-child inti-macy. Second is that of having the fetus die in aculturally appropriate way, that is, as a baby withdefinite gender, name, and Christian baptism.

It is the latter alternative that is taken up as part ofthe actualization of change, for part of the efficacy ofritual performance is precisely transforming thefetus into a person. A person in this sense is acultural representation, or more precisely an objecti-fication of indeterminate self processes [. . .] Whileboth a fetus and a baby are biological entities,whether, and at what point, they are objectified as“persons” varies across cultures. The current NorthAmerican debate is based on whether the person be-gins at conception, at birth, or in one of the culturallyestablished “trimesters” between the two. In cross-cultural perspective we see that the issue of person-hood extends even beyond birth, however. Amongthe Northern Cheyenne, children are not participantsin the moral community because they lack knowl-edge or responsibility for their actions, and are there-fore considered only “potential” persons (Fogelson1982; Ann Straus 1977). Among the Mande peoples ofAfrica, a newborn is not yet a member of the worldlyfamily, remaining unnamed till eight days after birth.The shape of the placenta is examined to determinewhether the newborn is in fact not a human personbut a saa or spirit child (R. Whittemore, personalcommunication). Among the Dogon, a fetus isconceived as a kind of fish until it has received a se-

ries of names and has been circumcised or excised, atwhich time only it is recognized as truly a boy or girl(Dieterlin 1971:226). For the Tallensi, “it is not untilan infant is weaned and has a following sibling(nyeer) that it can be said to be on the road to full per-sonhood,” a status that is in fact “only attained bydegrees over the whole course of a life” (Fortes1987:261). Among the poorest of Brazil, children areoften neither baptized nor named till they aretoddlers, and the infant that dies is considered nei-ther a human child nor yet a blessed angel. Instead,“the infant’s humanness, its personhood, and itsclaims on the mother’s attention and affectionsgrow over time, slowly, tentatively, and anxiously”(Scheper-Hughes 1990:560).

Such examples could be multiplied, and indeed apaper by Lynn Morgan (1989) does a masterful job ofsynthesizing the cross-cultural data on the person-hood of neonate humans. However in all of theseexamples, the contrast with the Charismatic practicecould not be more striking: Whereas in these instancesan already-born infant is not yet a person, in Charis-matic healing a never-to-be-born fetus is still a person.The difference is doubtless grounded in the circum-stance that in the former cases, where infant mortalityis high, no infant can necessarily be expected to sur-vive, whereas in the middle-class North America ofthe Charismatics, no infant is ever expected to die.Nevertheless, in all the cases it is the ritual action ofnaming (and baptizing or its equivalent) that bestowsthe cultural status of person. Phenomenologically re-inforced by imaginal performance, part of the actual-ization of change in the healing of abortion is creationof a person that can subsequently be prayed for andregarded as being “with Jesus.”

This is not all, however, for in this instance actual-ization of change includes the dual movement of “ac-cepting responsibility” and “letting go.” In the heal-ers’ account the supplicant’s screaming must becategorized as a kind of therapeutic breakthroughthat was buffered as they “loved her through that incollaboration with the divine presence.” The ratherpeculiar juxtaposition of “scary” and “beautiful” todescribe the situation carries a dual message relatedboth to efficacy to situational dynamics. To redefine ascary situation as a beautiful one is at once to say thatwhat was potentially negative and dangerous was, infact, highly successful—beauty is synonymous withefficacy. At the same time, it is an acknowledgment



that the dynamics of the situation nearly got out ofhand but didn’t and here, beauty is synonymouswith control. Finally, the actualization of “letting go”is the epitome of the Charismatic surrender of controlto the deity in exchange for emotional freedom. Hereagain is a dual meaning. On the one hand, the suppli-cant “lets go of” the guilt expressed in her catharticscream, and on the other she “lets go of” her cher-ished maternal intimacy and the associated grief overits absence by relinquishing the imaginal baby.

In brief summary, in the Charismatic rite forhealing abortions we see the rhetorical power ofmultisensory imaginal performance to create aproto-Gileadean cultural reality for women who par-ticipate in the ritual healing system of the Charis-matic Renewal. A clear ideological choice is madenot to make them feel alright about what they havedone but to presume their guilt and absolve them ofit through divine forgiveness; not to affirm the pre-personhood of the fetus, but to create a person andbestow upon it an identity by naming/baptizing itand specifying its gender; not to emphasize the ter-mination of the woman’s pregnancy but the deathtrauma of the fetus and to resolve it by commendingthe unborn soul to the care of the deity.

In her important cultural analysis of the abortiondebate in the contemporary United States, FayeGinsburg (1989) identifies a series of what she calls“interpretive battlegrounds” in the struggle betweenprochoice and prolife forces. The Charismatic ritual isnot a public battleground, but an internal ideologicalexercise where what is at stake is to intensify theworld view that binds the ranks of antiabortion war-riors by ritually enacting that world view in a waythat displays its doxic qualities. The spontaneousentrainment of multisensory imagery is a productof deeply inculcated dispositions of a patriarchalhabitue, and by its spontaneity is a rhetorically pow-erful display of an ethnopsychological reality. In thiscapacity the healing ritual goes beyond addressingthe issue of fetal personhood to play a powerful rolein what Ginsburg calls the “re-negotiation of preg-nancy, childbirth, and nurturance . . . in the construc-tion of female gender identity in American culture”(1989:110). Since the legalization of abortion, mother-hood can no longer be presumed to be an ascribed sta-tus, the inevitable result of pregnancy conceived as aninevitable process in women’s lives. Instead it be-comes an achieved status, the result of a decision that

“comes to signify an assertion of a particular con-struction of female identity,” in the face of necessityfor rhetorical strategies for reproducing the culture inthe absence of its formerly taken-for-granted self-reproduction (1989:109). The ritual undoing of theabortion is just such a strategy, restoring throughimaginal performance the inevitability of pregnancy,childbirth, and nurturance. Ginsburg argues that anessential aspect of prolife political action is “therefiguring of a gendered landscape through prayer,demonstration, and efforts to convert others, particu-larly women in the vulnerable and liminal position ofcarrying an unwanted pregnancy” (1989:110). TheCharismatic healing of abortions extends this refigur-ing from women who choose to carry an unwantedpregnancy to women who once chose not to carry apregnancy.

In the example recounted above, the patient waschastised for blaming her husband, an escape fromresponsibility by citing lack of accountability in theface of the patriarchal authority of the husband. Onthe one hand, the healer’s insistence that she take ashare of responsibility for the decision to abort mayseem to proffer a degree of empowerment, and the in-clusion of the husband in the ritual carries the mes-sage that the woman is not abandoned to the emo-tional consequences of the abortion. On the otherhand, insofar as the notions of sin and guilt are in-evitably contained within this acceptance of respon-sibility, the patriarchal logic is enforced wherein thewoman is obligated to bear children at all costs, evenif her husband abdicates his procreative conscience.

Japanese Mizukoo Kuyo: Notes Toward a Comparison

In the above discussion of efficacy I situated theCharismatic ritual ethnologically by surveying defi-nitions of the objectification, or coming into being, ofpersons across a variety of cultures. In this final sec-tion I want to return to the same theme with a moreprecise comparison in mind. (Contemporary Japan-ese society is the site of a more public ritual practiceof postabortion healing.)3 It is a ritual in which thespirits of aborted fetuses are propitiated through


3. I am grateful to Susan Sered for drawing my attention tothe Japanese case.



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5. Necessity is sometimes conceived under the metaphorof “culling of seedlings,” is performed in order to enhancethe viability of those that survive (LaFleur 1992:99) Thenotion of tatari, that spirits of those who die untimely, un-natural, or unjust deaths may seek revenge on the living,is an old one in Japan, and is currently rather controver-sial with respect to the practice of mizuko kuyo (LaFleur1992:55, 163–172).

prayer and through representation by stylized stat-ues or tablets. These rites are called mizuko kuyo,where mizuko refers to fetuses miscarried, stillborn,and aborted, as well as the already-born who succumbto infanticide (LaFleur 1992:16) and kuyo is a type rit-ual based on an offering of simple gifts in thanks toobjects or beings that have been in some sense usedup, ranging from domestic objects like sewing need todeceased humans (LaFleur 1992:143–146). The mizukokuyo rites appear to be essentially Buddhist in nature,but originated in the social context of the JapaneseNew Religions since the 1970s (Blacker 1989), and arecited as evidence of the commercialization of contem-porary Japanese religion since they are often highlyprofitable to the temples and organizations that per-form them (Picone 1986). In what follows, I willbriefly discuss the Japanese Buddhist mizuko kuyo inrelation to the North American Catholic Charismatichealing of abortions in order to begin to point to theplace these overtly similar practices occupy in the cul-tural configurations of their respective societies.4

First let us take care to contextualize the relativesocial space occupied by these two practices. TheAmerican practice is largely a private one that takesplace within the membership of a discrete religiousmovement within Christianity and is a specific in-stance of the healing system elaborated within thatmovement. The Japanese practice has a relativelypublic profile not limited to a particular social groupand is an instance of a type of ritual common to avariety of forms of Buddhism. Historically, theCharismatic Renewal and the mizuko cult are con-temporaneous, products of the post-1960s culturalferment that spawned the New Age Christian funda-mentalism, a renewed interest in Eastern spirituali-ties in the United States, and the various NewReligions and a fluorescence of interest in spirit pos-session in Japan. Just as the Charismatic Renewaland other forms of neo-Pentecostalism have been as-sociated with the neoconservative Christian rightin America, some of the Japanese mizuko have beenobserved to have right-wing fundamentalist, natu-ralist, or Shinto connections.

In the United States, abortion was legalized for thefirst time in the early 1970s as a result of the Supreme

Court decision in Roe v. Wade, while in Japan abortionhas a deeper history. Both abortion and infanticidewere common from the early 1700s to the mid-1800s,when an abortion debate ensued among Buddhist,neo-Shinto, and neo-Confucian positions in the con-text of a nationalism that demanded populationgrowth and condemned such practices. Only follow-ing World War II in 1948 was abortion again legal-ized. Since that time, it has become the most popularform of birth control in Japan. Just as in the context ofthe American abortion debate the Charismatic prayerfor healing tends to emphasize the aborted ratherthan the stillborn or miscarried fetus, in the context ofthe postwar commonality of abortion the abortedfetus has taken precedence as the primary referent ofthe Japanese term mizuko.

In both societies the affective issue addressed bythe ritual is guilt, whereas in the United States this isa guilt occurring under the sign of sin, in Japan it isguilt under the sign of necessity. For the Americansabortion is an un-Christian act, and both perpetratorand victim must be ritually brought back into theChristian moral and emotional universe; for theJapanese both the acceptance of abortion as neces-sary and the acknowledgment of guilt are circum-scribed within the Buddhist moral and emotionaluniverse. Both rites are intended to heal the distressexperienced by the woman, but the etiology of theillness is somewhat differently construed in the twocases. For Charismatics, any symptoms displayed bythe woman are the result of the abortion as psycho-logical trauma compounded by guilt, along with themore or less indirect effects of the restive fetal spirit“crying out” for love and comfort. In Japan suchsymptoms are attributed to vengeance and resent-ment on the part of the aborted fetal spirit that is thepained victim of an unnatural, albeit necessary, act.5

Finally, not only the etiology but the emotional workaccomplished by the two rituals is construeddifferently. As we have seen, for the Charismatics

4. My discussion of mizuko kuyo and abortion in Japan reliesheavily on the excellent account provided by LaFleur (1992).



this is a work of forgiveness and of letting go. For theJapanese it is a work of thanks and apology to thefetus, where m cultural context gratitude and guiltare not sharply differentiated. Thus, “[t]here is nogreat need to determine precisely whether one is ad-dressing a guilt—pre-supposing ‘apology’ to amizuko or merely expressing ‘thanks’ to it for havingvacated its place in the body of a woman and havingmoved on, leaving her—and her family—relativelyfree of its physical presence” (LaFleur 1992:147).

We can now compare the two postabortionhealing practices with respect to what they assumeand what they produce with regard to the ethno-ontology of the person. The American Charismaticritual is largely an “imaginal performance” (conferCsordas 1994a) in which the woman may vividly ex-perience holding the imaginal fetus/baby, while theJapanese ritual typically includes the concrete repre-sentation of the fetus/baby in the form of a statue.For the Americans, the fetus is a distinct little beingthat at a certain point is given over to Jesus who is itssavior and protector. The Japanese statue (mizukojizo), on the other hand, assimilates the infant andsavior in the same representation, a bald anddiminutive monklike entity with infantile featuressometimes described as “the Bodhisattva who wearsa bib.” This contrast in the ontological status of thefetus is recapitulated in the respective culturalnotions of the coming into being of persons. Ameri-can Charismatics regard personhood to be definitiveat the moment of conception, whereas for Japanesebecoming a person is neither a matter of conceptionnor of birth, but a gradual ontological processwherein “in coming bit by bit into the social world ofhuman beings there is a thickening or densificationof being,” the inverse of a thinning of being as a per-son ages into ancestorhood and Buddhahood(LaFleur 1992:33). Thus, for the Charismatics, abor-tion is the definitive termination of a human life,while in the Japanese vies the aborted fetus can aseasily be thought of as returning to a state of prebe-ing where it may be held till a later date as to a statecomparable to that of deceased ancestors.

Given these differences, the intent of the Charis-matic ritual is to move rhetorically the dead fetusahead into a secure post-life union with the deity,whereas the intent of the Japanese ritual is to securethe fetus’ good will either as it slips back into its pre-life state or as it advances to the realm of the Buddhas.

Charismatics tend to eschew the old Catholic folk no-tion of a limbo where unbaptized infants must remainseparated from the deity (Linn, Linn, and Fabricant1985), whereas Japanese may embrace a kind oflimbo from whence the fetus may return at a laterdate. In this respect it is instructive to consider thedifference in meaning of the ritual symbolism ofwater and of naming. In the Charismatic ritual imag-inal water is used to baptize the fetus, an act thatensures the reunion of the fetus with Jesus. In theJapanese case, water is an essential element in thevery definition of the fetus: The term mizuko meansliterally “children of the waters,” which in a literalsense refers to the amniotic fluids, while in an onto-logical sense refers to the ambiguous status of thefetus we have been discussing. Whereas for Charis-matics water baptism and return to Jesus is thecultural constitution of the fetus as person, the use ofwater symbolism in Japan highlights the fluidity ofbeing that characterizes the ontological status of thefetus. Given that in Buddhism impermanence, suf-fering, and the absence of self are fundamental char-acteristics of all things, “the fetus as a mizuko in theprocess of sliding from its relative formedness as ahuman into a state of progressive liquidization isdoing no other than following the most basic law ofexperience” (LaFleur 1992:28). A similar point can bemade with respect to naming the aborted fetus. Forthe American Charismatics, naming is an aspect ofbaptism that contributes to the objectification of thefetus as person. For the Japanese, while the processof bestowing a posthumous ancestral name (kaimyo)is often a part of the ritual, it is often controversialwhether it is more appropriate to allow an unnamedfetus to “slip back” into pre-being or to be namedand thereby advanced into a state comparable toancestorhood.

Contemporary civilization has advanced too farinto the process of globalization to allow us to pre-sume that the two rituals we have been discussing arenecessarily isolated one from the other. Werblowsky(1991) critically refers to claims that there is a move-ment in the United States that is learning from Japanto fill the lacunae within Christianity, and sarcasti-cally asks whether “in addition to their belief insouls they also believe (in good Japanese fashion) infamily trees of souls, in which the souls of even un-born children remain closely related to the ances-tors” (1991:327, 328). In this Werblowsky appears to




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confuse the movement associated with the label of“Zen Catholicism” among progressive Catholicmonks with the quite separate and markedly moreconservative Catholic Charismatic Renewal. The for-mer is doubtless connected in some degree with theJapan-based Catholic journal of religious studies inwhich Werblowsky’s own article appears. In his owntext, however, he implicitly refers to the CatholicCharismatic Renewal, even citing the work by Linn,Linn, and Fabricant. While in addition to ZenCatholicism there is some proselytizing with respectto mizuko kuyo on the part of Japanese Buddhists inthe West (confer LaFleur 1992:150, 172), if such an in-fluence is present among Charismatics it is certainlyless direct than Werblowsky presumes. Charismatichealers Linn, Linn, and Fabricant in passing ac-knowledge awareness of mizuko kuyo, citing anotherCharismatic author who in turn cites an article in TheWall Street Journal, of the practice of Japanese women“increasingly going to Buddhist temples where theypay $115 for a ritualized service to get rid of theirguilt for the abortion, experienced in recurring baddreams” (1985:128).

On the other hand, to answer Werblowsky’scomment about family trees, in the 1980s manyCharismatics adopted a form of healing called, vari-ously, healing of ancestry or healing the family tree.Along with their more psychological interpretationsof guilt and grief, Linn, Linn, and Fabricant (1985) fa-vorably cite this notion, popularized by the BritishCharismatic psychiatrist Kenneth McCall (1982).They write that the fetus that has not been lovinglyaccepted by its family and committed to God “willcry out for love and prayer to a living family mem-ber,” with subsequent psychological impact onparents, on parents’ abilities to relate to older

children or children yet to be born, and on such chil-dren themselves. What is noteworthy here is thatMcAll’s practice was inspired by observing Chinesepractices with regard to ancestors and ghosts, im-plicitly assimilating them to souls in purgatory orlimbo, while living and practicing abroad. Moresignificant than whether the Charismatic practice isan instance of either classic cultural diffusion or spu-rious cultural borrowing, what this suggests is thatdespite its overt fundamentalist tendencies, theCatholic Charismatic Renewal and contemporaryNew Religion/Buddhism are mutually participantin the globally prevailing postmodern condition ofculture.

Conclusion

For a society in the throes of moral debate aboutabortion, where claims are made in terms of moralabsolutes, the limits of cultural relativism are testedwith the mere observation that “ritual performancecreates a cultural reality.” In this chapter I have at-tempted to give an account of the creation of mean-ing and the nature of therapeutic efficacy in a ritualthat rhetorically partakes in this serious cultural de-bate in contemporary American society, and to con-trast it with a parallel ritual in contemporary Japan.The account and the cross-cultural comparison pointbeyond relativism to the observation that within thelimits posed by their own configuration, cultures cancreate and define the very problems to which theythen develop therapeutic solutions. In the end, tocultivate guilt in order to relieve it is doubtless aform of creativity, but this cannot be said withoutalso acknowledging that one of the products ofhuman creativity can be human oppression.



135

Reprinted by permission of the American AnthropologicalAssociation from AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, vol. 58(1956), pp. 503–507. Not for further reproduction.

The anthropologist has become so familiar with thediversity of ways in which different peoples behavein similar situations that he is not apt to be surprisedby even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of thelogically possible combinations of behavior have notbeen found somewhere in the world, he is apt to sus-pect that they must be present in some yet unde-scribed tribe. This point has, in fact, been expressedwith respect to clan organization by Murdock (1949:71). In this light, the magical beliefs and practices ofthe Nacirema present such unusual aspects that itseems desirable to describe them as an example ofthe extremes to which human behavior can go.

Professor Linton first brought the ritual of theNacirema to the attention of anthropologists twentyyears ago (1936: 326), but the culture of this people isstill very poorly understood. They are a NorthAmerican group living in the territory between theCanadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare ofMexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles.

Little is known of their origin, though traditionstates that they came from the east. According toNacirema mythology, their nation was originated bya culture hero, Notgnishaw, who is otherwise knownfor two great feats of strength—the throwing of apiece of wampum across the river Pa-To-Mac and thechopping down of the cherry tree in which the Spiritof Truth resided.

Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly de-veloped market economy which has evolved in arich natural habitat. While much of the people’s timeis devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of thefruits of these labors and a considerable portion ofthe day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of thisactivity is the human body, the appearance andhealth of which loom as a dominant concern in theethos of the people. While such a concern is certainlynot unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associatedphilosophy are unique.

The fundamental belief underlying the wholesystem appears to be that the human body is uglyand that its natural tendency is to debility and dis-ease. Incarcerated in such a body, man’s only hope isto avert these characteristics through the use of thepowerful influences of ritual and ceremony. Every

17

Body Ritual Amongthe NaciremaHorace Miner

This article is a classic of anthropological literature. In it, Horace Miner gives readers a thor-ough and exciting ethnographic account of the myriad of taboos and ceremonial behaviors thatpermeate the everyday activities of the members of a magic-ridden society. Focusing on secret rit-uals that are believed to prevent disease while beautifying the body, Miner demonstrates theimportance of ceremonial specialists, such as the “holy-mouth-men” and the “listeners,” in di-recting even the most routine aspects of daily life among the Nacirema. Miner finds it difficult tounderstand how the Nacirema have managed to exist so long under the burdens that they haveimposed on themselves.



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household has one or more shrines devoted to thispurpose. The more powerful individuals in the soci-ety have several shrines in their houses and, in fact,the opulence of a house is often referred to in termsof the number of such ritual centers it possesses.Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, butthe shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walledwith stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by apply-ing pottery plaques to their shrine walls.

While each family has at least one such shrine, therituals associated with it are not family ceremoniesbut are private and secret. The rites are normallyonly discussed with children, and then only duringthe period when they are being initiated into thesemysteries. I was able, however, to establish sufficientrapport with the natives to examine these shrinesand to have the rituals described to me.

The focal point of the shrine is a box or chestwhich is built into the wall. In this chest are kept themany charms and magical potions without which nonative believes he could live. These preparations aresecured from a variety of specialized practitioners.The most powerful of these are the medicine men,whose assistance must be rewarded with substantialgifts. However, the medicine men do not provide thecurative potions for their clients, but decide what theingredients should be and then write them down inan ancient and secret language. This writing is un-derstood only by the medicine men and by theherbalists who, for another gift, provide the requiredcharm.

The charm is not disposed of after it has served itspurpose, but is placed in the charm-box of the house-hold shrine. As these magical materials are specificfor certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies ofthe people are many, the charm-box is usually full tooverflowing. The magical packets are so numerousthat people forget what their purposes were and fearto use them again. While the natives are very vagueon this point, we can only assume that the idea inretaining all the old magical materials is that theirpresence in the charm-box, before which the bodyrituals are conducted, will in some way protect theworshipper.

Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each dayevery member of the family, in succession, enters theshrine room, bows his head before the charm-box,mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, andproceeds with a brief rite of ablution. The holy

waters are secured from the Water Temple of thecommunity, where the priests conduct elaborateceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.

In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and belowthe medicine men in prestige, are specialists whosedesignation is best translated “holy-mouth-men.” TheNacirema have an almost pathological horror andfascination with the mouth, the condition of which isbelieved to have supernatural influence on all socialrelationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth,they believe that their teeth would fall out, theirgums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desertthem, and their lovers reject them. (They also believethat a strong relationship exists between oral andmoral characteristics. For example, there is a ritualablution of the mouth for children which is sup-posed to improve their moral fiber.)

The daily body ritual performed by everyone in-cludes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these peo-ple are so punctilious about care of the mouth, thisrite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiatedstranger as revolting. It was reported to me that theritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hoghairs into the mouth, along with certain magicalpowders, and then moving the bundle in a highlyformalized series of gestures.

In addition to the private mouth-rite, the peopleseek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year.These practitioners have an impressive set of para-phernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls,probes, and prods. The use of these objects in theexorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almostunbelievable ritual torture of the client. The holy-mouth-man opens the client’s mouth and, using theabove-mentioned tools, enlarges any holes whichdecay may have created in the teeth. Magical materi-als are put into these holes. If there are no naturallyoccurring holes in the teeth, large sections of one ormore teeth are gouged out so that the supernaturalsubstance can be applied. In the client’s view, thepurpose of these ministrations is to arrest decay andto draw friends. The extremely sacred and tradi-tional character of the rite is evident in the fact thatthe natives return to the holy-mouth-men year afteryear, despite the fact that their teeth continue todecay.

It is to be hoped that, when a thorough study ofthe Nacirema is made, there will be a careful inquiryinto the personality structure of these people. One



has but to watch the gleam in the eye of a holy-mouth-man, as he jabs an awl into an exposed nerve,to suspect that a certain amount of sadism is in-volved. If this can be established, a very interestingpattern emerges, for most of the population showsdefinite masochistic tendencies. It was to these thatProfessor Linton referred in discussing a distinctivepart of the daily body ritual which is performed onlyby men. This part of the rite involves scraping andlacerating the surface of the face with a sharp instru-ment. Special women’s rites are performed only fourtimes during each lunar month, but what they lack infrequency is made up in barbarity. As part of this cer-emony, women bake their heads in small ovens forabout an hour. The theoretically interesting point isthat what seems to be a preponderantly masochisticpeople have developed sadistic specialists.

The medicine men have an imposing temple, orlatipso, in every community of any size. The moreelaborate ceremonies required to treat very sick pa-tients can only be performed at this temple. Theseceremonies involve not only the thaumaturge but apermanent group of vestal maidens who movesedately about the temple chambers in distinctivecostume and headdress.

The latipso ceremonies are so harsh that it is phe-nomenal that a fair proportion of the really sicknatives who enter the temple ever recover. Smallchildren whose indoctrination is still incompletehave been known to resist attempts to take themto the temple because “that is where you go to die.”Despite this fact, sick adults are not only willing buteager to undergo the protracted ritual purification, ifthey can afford to do so. No matter how ill the sup-plicant or how grave the emergency, the guardians ofmany temples will not admit a client if he cannotgive a rich gift to the custodian. Even after one hasgained admission and survived the ceremonies, theguardians will not permit the neophyte to leave untilhe makes still another gift.

The supplicant entering the temple is firststripped of all his or her clothes. In every-day life theNacirema avoids exposure of his body and its nat-ural functions. Bathing and excretory acts are per-formed only in the secrecy of the household shrine,where they are ritualized as part of the body-rites.Psychological shock results from the fact that bodysecrecy is suddenly lost upon entry into the latipso. Aman, whose own wife has never seen him in an

excretory act, suddenly finds himself naked andassisted by a vestal maiden while he performs hisnatural functions into a sacred vessel. This sort ofceremonial treatment is necessitated by the fact thatthe excreta are used by a diviner to ascertain thecourse and nature of the client’s sickness. Femaleclients, on the other hand, find their naked bodies aresubjected to the scrutiny, manipulation, and prod-ding of the medicine men.

Few supplicants in the temples are well enough todo anything but lie on their hard beds. The daily cer-emonies, like the rites of the holy-mouth-men, in-volve discomfort and torture. With ritual precision,the vestals awaken their miserable charges eachdawn and roll them about on their beds of painwhile performing ablutions, in the formal move-ments of which the maidens are highly trained. Atother times they insert magic wands in the suppli-cant’s mouth or force him to eat substances whichare supposed to be healing. From time to time themedicine men come to their clients and jab magicallytreated needles into their flesh. The fact that thesetemple ceremonies may not cure, and may even killthe neophyte, in no way decreases the people’s faithin the medicine men.

There remains one other kind of practitioner, knownas a “listener.” This witch-doctor has the power toexorcise the devils that lodge in the heads of peoplewho have been bewitched. The Nacirema believethat parents bewitch their own children. Mothers areparticularly suspected of putting a curse on childrenwhile teaching them the secret body rituals. Thecounter-magic of the witch-doctor is unusual in itslack of ritual. The patient simply tells the “listener”all his troubles and fears, beginning with the earliestdifficulties he can remember. The memory displayedby the Nacirema in these exorcism sessions is trulyremarkable. It is not uncommon for the patient to be-moan the rejection he felt upon being weaned as ababe, and a few individuals even see their troublesgoing back to the traumatic effects of their own birth.

In conclusion, mention must be made of certainpractices which have their base in native estheticsbut which depend upon the pervasive aversion tothe natural body and its functions. There are ritualfasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feaststo make thin people fat. Still other rites are used tomake women’s breasts large if they are small, and

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Suggested Readings

Beattie, John 1970 “On Understanding Ritual.” In Bryan R. Wilson, ed. Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bell, Catherine 1997 Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Moore, Sally Falk, and Barbara, Myerhoff, eds. 1977 Secular Ritual. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum.

Turner, Victor 1967 The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

smaller if they are large. General dissatisfaction withbreast shape is symbolized in the fact that the idealform is virtually outside the range of human varia-tion. A few women afflicted with almost inhumanhyper-mammary development are so idolized thatthey make a handsome living by simply going fromvillage to village and permitting the natives to stareat them for a fee.

Reference has already been made to the fact that ex-cretory functions are ritualized, routinized, and rele-gated to secrecy. Natural reproductive functions aresimilarly distorted. Intercourse is taboo as a topicand scheduled as an act. Efforts are made to avoidpregnancy by the use of magical materials or by lim-iting intercourse to certain phases of the moon. Con-ception is actually very infrequent. When pregnant,women dress so as to hide their condition. Parturition

takes place in secret, without friends or relatives toassist, and the majority of women do not nurse theirinfants.

Our review of the ritual life of the Nacirema hascertainly shown them to be a magic-ridden people. Itis hard to understand how they have managed toexist so long under the burdens which they have im-posed upon themselves. But even such exotic cus-toms as these take on real meaning when they areviewed with the insight provided by Malinowskiwhen he wrote (1948: 70):

Looking from far and above, from our high placesof safety in the developed civilization, it is easy tosee all the crudity and irrelevance of magic. Butwithout its power and guidance early man couldnot have mastered his practical difficulties as he hasdone, nor could man have advanced to the higherstages of civilization.


4. Shamans, Priests, and Prophets


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CHAPTER FOUR

Shamans,Priests, andProphets

Where and how do religious leaders get their power? What is the distinction between ashaman and a priest, or a prophet and a priest? How do sorcerers, diviners, and magiciansdiffer? This chapter introduces the topic of religious specialists.

Any member of society may approach the supernatural on an individual basis; for ex-ample, a person may kneel to the ground, all alone, and recite a prayer for help from thespiritual world. But the religions of the world, whether small, animistic cults or the “greatfaiths,” also have intermediaries: religious people who, acting as part-time or full-time spe-cialists, intervene on behalf of an individual client or an entire community. Paul Radin(1937: 107) argued that the development of religion can be traced to the social roles under-taken by each of these “priest-thinkers”—at once, a philosopher of religion, a theologian ofbeliefs, a person who is the recognized master of worship.

If all religions appear to have specialists, anthropologists have also found that some so-cieties place more emphasis on these religious experts than others do. Robert Textor hasnoted, for example, that the societies that are more likely to have religious specialists tendto produce food rather than collect it, use money as a medium of exchange, and display dif-ferent social classes and a complex political system (1967). In other words, the more com-plex the society, the greater is the likelihood of having religious intermediaries.

Early anthropologists were drawn to the view of unilineal evolution: how institutionsprogressed from savagery to barbarism, finally achieving a civilized state. As societies ad-vance, all institutions become more complex and specialized. In this classic work PrimitiveCulture (1871), E. B. Tylor posited an early definition of religion that prompted his col-leagues to concern themselves with religious specialization. Describing religion as the beliefin spiritual beings, what he called “animism,” Tylor implied that a society’s degree of reli-gious specialization was directly related to its position on the evolutionary scale. Unilinealevolutionary theory was pockmarked with faulty premises, of course: although cultures doevolve, they do not necessarily follow a prescribed series of stages. What is important tonote here, however, is that Tylor and his contemporaries began to look carefully at religious

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specialization and categories of religious phenomena. J. G. Frazer, in The Golden Bough(1890), distinguished between magic and religion and described the role of specialists. AndHerbert Spencer’s approach, in the Principles of Sociology (1896), that religious stages couldbe comprehended only if the functions of religion and the interrelationships of religion withother institutions were known, demanded that religious specialization be studied in termsof its functions in society—an approach that anthropologists still adhere to today. Anthro-pological data have shown the importance of shamans, priests, prophets, and other special-ists to the maintenance of economic, political, social, and educational institutions of theirsocieties.

The anthropological literature devoted to religious specialists is extensive; much workremains, however, to define and distinguish adequately between the actual functions theyperform for members of their societies. Because of limitations on the application of bio-medical (Western) therapy in the Third World, traditional doctors play a crucial role in heal-ing (Hepburn 1988: 68). Shamans, for example, have duties and religious obligations thatdiffer from society to society, although their basic duty of curing through the use of the su-pernatural is accepted by anthropologists. J. M. Atkinson’s review article, “ShamanismsToday” (1992), demonstrates the continuing importance of shamanic practices in the con-temporary non-Western world. The same kinds of differences exist in the tasks performedby prophets, priests, sorcerers, and others designated as “intermediaries” with the super-natural. Without a clear understanding of these distinctions, systematic cross-cultural com-parisons would be impossible.

In addition to the definitional problem associated with specialists, anthropologists mustalso determine whether to place the tasks performed by these experts under the rubric of“the religious” or to create other categories for such activities. Is the performance of magic,witchcraft, and sorcery “religious” behavior, or are these examples of nonreligious, indeedantireligious acts? If those who practice these acts are outside the religious realm, thenwhat, if any, connection do they have with the sacred? The real question becomes, What isreligion? In Western culture, witchcraft, magic, and sorcery are assigned to the occult andare considered outside of and, ordinarily, counter to religion. In the non-Western world,however, specialists who take part in these kinds of activities are often considered to be im-portant parts of the total religious belief system. It is a common view in Africa south of theSahara that people are often designated witches by God, and that sorcerers and magiciansreceive their power from the spirit world—that is, from supernatural agencies controlled byGod. In these terms, is drawing upon supernatural aid from shamans, priests, or prophetsmore “religious” than turning to magicians, sorcerers, and other specialists who also callupon supernatural agents but for different ends? In light of these questions, anthropologistshave found it necessary to consider all specialists whose power emanates from supernat-ural agents to be in the realm of the religious, although some specialists serve, whereas oth-ers harm society through their actions.

Because not all societies contain identical religious specialists, determining why certainspecialists exist and others do not is important to our understanding of the structure of asociety and its supernatural world, as well as of the causal forces behind good and badfortune. In societies where witches do not exist, for example, it is frequently malicious ghostsor ancestors who are believed to bring misfortune and illness. In such cases, elders may playan important role as diviners, in contrast to the diviner specialists that exist in other groups.Such data not only aid our understanding of supernatural causation and specialization butalso demonstrate the connection between the social structure of the living—the position ofthe elder in society—and that of the ancestor or ghost in the afterworld.

140 | SHAMANS, PRIESTS, AND PROPHETS




The difficulty in making distinctions among non-Western specialists may be further re-alized by considering the position of the religious layleader in the United States. Althoughnot a specialist in the traditional sense, this individual is nevertheless more involved andusually more knowledgeable than the typical church member. Is the layleader significantlydifferent from one of the more traditional part-time specialists? The problem of the degreeof participation comes to mind—part-time versus full-time—accompanied by the compli-cating factor of training—formal versus on-the-job learning. Making distinctions such asthese is an important part of analytic accounts of religious functionaries.

The five excellent articles that follow tell us much about the religious specialist. Victor W.Turner’s lead-off essay provides a broad-spectrum account of the various specialists whoappear in ethnographic descriptions of religions around the world.

Piers Vitebsky provides an overview of shamanism as understood by anthropologists, fo-cusing on the Inuit and Sora, and with attention to intellectual disagreements over definitions.

Reflecting on research in Peru, Michael Fobes Brown rejects romanticized views ofshamanism, reminding readers of the anxiety and violence that may accompany thephenomenon.

The fourth article, by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, provides a detailed account of priest-hood among the Kogi of Colombia. The author focuses on the lengthy and elaborate train-ing young men must undergo to become priests.

Michael Barkun concludes the chapter with an in-depth look into the minds of theBranch Davidians and their prophetic leader, David Koresh, as well as the FBI and ATFauthorities and the tragic clash at Waco, Texas.

References

Atkinson, J. M.1992 “Shamanisms Today.” Annual Reviews in Anthropology 21: 307–30.

Frazer, J. G.1890 The Golden Bough. London: MacMillan.

Hepburn, Sharon J.1988 “Western Minds, Foreign Bodies.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 2 (New Series):

59–74.

Radin, Paul1937 Primitive Religion: Its Nature and Origin. New York: Dover.

Spencer, H.1896 Principles of Sociology. New York: D. Appleton.

Textor, Robert1967 A Cross-Cultural Summary. New Haven, Conn.: HRAF Press.

Tylor, E. B.1871 Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion,

Language, Art and Custom. London: J. Murray.

INTRODUCTION | 141




142

A religious specialist is one who devotes himself to aparticular branch of religion or, viewed organiza-tionally, of a religious system. “Religion” is a multivo-cal term whose range of meanings varies in differentsocial and historical contexts. Nevertheless, most de-finitions of religion refer to the recognition of a trans-human controlling power that may be either per-sonal or impersonal. A religious specialist has aculturally defined status relevant to this recognition.In societies or contexts where such power is re-garded as impersonal, anthropologists customarilydescribe it as magic, and those who manipulate thepower are magicians. Wherever power is personal-ized, as deity, gods, spirits, daemons, genii, ancestralshades, ghosts, or the like, anthropologists speak ofreligion. In reality, religious systems contain bothmagical and religious beliefs and procedures: inmany of them the impersonal transhuman (or mysti-cal, or non-empirical, or supernatural) power is con-sidered to be a devolution of personal power, as in

the case of the mystical efficacy of rites establishedin illo tempore by a deity or divinized ancestor.

Priest and Prophet

Scholars have tended to distinguish between two po-larities of religious specialization. Max Weber, for ex-ample, although well aware of numerous historicalinstances of their overlap and interpenetration, con-trasts the roles of priest and prophet. He begins bymaking a preliminary distinction between priest andmagician. A priest, he writes, is always associatedwith “the functioning of a regularly organized andpermanent enterprise concerned with influencingthe gods—in contrast with the individual and occa-sional efforts of magicians.” Accordingly, the crucialfeature of priesthood is that it represents the “spe-cialization of a particular group of persons in thecontinuous operation of a cultic enterprise, perma-nently associated with particular norms, places andtimes, and related to specific social groups.” InWeber’s view, the prophet is distinguished from thepriest by “personal call.” The priest’s claim to reli-gious authority derives from his service in a sacredtradition; the authority of the prophet is founded onrevelation and personal “charisma.” This latter term

18

Religious SpecialistsVictor W. Turner

Noted for his contributions to the study of symbolism and the structure of rituals, Victor W. Turnerhere introduces the basic terms for different types of religious specialists, as conventionally used byanthropologists. Turner focuses upon the most commonly used terms such as shaman, priest, and prophet,but includes other, less prominent but often equally important religious specialists as well—diviners,seers, mediums, witches, sorcerers, and magicians—and discusses how each type of specialist is likelyto appear in societies with particular levels of social complexity and political specialization. Whilethese terms appear throughout the anthropological literature with a fair degree of consistency, insome cases (for example, the term “shaman”), anthropologists disagree about how widely or narrowlythe term should be applied. Turner’s overview lays the groundwork for the articles to follow, whichdeal specifically with shamans, priests, and prophets.

Reprinted by permission of the publisher from theINTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIALSCIENCES, David L. Sills, Editor. vol. 13, pp. 437–44.Copyright © 1972 by Crowell Collier and Macmillan.




has been variously defined by Weber (in some con-texts it seems almost to represent the Führerprinzip),but it may broadly be held to designate extraordi-nary powers. These include, according to Weber,“the capacity to achieve the ecstatic states which areviewed, in accordance with primitive experience, asthe preconditions for producing certain effects inmeteorology, healing, divination and telepathy.” Butcharisma may be either ascribed or achieved. It maybe an inherent faculty (“primary charisma”) or itmay be “produced artificially in an object or personthrough some extraordinary means.” Charisma maythus be “merited” by fastings, austerities, or otherordeals. Even in such cases, Weber asserts, theremust be some dormant capacity in the persons or ob-jects, some “germ” of extraordinary power, alreadyvested in them. The prophet, then, is a “purelyindividual bearer of charisma,” rather than the rep-resentative of a sacred tradition. He produces dis-continuity in that cultic enterprise which it is thepriest’s major role to keep “in continuous opera-tion.” Weber’s prophet feels that he has a “mission”by virtue of which he “proclaims religious doctrineor divine commandment.” Weber refuses to distin-guish sharply between a “renewer of religion” whopreaches “an older revelation, actual or supposi-tious” and a “founder of religion” who claims tobring completely new “deliverances,” for, he says,“the two types merge into one another.” In Weber’sview, the charisma of a prophet appears to contain,in addition to ecstatic and visionary components, arational component, for he proclaims “a systematicand distinctively religious ethic based upon a consis-tent and stable doctrine which purports to be a reve-lation” [(1922)].

Weber’s distinction between priest and prophethas its main relevance in an analytical frame of ref-erence constructed to consider the relationship be-tween religion as “a force for dynamic socialchange” and religion as “a reinforcement of the sta-bility of societies” (Parsons 1963). It has been foundeffective by such anthropologists as Evans-Pritchard([1956] 1962) and Worsley (1957a; 1957b) who aredealing directly with social transitions and “theprophetic break,” or what Parsons calls “the pri-mary decision point [between] a direction whichmakes for a source of evolutionary change in the . . .established or traditional order, and a directionwhich tends either to reinforce the established order

or at least not to change it drastically” (1963; p. xxixin 1964 edition).

Priest and Shaman

Anthropologists who are less concerned than Weberwith the genesis of religions and with internal devel-opments in complex societies or their impact on the“primitive” world are inclined to contrast priest notwith prophet but with shaman or spirit medium andto examine the relationship between these statusesas part of the normal working of the religious systemin the simpler societies. In their excellently represen-tative Reader in Comparative Religion (1958), the edi-tors W. A. Lessa and E. Z. Vogt devote a whole sec-tion to this distinction.

Often, where there is a priest the shaman is absent,and vice versa, although both these roles may befound in the same religion, as among the Plains Indi-ans. According to Lowie (1954), a Plains Indianshaman is a ritual practitioner whose status is ac-quired through a personal communication from asupernatural being, whereas a priest does not neces-sarily have a face-to-face relationship with the spiritworld but must have competence in conducting rit-ual. Lessa and Vogt ([1958] 1965: 410) expand thesedifferences: a shaman’s powers come by “divinestroke,” a priest’s power is inherited or is derivedfrom the body of codified and standardized ritualknowledge that he learns from older priests and latertransmits to successors. They find that shamanismtends to predominate in food-gathering cultures,where the shaman most frequently performs a curingrite for the benefit of one or more patients and withinthe context of an extended family group. Shamanis-tic rites are “non-calendrical,” or contingent uponoccasions of mishap and illness. The priest andpriestly cult organization are characteristically foundin the more structurally elaborated food-producing—usually agricultural—societies, where the more com-mon ceremonial is a public rite performed for thebenefit of a whole village or community. Such ritesare often calendrical, or performed at critical pointsin the ecological cycle.

Shaman and Medium

Raymond Firth (1964a: 638) regards shamanism asitself “that particular form of spirit mediumship in

TURNER • RELIGIOUS SPECIALISTS | 143




which a specialist (the shaman) normally himself amedium, is deemed to exercise developed tech-niques of control over spirits, sometimes includingmastery of spirits believed to be possessing anothermedium.” This definition, like that of Howells(1948), stresses the control exercised over spirits.Howells describes the shaman as “bullyragging”gods or spirits and emphasizes his intellectual qual-ities as a leader. This element of mastery makes theshaman a distinctive type of spirit medium, onewho is believed to be “possessed by a spirit (orclosely controlled by a spirit) [and who] can serveas a means of communication between other humanbeings and the spirit world” (Firth 1964b: 689). Thespirit medium per se need not exert mastery; heis rather the vessel or vehicle of the transhumanentity.

Thus, although we sometimes find the two func-tions of priest and shaman combined in the same in-dividual (Piddington 1950), mediums, shamans, andprophets clearly constitute subtypes of a single typeof religious functionary. The priest communicateswith transhuman entities through ritual that in-volves cultural objects and activities. The medium,shaman, and prophet communicate in a person-to-person manner: they are in what Buber (1936) woulddescribe as an I-thou relationship with the deities orspirits. The priest, on the other hand, is in what maybe called an I-it relationship with the transhuman.Between the priest and the deity intervenes the insti-tution. Priests may therefore be classified as institu-tional functionaries in the religious domain, whilemedium, shaman, and prophet may be regarded assubtypes of inspirational functionaries. This distinc-tion is reflected in characteristically different modesof operation. The priest presides over a rite; theshaman or medium conducts a seance. Symbolicforms associated with these occasions differ correla-tively: the symbols of a rite are sensorily perceptibleto a congregation and have permanence in that theyare culturally transmissible, while those of a seanceare mostly in the mind of the entranced functionary aselements of his visions or fantasies and are oftengenerated by and limited to the unique occasion. Theinspirational functionary may describe what he hasclairvoyantly perceived (or “been shown” as hemight put it), but the institutional functionary ma-nipulates symbolic objects with prescribed gesturesin full view of this congregation.

Sociocultural Correlates

Since the priest is an actor in a culturally “scripted”drama, it is but rarely that priests become innovators,or “dramatists.” If they do assume this role it ismainly as legislative reformers—by altering the de-tails of liturgical procedure—that they do so. If apriest becomes a radical innovator in religion, he islikely to become a prophet to his followers and aheretic to his former superiors. From the priestlyviewpoint it is the office, role, and script that are sa-cred and “charismatic” and not the incumbent ofpriestly office. The priest is concerned with the con-servation and maintenance of a deposit of beliefs andpractices handed down as a sacred trust from thefounders of the social or religious system. Since itssymbols at the semantic level tend to condense thecriticalvalues,norms,andprinciplesof thetotalculturalsystem into a few sensorily perceptible representa-tions, the sanctification of these symbols is tanta-mount to a preservative of the entire culture. What thepriest is and does keeps cultural change and individ-ual deviation within narrow limits. But the energyand time of the inspirational functionary is less boundup with the maintenance of the total cultural system.His practice has more of an ad hoc flavor; he is moresensitive and responsive than the priest to the privateand personal, to the mutable and idiosyncratic. Thistype of functionary thrives in loosely structured food-gathering cultures, where he deals individually withspecific occasions of trouble, or during periods of so-cial turbulence and change, when societal consensusabout values is sharply declining and numerically sig-nificant classes of persons and social groups are be-coming alienated from the orthodox social order. Theshaman subtype is completely a part of the culturalsystem of the food-gatherers; the prophet may wellstand outside the cultural system during such a pe-riod of decomposition and propose new doctrines,ethics, and even economic values.

The shaman is not a radical or a reformer, sincethe society he services is traditionally flexible andmobile; the prophet is an innovator and reformer,for he confronts a tightly structured order that ismoribund and points the way to religious forms thatwill either provide an intensified cognitive dynamicfor sociocultural change or codify the new moral,ideational, and social structures that have been inar-ticulately developing.





There are of course significant differences in thescale of the societies in which shaman and prophetoperate. The shaman enacts his roles in small-scale,multifunctional communities whose religious life in-corporates beliefs in a multitude of deities, daemons,nature spirits, or ancestral shades—societies thatDurkheim might have described as possessing me-chanical solidarity, low moral density, and segmentalorganization. The prophet tends to come into hisown when the division of labor is critically replacing“mechanical” by “organic” solidarity, when class an-tagonisms are sharpened, or when small-scale soci-eties are decisively invaded by the powerful per-sonnel, ideas, techniques, and cultural apparatus(including military skills and armaments) of large-scale societies. The shaman deals in a personal andspecific way with spirits and lesser deities; theprophet enters into dialogue, on behalf of his wholecommunity, with the Supreme Being or with themajor deities of a traditional pantheon, whose tute-lary scope embraces large numbers of persons andgroups, transcending and transecting their tradi-tional divisions and animosities. Alternatively hecommunicates with the generalized ancestors orgenii loci, conceived to be a single anonymous andhomogeneous collectivity rather than a structure ofknown and named shades, each representing aspecific segment of society. Whereas the shaman’sfunction is associated with looseness of structurein small-scale societies, the prophet’s is linked withloosening of structure in large-scale societies orwith incompatibilities of scale in culture-contactsituations.

Divination and Religious Specialists

In its strict etymological sense the term “divination”denotes inquiry about future events or matters, hid-den or obscure, directed to a deity who, it is believed,will reply through significant tokens. It usuallyrefers to the process of obtaining knowledge of secretor future things by mechanical means or manipula-tive techniques—a process which may or may not in-clude invoking the aid of non-empirical (transhu-man) persons or powers but does not include theempirical methods of science.

In the analysis of preliterate societies divinationoften is concerned with the immediate problemsand interests of individuals and subgroups and but

seldom with the destinies of tribes and nations. It isthis specificity and narrowness of reference that pri-marily distinguishes divination from prophecy.Nadel (1954: 64) has called the kind of guidance itoffers “mechanical and of a case-to-case kind.” Thediviner “can discover and disentangle some of thehidden influences which are at work always andeverywhere. . . . He cannot uncover any more em-bracing design. . . . Yet within the limits set to itdivination has a part to play, providing some of thecertainty and guidance required for provident ac-tion.” Thus, although its range and scope are morecircumscribed than those of prophecy, divination isbelieved to reveal what is hidden and in many casesto forecast events, auspicious and inauspicious.

Divination further refers to the analysis of pastevents, especially untoward events; this analysisoften includes the detection and ascription of guiltwith regard to their perpetrators, real or alleged.Where such untoward events are attributed to sor-cerers and witches the diviner has great freedom ofjudgment in detecting and determining guilt. Divin-ers are frequently consulted by victims’ relatives andshow intuitive and deductive virtuosity in discover-ing quarrels and grudges in their clients’ kin groupsand local communities. Social anthropologists findimportant clues to areas and sources of social strainand to the character and strength of supportive so-cial norms and values in the diviners’ diagnoses.

There is evidence that mediums, shamans, andpriests in various cultures have practiced divination.The medium and shaman often divine without me-chanical means but with the assistance of a tutelaryspirit. In the work of Lessa and Vogt there is a trans-lation of a vivid first-person account by a Zulu infor-mant of a diviner’s seance. This mediumistic femalediviner

dramatically utilizes some standard proceduresof her art—ventriloquism, prior knowledge of theclients, the overhearing of the client’s unguardedconversation, and shrewd common sense—toenable her spirits to provide the clients with advice.In this example, . . . a boy is suffering from aconvulsive ailment. The spirits discover that anancestral spirit is spitefully causing the boy’sillness: the spirits decree that the location of thefamily’s village must be moved; a goat must besacrificed to the ancestor and the goat’s bile pouredover the boy; the boy must drink Itongo medicine.





The treatment thus ranges from physical to socialactions—from propitiation of wrathful ancestors toprescription of a medicinal potion (Lessa & Vogt[1958] 1965: 340).

Similar accounts of shamanistic divinatory seanceshave been recorded by anthropologists workingamong North and South American Indians, Eskimos,and Siberian tribes, in many parts of Africa, andamong Afro-Americans.

Divination was a function of members of thepriesthood in many of the complex religious systemsof Polynesia, west Africa, and ancient Mexico; in thereligions of Israel, Greece, Etruria, and Rome; inBabylonia, India, China, Japan, and among the Celts.According to Wach,

The Etruscans made these practices so much a partof their culture that the discipline has been namedafter them (disciplina Etrusca or auguralis). Differentphenomena and objects were used as media toascertain the desires of the gods (regular andirregular celestial events, lightning, fire, andearthquakes, the shape or utterances of animals,flights of birds, movements of serpents, barking ofdogs, forms of liver or entrails). Both in Etruria andRome a numerous and well-organized hierarchy offunctionaries existed for practice of the sacred arts(1958, p. 111 in 1961 edition).

Indeed, diffused through the Roman world, many ofthese techniques passed into medieval and modernculture.

Diviner and Doctor

Callaway’s account (1868–1870) of the combineddivinatory and curative seance in Zululand empha-sizes the close relationship believed to hold in manypreliterate societies between the functions of divina-tion and therapy. Sometimes, as in the case cited, thediviner and “doctor” are the same person, but moreoften the roles are specialized and performed by dif-ferent individuals. Modern therapy is taking increas-ingly into account the psychosomatic character ofmany maladies and the importance of sociologicalfactors in their etiology. In most preliterate societiesbodily symptoms are regarded as signs that the soulor life principle of the patient is under attack or hasbeen abstracted by spiritual forces or beings. Fur-thermore, it is widely held that these attacks are

motivated by animosities provoked by breachesof cultural, mainly religious, prescriptions and/orbreaches of social norms regarded as binding onmembers of kin groups or local communities. Thus,to acquire a comprehensive understanding of whyand how a patient was afflicted with certain symp-toms by a spirit or witch, primitives seek out adiviner who will disclose the secret antagonisms insocial relations or the perhaps unconscious neglectof ritual rules (always a threat to the cultural order)that incited mystical retribution or malice. The di-viner is a “diagnostician” who refers his clients to hiscolleague, the doctor or “therapist.” The doctor inquestion has both shamanistic and priestly attrib-utes. The division of labor which in more complexsocieties segregates and institutionalizes the func-tions of priest and medical man has hardly begunto make its influence felt. The diviner-doctor di-chotomy does not depend, as does the priest-shamandichotomy, upon contrasting roles in regard to thetranshuman realm but upon different phases in a so-cial process which involves total human phenomena—integral personalities, many psychosomatic com-plexes, multiple social relationships, and multiformcommunities.

Modes of Religious Specialization

As the scale and complexity of society increase andthe division of labor develops, so too does the degreeof religious specialization. This process accompaniesa contraction in the domain of religion in social life.As Durkheim stated with typical creative exag-geration in his Division of Labor in Society ([1893]1960: 169): “Originally [religion] pervades every-thing; everything social is religious; the two wordsare synonymous. Then, little by little, political, eco-nomic, scientific functions free themselves from thereligious function, constitute themselves apart andtake on a more and more acknowledged temporalcharacter.”

Simple Societies

In the simplest societies every adult has some re-ligious functions and the elders have most; as theircapacity to hunt or garden wanes, their priestlike rolecomes into ever greater prominence. Women tend toreceive more recognition and scope as religious func-tionaries than in more developed societies. There is





some tendency toward religious specialization insuch societies, based on a variety of attributes, suchas knowledge of herbalistic lore, skill in leechcraft,the capacity to enter a state of trance or dissociation,and sometimes physical handicap that compels aman or woman to find an alternative means of sup-port to subsistence activities. (I have met several di-viners in central Africa with maimed hands or am-putated limbs.) But such specialization can hardly bedefined, in the majority of cases, as more than part-time or even spare-time specialization. MichaelGelfand’s description of the Shona nganga, variouslytranslated in the ethnographic literature as “medi-cine man,” “doctor,” or “witch doctor,” exemplifiesthe sociocultural situation of similar practitioners invery many preliterate societies (1964). The Shonanganga is at once a herbalist, a medium, and also a di-viner who, possessed by a spirit of a dead relative,diagnoses both the cause of illness and of death. Yet,reports Gelfand,

when he is not engaged in his medical practice heleads exactly the same life as the other men of hisvillage. He cultivates his land, looks after his cattle,repairs his huts, makes blankets or other equipmentneeded by his family. And the same applies to awoman nganga, who busies herself with the tasksexpected of every Shona woman. . . . The amount thenganga does in his village depends, of course, on thedemands of his patients, but on the average he hasa fair amount of spare time. . . . A fair guess wouldbe [that there is a nganga] to every 800 to 1,000persons. . . . The nganga is given no special status inhis village, his chances of being appointed headmanare the same as anyone else’s (1964: 22–23).

Complex Societies

To bring out best the effects of increase in scaleand the division of labor it is necessary to examinereligious systems at the opposite end of the gradientof complexity. Religion no longer pervades all socialdomains; it is limited to its own domain. Further-more, it has acquired a contractual and associationalcharacter; people may choose both the form andextent of their religious participation or may opt outof any affiliation. On the other hand, within each re-ligious group a considerable amount of specializa-tion has taken place. Much of this has been on theorganizational level. Processes of bureaucratization,involving rationality in decision making, relative

impersonality in social relations, routinization oftasks, and a hierarchy of authority and function,have produced a large number of types, grades, andranks of religious specialists in all the major religioussystems.

For example, the Catholic clerical hierarchy maybe considered as (1) the hierarchy of order, whosepowers are exercised in worship and in the adminis-tration of the sacraments, and (2) as the hierarchy ofjurisdiction, whose power is over the members of thechurch. Within the hierarchy of jurisdiction alone wefind such manifold statuses as pope and bishop(which are held to be of divine institution); cardinal,patriarch, exarch, and primate (whose powers arederived by delegation expressed or implied from theholy see); metropolitan and archbishop (who derivetheir powers from their patriarch, exarch, or pri-mate); archdeacon, vicar general, vicar forane, ruraldean, pastor, and rector (who derive their powersfrom their diocesan bishop).

In addition to the clerical hierarchy there are inthe Catholic church numerous institutes of the reli-gious, that is, societies of men and women approvedby ecclesiastical superiors, in which the members inconformity with the special laws of their associationtake vows, perpetual or temporary, and by thismeans aspire to religious perfection. This is definedas “the heroic exercise of the virtue of supernaturalcharity” and is pursued by voluntary maintenanceof the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, byascetical practices, through charitable works, such ascare of the poor, sick, aged, and mentally handi-capped, and by contemplative techniques, such asprayer. Within each religious institution or congrega-tion there is a marked division of function and gra-dation of office.

Thus there are many differences of religious sta-tus, rank, and function in a developed religious sys-tem such as the Catholic church. Differences incharismata are also recognized in such terms as“contemplative,” “ascetic,” “mystic,” “preacher,”“teacher,” “administrator.” These gifts may appearin any of the major divisions of the church: amongclergy or laity, among hermits, monks, or friars,among female as well as male religious. Certain ofthese charismata are institutionalized and constitutethe devotional pattern particular to certain religiousinstitutions: thus there are “contemplative orders,”“friars preachers,” and the like.





Medium-Scale Societies

Other developed religions, churches, sects, cults,and religious movements exhibit degrees of bureau-cratic organization and specialization of role andfunction. Between the situational specialization ofreligious activities found in small-scale societies andthe full-time and manifold specialization in large-scale societies falls a wide variety of intermediatetypes. A characteristic religious dichotomy is foundin many of the larger, politically centralized societiesof west and east Africa, Asia, Polynesia, and pre-Columbian Central and South America. Nationaland tribal gods are worshiped in the larger towns,and minor deities, daemons, and ancestral shadesare venerated in the villages. At the village level wefind once more the multifunctional religious practi-tioner. But where there are national gods there areusually national priests, their official servants, andworship tends to take place in temples or at fixedand elaborate shrines. Parrinder writes:

In the cults of the West African gods [for example,in Dahomey, Yoruba, and Ashanti] there are priestswho are highly trained to do their work. Thesepriests are often set aside from birth, or they may becalled to the service of the god by being possessedby his spirit. They will then retire from theirfamilies and public life, and submit to the trainingof an older priest. The training normally lastsseveral years, during which time the novice has toapply himself to learn all the secrets of consultingand serving the god. The training of a priest is anarduous matter. . . . [He] has to observe chastity andstrict taboos of food and actions. He frequently hasto sleep on a hard floor, have insufficient food, andlearn to bear hardship. He is regarded as married tothe god, though later he may take a wife. Like anIndian devotee, he seeks by self-discipline to trainhimself to hear the voice of his god. He learns theritual and dances appropriate to the cult, receivesinstruction in the laws and taboos of the god, andgains some knowledge of magical medicines (1954:100–101).

In these west African cults of deities there is a for-mal division of function between priests and medi-ums. In general, priests control mediums and care-fully regulate their experience of possession. Thissituation is one solution to the perennial problemposed for priesthoods by what Ronald Knox (1950)has termed “enthusiasm,” that is, the notion that onecan become possessed by or identified with a god or

God and that one’s consequent acts and words aredivinely inspired, even if they transgress religious orsecular laws. In Dahomey, for example (Herskovits1938), there are communal training centers, calledcult houses or “convents,” for mediums and assis-tants to priests. Here the novices are secluded forconsiderable periods of time. Part of their traininginvolves the attempt to induce the return of the ini-tial spirit possession that marked their calling. Theylearn later to produce coherent messages in a stateof trance. During this period they are under thesurveillance of priests. The Catholic church has sim-ilarly brought under its control as members of con-templative orders mystics and visionaries who claim“experimental knowledge of God’s presence.”

Religious and Political Specialization

In many primitive societies an intimate connectionexists between religion and politics. If by politics wedenote those behavioral processes of resolution ofconflict between the common good and the interestsof groups by the use of or struggle for power, then re-ligion in such societies is pragmatically connectedwith the maintenance of those values and norms ex-pressing the common good and preventing theundue exercise of power. In centralized political sys-tems that have kings and chiefs, these dignitariesthemselves have priestly functions; in many parts ofAfrica, for example, they take charge of observanceswhich safeguard many of the basic needs of exis-tence, such as rainmaking, sowing, and harvest rites,rituals to promote the fertility of men, domestic andwild animals, and so on. On the other hand, evenwhere this is the case, there are frequently other spe-cialized religious functionaries whose duties arebound up with the office of kingship. An illustrationof this occurs among the Bemba of Zambia, wherethe Bakabilo

are in charge of ceremonies at the sacred relicshrines and take possession of the babenye whenthe chief dies. They alone can purify the chief fromthe defilement of sex intercourse so that he is ableto enter his relic shrine and perform the necessaryrites there. They are in complete charge of theaccession ceremonies of the paramount and thebigger territorial chiefs, and some of their numberare described as bafingo, or hereditary buriers of thechief. Besides this, each individual mukabilo has his





called) among the Nuer of the Nilotic Sudan is a per-son whose ritual relationship with the earth giveshim power to bless or curse, to cleanse a killer fromthe pollution of bloodshed, and, most important, toperform the rites of reconciliation between personswho are ready to terminate a blood feud. A similarrole is performed by the “masters of the fishingspear” among the Dinka and the tendaanas, or earthpriests, among the Tallensi and their congeners inthe northern territories of Ghana. Similar religiousfunctionaries are found in many other regions ofAfrica. They serve to reduce, if not to resolve, conflictwithin the society. As against sectional and factionalinterests they posit the commonweal. In these con-texts, moreover, the commonweal is regarded as partof the cosmic order; breach, therefore, is mysticallypunished. The religious specialists are accorded thefunction of restoring the right relation that shouldobtain between society, the cosmos, and the deitiesor ancestral shades.


own small ritual duty or privilege, such as lightingthe sacred fire, or forging the blade of the hoe that isto dig the foundations of the new capital (Richards1940, p. 109 in 1955 edition).

The Bakabilo constitute a council that exerts a checkon the paramount’s power, since the members arehereditary officials and cannot be removed at will.They are immune to the paramount’s anger and canblock the implementation of decisions that they con-sider to be detrimental to the interests of the Bembapeople by refusing to perform the ritual functionsthat are necessary to the exercise of his office. Apriesthood of this type thus forms a constituent partof the interior structure of the government of a prim-itive state.

In stateless societies in Africa and elsewhere, in-cumbents of certain ritual positions have similarfunctions in the maintenance of order and the reso-lution of conflict. The “leopard-skin chief” or “priestof the earth” (as this specialist has been variously




150

The Terms “Shamanism” and “Shaman”

From the Stone Age to the New Age, the figure of theshaman has continued to grip the human imagina-tion. Being chosen by the spirits, taught by them toenter a trance and fly with one’s soul to other worldsin the sky or clamber through dangerous crevassesinto terrifying subterranean worlds; being strippedof one’s flesh, reduced to a skeleton and then re-

assembled and reborn; gaining the power to combatspiritual enemies and heal their victims, to kill ene-mies and save one’s own people from disease andstarvation—these are features of shamanic religionsin many parts of the world. And yet they are gener-ally regarded by the communities in which theyoccur, not as part of some extraordinary sort of mys-tical practice, but as a specialized development of therelationship which every person has with the worldaround them.

“Shamanism” is probably the world’s oldest formof religion. It is a name generally given to many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of religions aroundthe world. These are thought to have something in

19

ShamanismPiers Vitebsky

The religious systems loosely grouped under the term “shamanism” generally involve a specialistwhose soul is perceived to leave the body during trance and, on behalf of clients, travel to other realmsand encounter spirits or ancestors. As author Piers Vitebsky explains, the term “shaman” derivesfrom the Tungus of Siberia, but was applied by early researchers—and later the general public—toperhaps thousands of religions thought to have something in common. In truth, there is no “-ism” toshamanism, and the breadth of the word’s applicability is somewhat controversial in anthropologytoday. Nonetheless, many researchers find the term useful and can point to consistent basic featuresshared by practitioners.

Piers Vitebsky has conducted fieldwork among the Sora of Eastern India and has published nu-merous works on shamanism. In this article, he introduces the most important features of theshaman’s role, with attention to the various intellectual concerns about definitions. He explains howthe shaman is distinct from other forms of religious specialist, such as spirit mediums, and arguesthat the shaman must be understood in the context of such local cultural features as social structure,concepts of nature and personhood, and the economy. Vitebsky cautiously compares shamans to so-cial workers and psychotherapists, as illustrated in extended examples from the Inuit and the Sora.

The article ends with examination of shamanic revival or neo-shamanic practices. In the urbanizedWest, these adaptations reconfigure shamanism as something that can be taught and learned, to beused as a form of therapy or spiritual enhancement. A different form of shamanic revival is occurringtoday among some of the peoples who lost their indigenous shamanic practices under colonialism.

From: Indigenous Religions: A Companion, ed. GrahamHarvey. London and NY: Cassell (2000), pp. 55–67.




common with the religion of the Tungus hunters andreindeer herders in Siberia from whom the word“shamán” or “hamán” was taken. (In English theword is widely pronounced “sháy-man.” The endinghas nothing to do with the English word “man.”Whichever way one pronounces it, the plural is“shamans.”) It could thus be said that there are manyshamanisms (Atkinson 1992), just as there are manymonotheisms.

Among the Tungus peoples such as the Evenkiand the Even, a shaman is a man or woman whosesoul is said to be able to leave their body duringtrance and travel to other realms of the cosmos. Theterm is thus named after a central figure and refers,not to a single religion, but rather to a style of reli-gious activity and a kind of understanding of theworld. The term was not traditionally used in any in-digenous culture, for two reasons: first, every lan-guage has its own words for figures who correspondto the shaman, such as the female udaghan and themale oyuun among the Sakha (Yakut) of Siberia, thekuran among the Sora of tribal India, the angakkoq ofthe Greenlandic Kalaallit (Eskimo) or the Payé in var-ious languages of the upper Amazon. Second, theending “-ism” carries an implication of formal doc-trine which belongs to more systematized religionsand ideologies from the “western” world and is in-appropriate for the fluidity and flexibility of theseuncodified religions from largely non-literate soci-eties. The word’s usefulness therefore depends onour ability, and our need, to perceive parallels be-tween these many different religions. Even if we ac-cept these parallels, it has been suggested that, ratherthan shamanism as a systematic form of religion, weshould speak of “shamanship” as a skill or personaldisposition which is manifested to a greater or lesserdegree in various cultures and persons (Atkinson1989; Vitebsky 1993, 21–2).

By a strict definition, “shamanism” should per-haps be used only for religions of the non-Europeanpeoples of the circumpolar north, and especially ofSiberia, where many other peoples have similar reli-gions to those of the Tungus peoples. This view istaken by some scholars specializing in the religionsand cultures of this region (for good overviews, seeSiikala 1978; Hoppál 1984; Balzer 1990). A broaderand more common approach (Eliade 1964; Lewis1989; Atkinson 1992; Vitebsky 1995a) recognizesshamanic kinds of religion around the world, partic-

ularly among the Inuit (Eskimo) peoples,1 in Amazo-nia, in Arctic and sub-Arctic North America, and un-derlying other more mainstream or “world religions”in Mongolia, Tibet, Central Asia, Nepal, China, Japan,Korea, aboriginal India and Indonesia.

There is less agreement about how far the termshould be applied to indigenous religions in Africa,Australia, the Pacific, North America south of thesub-Arctic, or ancient Europe. Such controversiesgenerally concern the nature of the relationship be-tween religious practitioner and spirits, and particu-larly the frequent absence of soul travel. In Africanreligions, for example, with some exceptions (e.g. the!Kung Bushmen, see Katz 1982) the souls of special-ists do not generally travel to the world of spirits.Rather, spirits more commonly visit this world andpossess people here (de Heusch 1981). This is a re-minder that, even if we believe that all early religionswere based on direct relationships between humansand spirits, these can take many different forms.

In industrial or “western” society today, peopleinterested in spiritual revival sometimes use theword “shaman” for anyone who is thought to have aspecial relationship with spirits. In this chapter Ishall keep to the criterion of soul flight, since thisconstitutes a distinctive form of human religiositywith its own particular theological, psychologicaland sociological implications. This already containsenough diversity to make generalization difficult,but I shall try to highlight some widespread featureswhich such religions have in common.

Prehistory and Hunting

Broadly speaking, shamanic kinds of religion havetended to be marginalized or persecuted with thegrowth of urban civilizations, centralized states(Thomas and Humphrey 1994), and institutionalizedpriest-based religions (though their legacy can beseen, for example, in mystical experiences of ascent inChristianity and Islam). Their scattered distribution

VITEBSKY • SHAMANISM | 151

1. Each of the different peoples of this family in Greenland,Canada, Russia, and Alaska has their own name for them-selves. The name “Eskimo” is now considered insultingamong some groups such as the Inuit (“Real People”) ofCanada. However, other groups reject the name Inuit andthere is currently no name which is universally acceptablefor the peoples of this family.




worldwide, mostly in small-scale societies outsidethe main orbit of these structures, raises the questionof whether these religions could be relicts of somepan-human form of early religion.

Prehistoric paintings and petroglyphs, some dat-ing to the paleolithic era, have been found in Europe,South Africa, Australia, Siberia and elsewhere, por-traying figures which are part-human, part-animal.Though this is impossible to prove, some scholarshave interpreted these as shamans undergoingtransformation into animals. Less controversially,rock carvings in Siberia which are several thousandyears old show recognizable modern Siberianshaman’s costumes, complete with reindeer-antlerhelmets and drums stretched over a distinctive styleof wooden framework. This at least suggests that,even if not unchanging, the religions of this regionhave a very ancient core.

Another possible link with prehistory is the close,though not exclusive, link between soul flight andhunting. In many societies the shaman’s journeyacross the landscape or the sea echoes the move-ments and experiences of the hunter but also en-larges and intensifies them. Just as the hunter maytry to share the mentality and being of his quarry bydressing in its skins and smelling, calling and mov-ing like an animal, so the shaman may undertake asoul flight in order to locate game animals. But theshaman may also go further and experience turninginto an animal, possibly even living for a while as amember of that animal’s community and then usingthis knowledge to encourage members of the speciesto give themselves up to the community’s hunters,or to become the shaman’s own spirit helper. Suchimagery is often quite male and contrasts with themore female shamanisms found in some agrarian so-cieties in Asia (Kendall 1985).

Trance, Cosmology and Reality

Shamanic believers generally say that many featuresof the world, whether animals, trees, streams, moun-tains, heavenly bodies, even man-made objects likeknives and drums, may be imbued with some formof spirit. These manifestations of spirit represent thevery essence of these phenomena: the bearness of abear, the treeness of a tree, the musical power of adrum. At the same time, they resemble human con-sciousness in that they are capable of experience and

volition. They notice how we treat them and can giveor withhold from us. They also represent a principleof causality in human affairs. Just as bears, trees andknives interact with us physically according to theirqualities and powers of growing and cutting, so theirspirits may have effects and cause events in our livesin accordance with their own nature and desires.

The shaman’s journeys allow him or her to per-ceive the true nature or essence of phenomena, to un-derstand how this is implicated in the causation ofevents in this world, and to act upon this under-standing in order to change undesirable situationsand sustain desirable ones.

This dimension of reality is not accessible to ordi-nary people, or in an ordinary state of consciousness.The shaman’s switch to an altered state of conscious-ness is expressed as a journey in space. This imageryconveys the otherness of the spirit realm, but it alsoopens up a whole topography of mental or spiritualstates. This topography is elaborated by differentcultures in very different ways. Though the shamanmay also fly around the known local landscape, it isalso very common to travel up and down through amany-layered cosmology in which our world occu-pies a position somewhere in the middle. For exam-ple, in various parts of Siberia there may be severallower worlds as well as seven, eleven or more upperworlds, of which the higher ones can be reached onlyby shamans with appropriate skills and training.

Though the shaman’s journey to another worldsuggests a theology of transcendence, the fact thatthat other world also animates the phenomena ofthis world shows that this theology is also deeplyimmanentist. Rather than occasional theophanies,shamanic religions tend to emphasize concentra-tions or intensifications of a divine presence which iscontinuously in the world, while humans are notseparated from the divine but shade into it, or par-take of it, through forms of shared soulhood.

This emphasis on immanence can also be linked towhat may be called a shamanic view of time. Unlikethe linear historical time of Semitic religions, with theirstrong concern with eschatology, shamanic thinkingtends to conceive time as cyclical or steady-state. TheInuit shaman’s journey to the bottom of the sea and theSora shamans’ journeys to the Underworld describedbelow are intended to ameliorate a situation, but theydo not provide a permanent solution. The sea spiritmay withhold whales from hunters again on another





occasion, the Sora patient who gets better today maybe ill again tomorrow and will eventually die. Simi-larly, the shamanic community’s cosmos may containa finite amount of soul-force, so that animals huntedmust be paid for by trading in the lives of humans (theTukano of Amazonia, see Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971) orparts of a seal must be honoured and thrown back intothe sea to be reincarnated (some Inuit of the Arctic).

This is not because these religions are theologi-cally undeveloped. Rather, it is because they regardthe problematic nature of life as existentially given,rather than as a situation of ignorance or sin await-ing a historical redemption. Shamanic rites are basedon an acknowledgement of the essences andprocesses of the world, combined with a willingnessto use them to achieve one’s goals.

Person, Powers and InitiatoryExperience of the Shaman

In many societies there can be several kinds ofshaman, who shade in turn into a range of otherspecialists such as midwives, diviners, exorcists, bone-setters or herbalists. Some shamans may use tech-niques of soul journey to fulfil any of these functions,as well as those of doctor, priest, mystic, social worker,psychoanalyst, hunting consultant, psychopomp, as-tronaut and many others. It often seems that a shamanhas to encompass the totality of possibilities of being,transcending boundaries of gender, species and othercategories. The ability to make a soul journey is linkedto special skills at transformation. Shamans may betransvestite or sexually ambiguous, may speak lan-guages of other peoples or other worlds, or may trans-form themselves into animals or other beings.

The trance of an experienced shaman is atechnique of dissociation with a high degree of con-trol, entered into more or less at will. It is oftenestablished with the aid of rhythmical drumming,chanting and dancing, or invocations describing theimminent journey, obstacles which will be encoun-tered, and anticipated battles with hostile spirits andmonsters. Other aids, especially in Amazonia, caninclude the ingestion of psychotropic plants whichare said to teach the shaman by revealing what can-not be seen by other means (Reichel-Dolmatoof 1975;Schultes and Hofmann 1979).

The element of will and control in trance makesshamans very different from some other kinds of

spirit mediums who stay in this world and are pos-sessed or dominated by spirits which come to visitthem and take over their body. Eliade (1964) andShirokogoroff (1935) have emphasized the shaman’s“mastery” of spirits, but it should be rememberedthat the degree of this control is always precarious.The shaman’s involvement with spirits is very dan-gerous and there is said to be a constant risk ofinsanity or death.

Though there is much variation across societies,shamanic power and practice are often inheritedwithin a lineage or kin-group. But at the same time itis generally said that a future shaman does notchoose his or her profession, but is chosen by thespirits themselves to serve them. The young candi-date may be made aware of this through dreams orby other signs. Their first response is often to refuseto accept such a life of suffering and hardship. Thespirits then torment them for months or years untilthey submit, threatening to kill them if they resist,driving them mad, dismembering them in visions,sending spirit animals to devour them, or forcingthem to live up trees eating bark or rush crazilyacross mountains and snowfields.

The symbolism of transformation and rebirth isoften very clear. The candidate comes to understandthe true nature of things by being dismembered andreassembled as someone greater and more completethan before. These additional powers are repre-sented by animal helpers whose properties of skill orstrength the shaman acquires. Other power objectscan include crystals, drums and costumes, melodies,spells, and parts of animals such as a deer’s paw forswiftness or (in Nepal) porcupine quills to fire asdarts at evil spirits.

Here is part of an account of his initiation in thelower world given by a Siberian shaman to a Russiananthropologist earlier this century (Popov 1936,84ff., translated in Vitebsky 1995a, 58–61; for othershaman’s narratives, see Halifax 1979):

The Great Underground Master told me that Iwould have to travel the path of every illness. Hegave me a stoat and a mouse as my guides and to-gether with them I continued my journey furtherinto the underworld. My companions led me to ahigh place where there stood seven tents. ‘The peo-ple inside these tents are cannibals,’ the mouse andstoat warned me. Nevertheless I went into the mid-dle tent, and went crazy on the spot. These were the





Smallpox People. They cut out my heart and threwit into a cauldron to boil. Inside this tent I found theMaster of my Madness, in another tent I saw theMaster of Confusion, in another the Master of Stu-pidity. I went round all these tents and became ac-quainted with the paths of various human diseases.

Then I went through an opening in another rock.A naked man was sitting there fanning the fire withbellows. Above the fire hung an enormous cauldronas big as half the earth. When he saw me the nakedman brought out a pair of tongs the size of a tentand took hold of me. He took my head and cut itoff, and then sliced my body into little pieces andput them in the cauldron. There he boiled my bodyfor three years. Then he placed me on an anvil andstruck my head with a hammer and dipped it intoice-cold water to temper it.

He took the big cauldron off the fire andpoured its contents into another container. Nowall my muscles had been separated from thebones. Here I am now, I’m talking to you in an or-dinary state of mind and I can’t say how manypieces there are in my body. But we shamans haveseveral extra bones and muscles. I turned out tohave three such parts, two muscles and one bone.When all my bones had been separated from myflesh, the blacksmith said to me, “Your marrowhas turned into a river” and inside the hut I reallydid see a river with my bones floating on it. “Look,there are your bones floating away!” said theblacksmith and started to pull them out of thewater with his tongs.

When all my bones had been pulled out on to theshore the blacksmith put them together, they becamecovered with flesh and my body took on its previousappearance. The only thing that was still left unat-tached was my head. It just looked like a bare skull.The blacksmith covered my skull with flesh andjoined it onto my torso. I took on my previoushuman form. Before he let me go the blacksmithpulled out my eyes and put in new ones. He piercedmy ears with his iron finger and told me, ‘You will beable to hear and understand the speech of plants.’After this I found myself on the summit of a moun-tain and soon afterwards woke up in my own tent.Near me sat my worried father and mother.

The Shaman in Practice

A shaman’s practice will vary enormously across nu-merous diverse cultures. It may also cover a widerange of domanis which industrial society regards asvery separate. In theological terms, it represents a

communion with the divine; medically and psychi-atrically, it can represent a movement from sicknessto health; socially, it leads from a dysfunctional situ-ation to one of communal harmony. So while it isreminiscent in some ways of mystical experience inthe mainstream historical religions, shamanic jour-neying is at the same time extremely pragmatic andgoal-oriented.

In many rites one can discern a re-enactment ofthe central experience of transformation from theshaman’s initiation, but on a smaller and less drasticscale. Some rites, such as offerings, are performedregularly or seasonally to maintain order. Others areperformed in response to a problem. When a personfalls ill because their soul has been abducted byspirits, or the community begins to starve becauseanimals refuse to give themselves to hunters, theshaman must go on a soul journey to visit the spiritsconcerned and persuade or coerce them to changetheir behaviour. This widespread format can be seenclearly in a classic example collected earlier thiscentury from a community of Iglulik Inuit (Eskimo)in northern Canada (summarized from Rasmussen1929, 123–29).

When there was an incurable sickness, a hunterwas particularly unsuccessful, or an entire villagewas threatened by famine, this was thought to bedue to the anger of the sea spirit Takanakapsaluk,who had become contaminated with the commu-nity’s accumulated sins and breaches of taboos. Shewas a woman whose father had cruelly cut off herfingers, which then turned into the different speciesof sea creatures on which the Iglulik Eskimo dependand which she grants them or withholds from themat will. This immediately highlights a central dilemmaof traditional Inuit life. Not only do they have totake the life of animals to live, so that those animalsmust be treated with respect and gratitude, butthese animals are also part of the flesh of the seaspirit and humans are able to live only as a result ofher suffering.

Anywhere in the world, a shaman’s response tothis kind of problem may be to enter a trance and goon a soul journey. In this case, the shaman preparesfor a difficult journey to Takanakapsaluk’s house onthe sea-bed. The community gathers in a house andthe shaman sits behind a curtain. After particularlyelaborate preparations he calls his helpers, sayingagain and again, ‘The way is made ready for me, the






spirit lord for mercy, or lead serried ranks of helperspirits in a pitched battle against armies of hostiledemons.

Now the shaman starts to return. He can be hearda long way off returning through the tube which hishelper spirits have kept open for him. With one last“Plu – a – he – he,” he shoots up into his place behindthe curtain, gasping for breath. After an expectant si-lence, he says, “Words will arise.” Then, one after an-other, poeple start to confess their misdeeds, oftenbringing out secrets which were quite unsuspectedeven in a small community living at close quarters. Inparticular, many women confess to a breach of taboowhich the sea spirit finds particularly offensive, theconcealment of miscarriages. (After a miscarriage, allsoft skins and furs belonging to everyone inside thehouse must be thrown away. This is such a seriousloss that a woman may try to conceal any miscarriageor irregular bleeding.) By the end of the seance thereis such a mood of optimism about the next hunt thatpeople may even feel grateful to the women whosebehaviour caused the problem in the first place.

This example shows how intensely the commu-nity is involved, both in commissioning the shaman’ssoul journey and in participating in it from a comple-mentary position as audience or congregation. Theshaman’s activities are intensely embedded in thelocal social structure. The entire practice of shaman-ism must therefore be understood with reference notonly to indigenous theology, but also to local con-cepts of nature, humanity and the person, the mean-ings of life and death, and even the workings of theeconomy. Many writings about shamans ignore so-cial context or even deny the shaman’s social role,promoting an image of the shaman as some kind ofsolitary mystic (Eliade 1964, 8; Castaneda 1968). Butas the earlier initiation narrative shows, a shamanmay pass through eremitic or psychotic phases, butmust always be re-socialized and psychologicallyreintegrated to serve a social function within thecommunity. The mystic is also a social worker.

The public role of the shaman also emergesclearly among the Sora, an aboriginal tribe in easternIndia (Vitebsky 1993). The Inuit shaman’s trance, likethat of the Siberian shaman, is a rare and highly dra-matic occasion. But in every Sora village, almostevery day, one of the many shamans will go intotrance, allowing groups of living people to hold dia-logues with the dead, who come one at a time to

way opens before me!’, while the audience reply“Let it be so!” Finally, from behind the curtain theshaman can be heard crying “Halala – he – he – he,halala – he – he!” Then as he drops down a tubewhich is said to lead straight to the bottom of the sea,his voice can be heard receding ever further into thedistance: “Halele – he!,” until it is lost altogether.

During the shaman’s absence, the audience sits inthe darkened house and hears the sighing andgroaning of people who lived long ago. These can beheard puffing and splashing and coming up for air inthe form of seals, whales and walruses. As soon asthe shaman reaches the sea-bed, he follows a coast-line past a series of obstacles to the sea spirit’s house.He has to dodge three deadly stones which churnaround leaving hardly any room to pass. The en-trance tunnel to the sea spirit’s house is guarded by afierce dog over which the shaman must step. He isalso threatened by her father.

When the shaman finally enters the house hefinds Takanakapsaluk with a great pool of sea crea-tures over the floor beside her, all puffing, blowingand snorting. As a sign of her anger, she is sittingwith her back to this pool and to the blubber-oillamp which is the only source of light. She is in a piti-ful state. Her hair is filthy and uncombed and hangsover her eyes so that she cannot see. Her body is alsofilthy. This dirt represents the sins and misdeeds ofthe human community up above. The shaman mustovercome her anger and slowly, gently turn her to-wards the lamp and the animals. He must comb herhair, for she has no fingers and is unable to do thisfor herself. When he has calmed her, he tells her,“Those above can no longer help the seals up bygrasping their foreflippers,” and she answers, “Thesecret miscarriages of the women and breaches oftaboo bar the way for the animals.” When theshaman has fully mollified her, Takanakapsaluk re-leases the animals one by one and they are carriedout by a torrent through the entrance tunnel into thesea, to become available again to hunters.

Just as when a patient’s soul has been kid-napped, a shaman will regain possession of it inpreparation for restoring it to the patient’s body, sohere the shaman has moved the situation deci-sively towards a resolution. He has done this byprecipitating, and winning, an encounter. Here, heachieves his goal by tender persuasion, though inother situations a shaman may have to beg a great




speak to them through the shaman’s mouth. Here,instead of being called in for a crisis, the shaman isinvolved in a constant regulation of social relations.

The shaman (usually a woman) sits down and in-vokes her predecessors and helper spirits with arhythmic chant. When she enters trance she experi-ences her soul clambering down terrifying precipicesto the underworld like a monkey. This leaves herbody vacant for the dead to use as their vehicle ofcommunication and one by one, they begin to speakthrough her mouth. (Here, the technically distinct“shamanism” and “possession” are combined intoone system.)

Every case of illness or death is thought to becaused by the dead. The living respond by stagingdialogues in which they summon the dead personsresponsible, interrogate them in an attempt to under-stand their state of mind, and negotiate with them.Closely related groups thus find themselves in con-stantly recurring contact: mourners crowd aroundthe shaman arguing vehemently with the dead,laughing at their jokes, or weeping at their recrimi-nations; family conversations and quarrels continueafter some of their participants have crossed the di-viding line between what are called life and death.

In this way, everyone engages in a continual fine-tuning of their mutual relationships and each dia-logue is only a fleeting episode in an open-ended re-lationship which explores and ultimately resolves arange of emotional ambiguities in the lives of theparticipants.

After death, a person’s consciousness becomes aform of spirit called sonum. Sonums are a powerfulcausal principle in the affairs of the living. But theyare also a contradictory one. On the one hand, in cer-tain moods or aspects, sonums nourish their livingdescendants through the soul-force they put intotheir growing crops, giving them their continuedsustenance and their very existence; but on the otherhand, they ‘eat them up’ and destroy them.

A person’s susceptiblity to the effects of sonumsdepends on a subtle interplay between their ownstate of mind and that of the numerous other livingand dead persons who are caught up in the ongoingdialogue. Different categories of sonum are locatedin different features of the landscape. As a living per-son moves around this landscape, he or she may en-counter sonums and become involved with them.But this happens not at random, but as a develop-

ment of their long-term relationships with the vari-ous dead persons who now reside in those places.What seems at first sight like a person’s medical his-tory also turns out to be a comprehensive social andemotional biography.

Illness arises out of the playing out of an emotionalattachment and healing consists in altering the natureof that attachment over time. When a dead Sora en-counters a living one, it is said that the dead person’sattachment can be so strong that, even without mean-ing to, they overwhelm and engulf the living. Duringthe course of several years’ dialogue, living and deadwill discuss and develop their relationship to thepoint where the deceased is gradually persuaded tomove into ever less unwholesome places on the land-scape and less disturbed and threatening categories ofsonum. Finally, the deceased becomes a pure ancestor,who is supposed to have no remaining aggressive im-pulses but to recycle his or her name into a new babyamong their descendants and to watch over this baby.This is the final resolution of a range of ambivalenceswhich can be emotional, sociological and even legal,concerning inheritance.

If the Inuit example directs us towards one aspectof shamanic way of thinking, namely the intimate andcomplex relationship between humans, animals andmorality, the Sora show us something else: a system inwhich shamans use their trance to act as conduits fora shifting and constantly renegotiated concept of per-sonhood. It would be hard to conceive the Sora personwithout these dialogues since the Sora person seemsnot to have a unitary core but to be composed almostentirely of the confluence of the person’s relationshipwith other persons.

Shamans have often been compared to psychoan-alysts and psychotherapists, and here we see howboth Inuit and Sora shamans not only engage withspirits, but also use dramatic enactment to conduct aform of psychotherapy and sociotherapy. The Inuitshaman makes a shaper contrast between the roles ofshaman and audience, while the Sora shaman bowsout as the dead arrive and leaves the living clients toface them unaided. Either way, however, there is aprofound theological contrast with psychoanalysisconcerning the presumed reality of spirits. In theSora view, the dead not only exist but are equal part-ners in their encounters with the living. In Freud’smodel of bereavement, the dead have ceased to existand the mourner who continues to speak with them





is suffering from a “hallucinatory wishful psychosis”(Vitebsky 1993, 238–47)––just as in zoology, marinemammals have no spirit keepers.

A Shamanic Revival?

In the West, there is a growing fascination with in-digenous and synthetic forms of shamanism (see e.g.Shaman’s Drum: A Journal of Experiential Shamanism).Forms of so-called “shamanism” flourish in popularmagazines and weekend workshops, under the guid-ance of a new profession of “urban shamans.” As or-ganized religion retreats ever further from the lives ofmillions and as institutionalized medicine is sub-jected to unprecedented criticism, increasing num-bers are wondering whether what they call shaman-ism may offer an appropriate new way of thinkingand acting in the industrial and post-industrialworld. The evaluation of shamans themselves hasshifted from their earlier dismissal as crazy and de-luded, to a respect and awe for these people who aresaid to go to the edge of psychosis, perceive realityand return to serve society (see Walsh 1990 for a sur-vey of shamanic and related states of mind).

However, such movements do not deal easilywith the embeddedness of shamanic beliefs in theirsocial structures, and some neo-shamanic practition-ers advocate a composite form of “shamanism”based on ideas of universal human spiritual poten-

tial (Harner 1982), arguing that shamanism is not re-ligion but a technique which anyone can learn. Thiscontrasts strikingly with the claim in many tradi-tional societies that a shaman is a rare person whohas been specially chosen by the spirits.

While shamanic revival is a major strand in West-ern life today, it is also appearing among the peoplewho were the world’s earlier shamanists but whoabandoned shamanic religions under colonial pres-sure. But revival cannot mean a return to an old wayof life. Modern indigenous ”shamanisms” have become linked to ethnic identity, environmentalprotest, democratic ideals or a backlash against themilitant atheism of communist regimes (Vitebsky1995b). Moreover, even the remotest tribal shamansmay now have relationships, not only with whitepeople, but increasingly even with shamans fromother, separate traditions of which they are only justbecoming aware.

So, perhaps as in the paleolithic era, there is a pos-sibility that shamanism may now become a sort ofworld religion. But this is most likely to come aboutonly in a globalized form in which diverse shamanicideas and practices are severed from their roots innumerous small-scale societies, largely at the handsof white outsiders. For the foreseeable future, theterm “shamanism” will be the subject of intense con-troversy centering especially on questions of defini-tion, authenticity and appropriation.





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Dark Side of the ShamanMichael Fobes Brown

Spiritual seekers in the United States have long turned to non-Western and indigenous cultures forinspiration, often adopting practices they perceive as superior or more natural than their Westernbiomedical and religious counterparts. Shamanism has been particularly attractive to some Ameri-cans in recent decades, including those in the therapeutic professions and self-improvement move-ment. Anthropologist Michael Fobes Brown, who spent two years with the Aguaruna of northeasternPeru, offers a contrasting point of view. His research yielded first-hand knowledge of the complexityof Aguaruna shamanism and its accompanying beliefs, including sorcery intended to cause harm.Individuals identified as sorcerers face execution, and shamans in turn are at risk for sorcery accusa-tions or vengeance from a sorcerer’s family. To Brown, shamanism and sorcery function well for theAguaruna, providing rituals of community support, ethnomedical treatment, and rules and punish-ments in a society without a police force or written laws. However, Brown strongly dismisses theromantic attitude of U.S. enthusiasts who strip shamanism of its original cultural context and whoseek an easily acquired set of techniques for personal development.

For another discussion of the distinction between Western neo-shamanism and shamanism as tra-ditionally studied by anthropologists, see Fiona Bowie, The Anthropology of Religion: An Intro-duction (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006, pp. 191–95).

Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a stronghold of that eclecticmix of mysticism and folk medicine called “NewAge” thought. The community bulletin board of thepublic library, just around the corner from the plazaand the venerable Palace of the Governors, serves asa central bazaar for spiritual guides advertising in-struction in alternative healing methods. Many ofthese workshops—for example, classes in holisticmassage and rebirthing—have their philosophicalroots in the experiments of the 1960s. Others resisteasy classification: What, I’ve wondered, is EthericBody Healing and Light Body Work, designed to

“resonate the light forces within our being”? Forthirty-five dollars an hour, another expert offers con-sultations in “defense and removal of psychic attack.”Most of the classes, however, teach the healing artsof non-Western or tribal peoples. Of particular inter-est to the New Agers of Santa Fe is the traditionknown as shamanism.

Shamans, who are found in societies all over theworld, are believed to communicate directly withspirits to heal people struck down by illness. Anthro-pologists are fond of reminding their students thatshamanism, not prostitution, is the world’s oldestprofession. When, in my role as curious ethnogra-pher, I’ve asked Santa Feans about their interest inthis exotic form of healing, they have expressed theiradmiration for the beauty of the shamanistic tradi-tion, the ability of shamans to “get in touch withtheir inner healing powers,” and the superiority of

“Dark Side of the Shaman” by Michael Fobes Brown reprintedfrom NATURAL HISTORY, November 1989, pp. 8, 11;Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 1989.




spiritual treatments over the impersonal medicalpractice of our own society. Fifteen years ago, Iwould have sympathized with these romantic ideas.Two years of fieldwork in an Amazonian society,however, taught me that there is peril in theshaman’s craft.

A man I shall call Yankush is a prominent shamanamong the Aguaruna, a native people who maketheir home in the tropical forest of northeastern Peru.Once feared headhunters, the Aguaruna now directtheir considerable energies to cultivating cash cropsand protecting their lands from encroachment bysettlers fleeing the poverty of Peru’s highland andcoastal regions.

Yankush is a vigorous, middle-aged man knownfor his nimble wit and ready laugh. Like every otherable-bodied man in his village, Yankush works hardto feed his family by hunting, fishing, and helpinghis wife cultivate their fields. But when his kinfolkor friends fall ill, he takes on the role of iwishín—shaman—diagnosing the cause of the affliction andthen, if possible, removing the source of the ailmentfrom the patient’s body.

In common with most peoples who preserve alively shamanistic heritage, the Aguaruna believethat life-threatening illness is caused by sorcerers.Sorcerers are ordinary people who, driven by spiteor envy, secretly introduce spirit darts into the bodiesof their victims. If the dart isn’t soon removed by ashaman, the victim dies. Often the shaman describesthe dart as a piece of bone, a tiny thorn, a spider, or ablade of grass.

The Aguaruna do not regard sorcery as a quaintand colorful bit of traditional lore. It is attemptedhomicide, plain and simple. That the evidence of sor-cery can only be seen by a shaman does not diminishthe ordinary person’s belief in the reality of the sor-cerer’s work, any more than our inability to seeviruses with the naked eye leads us to question theirexistence. The Aguaruna insist that sorcerers, whendiscovered, must be executed for the good of society.

Shaman and sorcerer might seem locked in a sim-ple struggle of good against evil, order againstchaos, but things are not so straightforward.Shamans and sorcerers gain their power from thesame source, both receiving spirit darts from atrusted instructor. Because the darts attempt to re-turn to their original owner, apprentice shamans andsorcerers must induce them to remain in their bodies

by purifying themselves. They spend months in jun-gle isolation, fasting and practicing sexual absti-nence. By wrestling with the terrifying apparitionsthat come to plague their dreams, they steel them-selves for a life of spiritual struggle.

There the paths of sorcerer and shaman divide.The sorcerer works in secret, using spirit darts to in-flict suffering on his enemies. The shaman operatesin the public eye and uses his own spirit darts tothwart the sorcerer’s schemes of pain and untimelydeath. (I say “he” because to my knowledge allAguaruna shamans are men. Occasionally, however,a woman is accused of sorcery.) Yet because shamanspossess spirit darts, and with them the power to kill,the boundary between sorcerer and shaman is some-times indistinct.

The ambiguities of the shaman’s role werebrought home to me during a healing session I at-tended in Yankush’s house. The patients were twowomen: Yamanuanch, who complained of pains inher stomach and throat, and Chapaik, who suffereddiscomfort in her back and lower abdomen. Their ill-nesses did not seem life threatening, but they werepersistent enough to raise fears that sorcery was atthe root of the women’s misery.

As darkness fell upon us, the patients and theirkin waited for Yankush to enter into a trance inducedby a bitter, hallucinogenic concoction he had takenjust before sunset (it is made from a vine known asayahuasca). While the visitors exchanged gossip andsmall talk, Yankush sat facing the wall of his house,whistling healing songs and waving a bundle ofleaves that served as a fan and soft rattle. Abruptly,he told the two women to lie on banana leaves thathad been spread on the floor, so that he could use hisvisionary powers to search their bodies for tinypoints of light, the telltale signature of the sorcerer’sdarts. As Yankush’s intoxication increased, his medi-tative singing gave way to violent retching. Gainingcontrol of himself, he sucked noisily on the patients’bodies in an effort to remove the darts.

Family members of the patients shouted words ofconcern and support. “Others know you are curing.They can hurt you, be careful!” one of the spectatorswarned, referring to the sorcerers whose work theshaman hoped to undo. Torn by anxiety, Chapaik’shusband addressed those present: “Who has donethis bewitching? If my wife dies, I could kill any manout of anger!” In their cries of encouragement to

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Yankush, the participants expressed their high re-gard for the difficult work of the shaman, who at thispoint in the proceedings was frequently doubledover with nausea caused by the drug he had taken.

Suddenly there was a marked change of atmos-phere. A woman named Chimi called out excitedly,“If there are any darts there when she gets backhome, they may say that Yankush put them there. Sotake them all out!” Chimi’s statement was an unusu-ally blunt rendering of an ambivalence implicit in allrelations between Aguaruna shamans and theirclients. Because shamans control spirit darts, peoplefear that a shaman may be tempted to use the coverof healing as an opportunity to bewitch his ownclients for personal reasons. The clients therefore re-mind the shaman that they expect results—and ifsuch results are not forthcoming, the shaman himselfmay be suspected of, and punished for, sorcery.

Yankush is such a skilled healer that this threatscarcely caused him to miss a step. He sucked noisilyon Yamanuanch’s neck to cure her sore throat and,after singing about the sorcery darts lodged in herbody, announced she would recover. For good mea-sure, he recommended injections of a commercialantibiotic. Yankush also took pains to emphasize theintensity of his intoxication. Willingness to endurethe rigors of a large dose of ayhausca is a sign of hisgood faith as a healer. “Don’t say I wasn’t intoxicatedenough,” he reminded the participants.

As Yankush intensified his singing and rhythmicfanning of the leaf-bundle, he began to have visionsof events taking place in distant villages. Suddenlyhe cried out, “In Achu they killed a person. A sor-cerer was killed.” “Who could it be?” the other par-ticipants asked one another, but before they couldreflect on this too long, Yankush had moved on toother matters. “I’m concentrating to throw out sick-ness, like a tireless jaguar,” he sang, referring to Cha-paik, who complained of abdominal pains. “Withmy help she will become like the tapir, which doesn’tknow how to refuse any kind of food.”

After two hours of arduous work, Yankush steeredthe healing session to its conclusion by reassuring thepatients that they were well on their way to recovery.“In her body the sickness will end,” he sang. “It’s allright. She won’t die. It’s nothing,” he added, return-ing to a normal speaking voice. Before departing,the patients and their kin discussed the particularsof Yankush’s dietary recommendations and made


plans for a final healing session to take place at alater date. As the sleepy participants left Yankush’shouse for their beds in other parts of the village, theyexpressed their contentment with the results of hisefforts.

During the year I lived near Yankush, he con-ducted healing sessions like this one about twice amonth. Eventually, I realized that his active practicewas only partly a matter of choice. To allay suspi-cions and demonstrate his good faith as a healer, hefelt compelled to take some cases he might otherwisehave declined. Even so, when I traveled to other vil-lages, people sometimes asked me how I could livein a community where a “sorcerer” practiced on aregular basis.

When a respected elder died suddenly of un-known causes in 1976, Yankush came under extraor-dinary pressure to identify the sorcerer responsible.From the images of his ayahuasca vision he drew thename of a young man from a distant region whohappened to be visiting a nearby village. The manwas put to death in a matter of days. BecauseYankush was widely known to have fingered the sor-cerer, he became the likely victim of a reprisal raid bymembers of the murdered man’s family. Yankush’swillingness to accept this risk in order to protect hiscommunity from future acts of sorcery was a sourceof his social prestige, but it was also a burden. Irarely saw him leave his house without a loadedshotgun.

In calling attention to the violent undercurrents ofshamanism, my intention is not to disparage thehealing traditions of the Aguaruna or of any othertribal people. I have no doubt that the catharticdrama I witnessed in Yankush’s house made the twopatients feel better. Medical anthropologists agreethat rituals calling forth expressions of communitysupport and concern for sick people often lead to amarked improvement in their sense of well-being.Shamans also serve their communities by adminis-tering herbal medications and other remedies andeven, as in Yankush’s case, helping to integrate tradi-tional healing arts with the use of modern pharma-ceuticals. At the same time, however, they help sus-tain a belief in sorcery that exacts a high price inanxiety and, from time to time, in human life.

In their attempts to understand this negative cur-rent, anthropologists have studied how shamanismand accusations of sorcery define local patterns of




power and control. Belief in sorcery, for example,may provide a system of rules and punishments insocieties that lack a police force, written laws, and aformal judicial system. It helps people assign a causeto their misfortunes. And it sustains religions thatlink human beings with the spirit world and with thetropical forest itself.

What I find unsettling, rather, is that New AgeAmerica seeks to embrace shamanism without anyappreciation of its context. For my Santa Fe acquain-tances, tribal lore is a supermarket from which theychoose some tidbits while spurning others. Theyprogram computers or pursue other careers by dayso that by night they can wrestle with spirit-jaguars

and search for their power spots. Yankush’s lifetimeof discipline is reduced to a set of techniques for per-sonal development, stripped of links to a specificlandscape and cultural tradition.

New Age enthusiasts are right to admire theshamanistic tradition, but while advancing it as analternative to our own healing practices, they brushaside its stark truths. For throughout the world,shamans see themselves as warriors in a struggleagainst the shadows of the human heart. Shamanismaffirms life but also spawns violence and death. Thebeauty of shamanism is matched by its power—andlike all forms of power found in society, it inspires itsshare of discontent.

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21

Training for the PriesthoodAmong the Kogi of ColombiaGerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff’s writings on the Kogi, published during the 1950s through 1970s, doc-ument one of the most fascinating examples of religious specialists to be found anywhere in anthro-pology. The Kogi are an indigenous people of Colombia, who sought refuge in the mountains to es-cape the brutality of Spanish conquerors. Relatively untouched by other cultures until recent times,and despite the hardship of their highland natural environment, they developed a worldview withwhat the author calls “profound spiritual satisfactions,” supported by a highly formalized priesthood.

This article begins with an overview of the Kogi environment, subsistence methods, and social or-ganization, as well as their elaborate cosmology, which includes a Mother-Goddess and distinctive,culturally specific ethical values. Reichel-Dolmatoff’s chief concern here, however, is with the train-ing of the mámas, men whose priestly functions require years of training and are carried out insolemn rituals. If selected to be trained as a máma, a young boy is separated from his family, segre-gated from females, kept indoors during the day, and fed a special diet. The author stresses how thetraining of the young máma, which normally takes eighteen years, shapes his later behavior as anadult priest. The priest’s responsibilities include officiating at ceremonial centers and listening to theconfession of misdeeds.

The Kogi claim to be elder brothers of humanity and to possess the only true religion. They are,therefore, deeply concerned for the education of future priests, who will maintain not only Kogi soci-ety but the entire world. Reichel-Dolmatoff warns us, however, not to think of the Kogi as noble sav-ages living in harmony with nature but as people who have developed a spiritual means of acceptingharsh reality and misfortune.

The Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta innortheastern Colombia are a small tribe of some6,000 Chibcha-speaking Indians, descendants ofthe ancient Tairona who, at the time of the Spanish

conquest, had reached a relatively high developmentamong the aboriginal peoples of Colombia. TheSierra Nevada, with its barren, highly dissectedslopes, steep and roadless, presents a difficult terrainfor Creole settlement and, owing to the harshnessand poor soils of their habitat, the Kogi have beenable to preserve, to a quite remarkable degree, theirtraditional way of life.

The present tribal territory lies at an altitude ofbetween 1,500 and 2,000 meters, where the Indiansoccupy several small villages of about ten to several

Source: Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, “Training for the Priesthoodamong the Kogi of Columbia,” in ENCULTURATION INLATIN AMERICA; AN ANTHOLOGY, edited by JohannesWilbert (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American CenterPublications, 1976), 265–288. Reproduced with permission ofThe Regents of the University of California.

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dozen round huts, each of about 3 to 4 meters in di-ameter and built of wattle and daub covered with aconical thatched roof. Each house is inhabited by onenuclear family composed of four or five people whosleep, cook, and eat in this narrow, dark space thatthey share with their dogs and with most of theirmaterial belongings. The huts of a village clusteraround a larger, well-built house, also round in itsground plan, but provided with a wall of denselyplaited canes; this is the ceremonial house, the tem-ple, access to which is restricted to the men, andwhere women and children are not allowed to enter.Kogi villages are not permanently occupied; mostIndians live in isolated homesteads dispersed overthe mountain slopes, and the villages are hardlymore than convenient gathering places where the in-habitants of a valley or of a certain restricted area cancome together occasionally to exchange news, dis-cuss community matters, discharge themselves ofsome minor ritual obligations, or trade with the vis-iting Creole peasants. When staying in the village,the men usually spend the night in the ceremonialhouse where they talk, sing, or simply listen to theconversation of the older men. As traditional pat-terns of family life demand that men and womenlive in not too close an association and collaborate inrigidly prescribed ways in the daily task of makinga living, most Kogi families, when staying in theirfields, occupy two neighboring huts, one inhabitedby the man while the other hut serves as a kitchenand storeroom, and is occupied by his wife andchildren.

The economic basis of Kogi culture consists ofsmall garden plots where sweet manioc, maize, plan-tains, cucurbits, beans, and some fruit trees aregrown. A few domestic animals such as chicken,pigs, or, rarely, some cattle, are kept only to be soldor exchanged to the Creoles for bush knives, ironpots, and salt. Some Kogi make cakes of raw sugarfor trading. Because of the lack of adequate soils, thefood resources of one altitudinal level are often in-sufficient, and many families own several small gar-dens and temporary shelters at different altitudes,moving between the cold highlands and the temper-ate valleys in a dreary continuous quest for someharvestable food. Although the starchy tubers pro-vide a fairly permanent food supply, protein sourcesare few, and a chronic state of malnutrition seemsto be the rule. Slash-and-burn agriculture is heavy

work, and the harsh, mountainous environmentmakes transportation a laborious task. Much agricul-tural work is done by women and children who col-laborate with the men in clearing and burning thefields.

The objects of material culture are coarse and sim-ple, and generally are quite devoid of ornamenta-tion. Some heavy wooden benches, a pair of oldstring hammocks, smoke-blackened cooking vesselsand gourd containers, and a few baskets and carry-ing bags are about all an average family owns. It isevident then that, to the casual observer, Kogi cul-ture gives the impression of deject poverty, and thedisheveled and sullen countenance of the Indianadds to this image of misery and neglect. Indeed, ifjudged by their external appearance and their aus-tere and withdrawn manner, one would easily cometo the conclusion that by all standards of culturalevolution these Indians are a sorry lot.

But nothing could be more misleading than ap-pearances. Behind the drab façade of penury, theKogi lead a rich spiritual life in which the ancient tra-ditions are being kept alive and furnish the individ-ual and his society with guiding values that not onlymake bearable the arduous conditions of physicalsurvival, but make them appear almost unimportantif measured against the profound spiritual satisfac-tions offered by religion. After days and weeks ofhunger and work, of ill health and the dreary roundof daily tasks, one will suddenly be taken into thepresence of a scene, maybe a dance, a song, or someprivate ritual action that, quite unexpectedly, offers amomentary glimpse into the depths of a very an-cient, very elaborate culture. And stronger still be-comes this impression in the presence of a priest oran elder who, when speaking of these spiritual di-mensions, reveals before his listeners this coherentsystem of beliefs which is the Kogi world view.

Traditional Kogi religion is closely related to Kogiideas about the structure and functioning of the Uni-verse, and Kogi cosmology is, in essence, a model forsurvival in that it molds individual behavior into aplan of actions or avoidances that are oriented to-ward the maintenance of a viable equilibrium be-tween Man’s demands and Nature’s resources. Inthis manner the individual and society at large mustboth carry the burden of great responsibilities which,in the Kogi view, extend not only to their own societybut to the whole of mankind.

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The central personification of Kogi religion is theMother-Goddess. It was she who, in the beginning oftime, created the cosmic egg, encompassed betweenthe seven points of reference: North, South, East,West, Zenith, Nadir, and Center, and stratified intonine horizontal layers, the nine “worlds,” the fifthand middlemost of which is ours. They embody thenine daughters of the Goddess, each one conceivedas a certain type of agricultural land, ranging frompale, barren sand to the black and fertile soil thatnourishes mankind. The seven points of referencewithin which the Cosmos is contained are associatedor identified with innumerable mythical beings,animals, plants, minerals, colors, winds, and manyhighly abstract concepts, some of them arranged intoa scale of values, while others are of a more ambiva-lent nature. The four cardinal directions are underthe control of four mythical culture heroes who arealso the ancestors of the four primary segments ofKogi society, all four of them Sons of the Mother-Goddess and, similarly, they are associated withcertain pairs of animals that exemplify the basic mar-riage rules. The organizing concept of social struc-ture consists of a system of patrilines and matrilinesin which descent is reckoned from father to son andfrom mother to daughter, and a relationship of com-plementary opposites is modeled after the relation-ship between certain animal species. The North isassociated with the marsupial and his spouse the ar-madillo; the South with the puma and his spouse thedeer; the East with the jaguar and his spouse the pec-cary; and the West with the eagle and his spouse thesnake. In other words, the ancestral couples form an-tagonistic pairs in which the “male” animal (mar-supial, puma, jaguar, eagle) feeds on the “female”animal (armadillo, deer, peccary, snake) and mar-riage rules prescribe that the members of a certainpatriline must marry women whose matriline is as-sociated with an animal that is the natural prey of theman’s animal. The equivalence of food and sex isvery characteristic of Kogi thought and is essentialfor an understanding of religious symbolism in mythand ritual. Moreover, each patriline or matriline hasmany magical attributes and privileges that togetherwith their respective mythical origins, genealogies,and precise ceremonial functions, form a very elabo-rate body of rules and relationships.

The macrocosmic structure repeats itself in innu-merable aspects of Kogi culture. Each mountain

peak of the Sierra Nevada is seen as a “world,” ahouse, an abode, peopled by spirit-beings and en-closed within a fixed set of points of reference: a top,a center, a door. All ceremonial houses contain fourcircular, stepped, wooden shelves on the inside oftheir conical roofs, representing the different cosmiclayers, and it is thought that this structure is re-peated in reverse underground, the house being thusan exact reproduction of the Universe, up to thepoint where its center becomes the “center of theworld.” Moreover, the cosmic egg is conceived as adivine uterus, the womb of the Mother-Goddess,and so, in a descending scale, our earth is conceivedas a uterus, the Sierra Nevada is a uterus, and so isevery mountain, house, cave, carrying bag, and, in-deed, every tomb. The land is conceived as a hugefemale body that nourishes and protects, and eachtopographic feature of it corresponds to an inclusivecategory of anatomical detail of this vast mother-image. The large roof apexes of the major ceremonialhouses, constructed in the shape of an open, up-turned umbrella, represent the sexual organ of theMother-Goddess and offerings are deposited thererepresenting a concept of fertilization.

The Kogi conceive the world in terms of a dualis-tic scheme that expresses itself on many differentlevels. On the level of the individual as a biologicalbeing, it is the human body that provides the modelfor one set of opposed but complementary princi-ples, manifest in the apparent bilateral symmetry ofthe body and the distinction between male and fe-male organisms. On the level of society, the existenceof groups of opposed but complementary segmentsis postulated, based on the mythical precedency andcontrolled by the principles of exogamy. The villagesthemselves are often divided into two parts and a di-visory line, invisible but known to all, separates thevillage into two sections. The ceremonial houses areimagined as being bisected into a “right side” and a“left side,” by a line running diametrically betweenthe two doors that are located at opposite points ofthe circular building, and each half of the structurehas its own central post, one male and another fe-male. On a cosmic level, the same principle dividesthe Universe into two sides, the division beingmarked by the tropical sun, which, going overhead,separates the world into a right and a left half. Thedualistic elaborations of this type are innumerable:male/female, man/woman, right/left, heat/cold,





light/dark, above/below, and the like, and they arefurthermore associated with certain categories of an-imals, plants, and minerals; with colors, winds, dis-eases, and, of course, with the principles of Goodand Evil. Many of these dualistic manifestationshave the character of symbolic antagonists that sharea common essence; just as the tribal deities who, inone divine being, combine benefic and malevolentaspects, thus man carries within himself this vitalpolarity of Good and Evil.

Apart from the Mother-Goddess, the principal di-vine personifications are her four sons and, next tothem, a large number of spirit-owners, the masters ofthe different aspects of Nature, the rulers over ritu-als, and the beings that govern certain actions. Thatall these supernatural beings are the appointedguardians of certain aspects of human conduct—cultural or biological—has many ethical implicationsthat provide the basis for the concept of sin. Whenthe divine beings established the world order, how-ever, they made provision for individual interpreta-tion and thus confirmed a person’s autonomy ofmoral choice. Life is a mixture of good and evil and,as the Kogi point out very frequently, there can be nomorality without immorality. According to Kogiethics one’s life should be dedicated entirely to theacquisition of knowledge, a term by which are meantthe myths and traditions, the songs and spells, andall the rules that regulate ritual. This body of esotericknowledge is called by the Kogi the “Law of theMother.” Every object, action, or intention has aspirit-owner who jealously guards what is his own,his privilege, but who is willing to share it withmankind if compensated by an adequate offering.The concept of offerings, then, is closely connectedwith divinatory practices because it is necessary todetermine the exact nature of the offerings that willmost please a certain spirit-being. These details—some of them esoteric trivia but nonetheless func-tional units of a complex whole—can only be learnedin the course of many years. Closely related to thisbody of knowledge, Kogi learning includes a widerange of information on phenomena that might beclassified as belonging to tribal history, geography,and ecology, animal and plant categorization, and afair knowledge of anatomy and physiology.

But all this knowledge has a single purpose: tofind a balance between Good and Evil and to reachold age in a state of wisdom and tolerance. The

process of establishing this balance is called yulúka,an expression that might be translated as “to be inagreement with” or “to be in harmony with.” Oneshould be careful, however, not to see in this concepta kind of romantic Naturphilosophie, of noble savagesliving in harmony with nature, but take it for what itis—a harsh sense of reality paired, at times, with arather cynical outlook on human affairs. The conceptof yulúka does not stand for blissful tranquillity, butmeans grudging acceptance of misfortune, be it sick-ness or hunger, the treachery of one’s closest of kin, orthe undeserved ill will of one’s neighbor. A Kogi,when faced with hardships or high emotional ten-sions will rarely dramatize his situation, but willrather try to establish an “agreement” by a process ofrationalization.

Another philosophical concept of importance iscalled aluna. There are many possible translationsranging from “spiritual” to “libidinous,” and from“powerful” to “traditional” or “imaginary.” Some-times the word is used to designate the human soul.An approximate general translation would be “other-worldly,” a term that would imply supernaturalpower with vision and strength, but otherwise themeaning of this concept has to be illustrated by exam-ples, to convey its significance to the outsider. For ex-ample, to say that the world was created “in aluna”means that it was designed by a spiritual effort. Thedeities and the tribal ancestors exist in aluna, that is, inthe Otherworld, and in an incorporeal state. Similarly,it is possible to deposit an offering in aluna at a certainspot, without really visiting that place. A man mightsin in aluna, by harboring evil intentions. And to gofurther still: to the Kogi, concrete reality quite often isonly appearance, a semblance that has only symbolicvalue, while the true essence of things exists only inaluna. According to the Kogi, one must therefore de-velop the spiritual faculty to see behind these appear-ances and to recognize the aluna of the Universe.

The divine personifications of the Kogi pantheonare not only continuously demanding offerings frommen but, being guardians of the moral order, alsowatch any interaction between mortals, and punishthe breaking of the rules that govern interpersonalrelations. The Kogi put great emphasis on collabora-tion, the sharing of food, and the observance of re-spectful behavior toward elders and other persons ofauthority. Unfilial conduct, the refusal to work forone’s father-in-law, or aggressive behavior of any





kind are not only social sins, but are transgressionsof the divine rules, and for this the offender is boundto incur the displeasure of the divine beings. Amongthe worst offenses are violations of certain sexual re-strictions. Kogi attitudes toward sex are dominatedby deep anxieties concerned with the constant fearof pollution, and prolonged sexual abstinence is de-manded of all men who are engaged in any ritual ac-tivity. The great sin is incest, and the observation ofthe rules of exogamy is a frequent topic of conversa-tions and admonitions in the ceremonial house.

Kogi culture contains many elements of sexualrepression, and there is a marked antifeminist ten-dency. The men consider the acquisition of esotericknowledge to be the only valid objective in life andclaim that women are the prime obstacle on the wayof achieving this goal. Although a Kogi husband isexpected to be a dutiful provider and should pro-duce sufficient food to keep his family in goodhealth, it is also stated that a man should never workfor material gain and should not make efforts to ac-quire more property than he needs in order to feedand house his family. All his energies should bespent on learning, on taking part in ritual, and on ac-quiring the necessary knowledge of procedure andmoral precepts to contribute to the maintenance ofthe ordained world order. Now women have veryfew ritual functions and, except when quite old,show but little interest in metaphysical matters. Tothem the balance of the Universe is of small concern;they eat, they sleep, they chat and idle; in otherwords, to a Kogi man they personify all the elementsof indulgence, of disruption, and of irresponsibility.“They are like cockroaches,” the Kogi grumble, “al-ways near the cooking place, and eating all thetime!” Besides, Kogi women are not squeamishabout sex and, being oblivious to the delicate detailsof ritual purity, appear to their men as eternaltemptresses bent upon destroying the social orderand, with it, the religious concepts that are so closelyconnected with it.

The Kogi are a deeply religious people and theyare guided in their faith by a highly formalizedpriesthood. Although all villages have a headmanwho nominally represents civil authority, the truepower of decision in personal and community mat-ters is concentrated in the hands of the native priests,called mámas. These men, most of whom have a pro-found knowledge of tribal custom, are not simple

curers or shamanistic practitioners, but fulfillpriestly functions, taught during years of trainingand exercised in solemn rituals. The mámas are sun-priests who, high up in the mountains behind thevillages, officiate in ceremonial centers where peoplegather at certain times of the year, and each ceremo-nial house in a village is under the charge of one ortwo priests who direct and supervise the nightlongmeetings of the men when they gather in the settle-ment. The influence of this priesthood extends toevery aspect of family and village life and completelyovershadows the few attributes of the headmen.

To begin with, all people must periodically visit apriest for confession—in private or in public—of alltheir actions and intentions. An important mecha-nism of control is introduced here by the idea thatsickness is, in the last analysis, the consequence of astate of sinfulness incurred by not living according tothe “Law of the Mother.” A man will therefore scru-tinize his conscience in every detail and will try to beabsolutely honest about his actions and intentions, toavoid falling ill or to cure an existing sickness. Con-fession takes place at night in the ceremonial house,the máma reclining in his hammock while the con-fessant sits next to him on a low bench. The othermen must observe silence or, at least, converse insubdued voices, while between the priest and theconfessant unfolds a slow, halting dialogue in whichthe máma formulates several searching questionsabout the confessant’s family life, social relations,food intake, ritual obligations, dreams, and manyother aspects of his daily life. People are supposed toconfess not only the actual fault they have commit-ted, but also their evil intentions, their sexual oraggressive fantasies, anything that might come totheir minds under the questioning of the priest. Thenagging fear of sickness, the hypochondriacal obser-vation and discussion of the most insignificantsymptoms, will make people completely unburdenthemselves. There can be no doubt that confession isa psychotherapeutic institution of the first order,within the general system of Kogi religion.

To act as a confessor to people as metaphysicallypreoccupied as the Kogi puts high demands upon amáma’s intelligence and empathy; his role is neverthat of a passive listener but he must be an accom-plished conversationalist, able to direct the confes-sant’s discourse into channels that allow him toprobe deeply into the troubled mind of his confidant.





But confession in the ceremonial house is not theonly occasion when an individual can relieve himselfof his intimate doubts and conflicts. At any time, anyman, woman, or child can approach a máma and askhim for advice. It is natural then that a máma ob-tains, in this manner, much information on individ-ual attitudes and community affairs which allowshim to exercise control over many aspects of local so-ciopolitical development. I know of no case, how-ever, where a máma would have taken advantage ofthis knowledge for his own ends. The mámas consti-tute a truly moralizing force and, as such, occupy ahighly respected position.

Kogi priests are the products of a long and arduoustraining, under the strict guidance of one or severalold and experienced mámas. In former times it wasthe custom that, as soon as a male child was born,the máma would consult in a trance the Mother-Goddess, to ascertain whether or not the newbornbabe was to be a future priest. It is also said that amáma might dream the name of a certain family andthus would know that their newborn male childwould become a priest. Immediately the mámawould then “give notice” to the newborn during avisit to his family, and it is pointed out that, in thosetimes, the parents would have felt greatly honoredby the knowledge that their son would eventuallybecome a priest. From several traditions it would ap-pear that certain families or, rather, patrilines, mayhave had hereditary preeminence in priesthood, andeven today priests belonging to a high-ranking ex-ogamic group are likely to be more respected thanothers.

Ideally, a future priest should receive a special ed-ucation since birth; the child would immediately beseparated from his mother and given into the care ofthe máma’s wife, or any other woman of childbear-ing age whom the máma might order to join hishousehold as a wet nurse. But occasionally themother herself would be allowed to keep the child,with the condition that he be weaned before reach-ing the age of three months. From then on the childwould have to be fed a mash of ripe bananas andcooking plantains, and soon afterwards would haveto be turned over to the máma’s family. If, for somereason, a family refused to give up the child, the civilauthorities might have to interfere and take the childaway by force. It was always the custom that the

family should pay the máma for the education of theboy, by sending periodically some food to his house,or by working in his fields.

These ideal conditions, it might be said, probablynever existed; under normal circumstances—andthis refers also to the present situation—the trainingbegins at about two or three years of age, but cer-tainly not later than the fifth year, and then continuesthrough childhood, adolescence, and young adult-hood, until the novice, aged now perhaps twenty ortwenty-two, has acquired his new status as máma byfulfilling all necessary requirements. The full train-ing period should be eighteen years, divided intotwo cycles of nine years each, the novice reachingpuberty by the end of the first cycle.

There exist about three or four places in the SierraNevada where young people are being trained forthe priesthood. In each place, two, or at most, threeboys of slightly different ages live in an isolated val-ley, far from the next village, where they are takeninto the care of their master’s family. The geographi-cal setting may vary but, in most cases, the small set-tlement, consisting of a ceremonial house and two orthree huts, is located at a spot that figures promi-nently in myth and tradition. It may be the placewhere a certain lineage had its origin, or where aculture hero accomplished a difficult task; or perhapsit is the spot where one of the many spirit-ownersof Nature has his abode. In any case, the close asso-ciation of a “school” with a place having certainreligious-historical traditions is of importance be-cause at such a spot there exists the likelihood ofready communication with the supernatural sphere;it is a “door,” a threshold, a point of convergence,besides being a place that is sacred and lies under theprotection of benevolent spirit-beings.

The institution of priestly training has a long andsacred tradition among the Kogi. Several lengthymyths tell of how the four sons of the Mother-Goddess created Mount Doanankuívi, at the head-waters of the Tucurinca River and, inside the moun-tain, built the first ceremonial house where noviceswere to be trained for the priesthood. The firstlegendary máma to teach such a group of discipleswas Búnalyue, and once they had acquired the sta-tus of priests, they settled in the nearby valley ofMukuánauiaishi which, thereafter, became thecenter for the training of novices from all over theSierra Nevada. According to several myths, it was





Búnkuasé, one of the sons of the Mother-Goddess,who established the rules according to which afuture máma was to be chosen and educated.Búnkuasé, “the shining one,” is the personificationof the highest moral principles in Kogi ethics and isthus taken to be the patron and spiritual guardian ofthe priesthood. It is, however, characteristic of Kogiculture that there should exist several other tradi-tions according to which it is Kashindúkua, themorally ambivalent jaguar-priest, who is the tutelarydivine personification. Kashindúkua, also a son ofthe Mother-Goddess, had been destined by her to bea great curer of human ills, a thaumaturge able to ex-tract sickness from the patient’s body as if it were aconcrete, tangible substance. But occasionally, andmuch to his brother’s grief, he misused his powersand then did great harm to people. Kashindúkuacame to personify sexual license and, above all, in-cest but, as an ancient priest-king, curer, and protec-tor of all ceremonial houses, he continues to occupya very important place in the Kogi pantheon.

A novice, training for the priesthood, is desig-nated by the term kuívi (abstinent). This conceptrefers not only to temperance in food and drink, butalso to sex, sleep, and any form of overindulgence.This attitude of ascetic self-denial is said to havebeen the prime virtue of the ancient mámas of myth-ical times. But, as always, the Kogi introduce an ele-ment of ambivalence, of man’s difficult choice of ac-tion, and also tell of outstanding sages and miracleworkers who, at the same time, were great sinners.

At the level of cultural development attained bythe Kogi, the teacher position is well recognized andthere is full agreement that all priests must undergoa long process of organized directed training, in thecourse of which the novice’s education is function-ally specialized. The ideal image of the great teacherand master, the ancient sage, is often elaborated inmyths and tales, and in their context the máma isgenerally represented as a just but authoritarian fa-ther figure. In the great quest for knowledge and di-vine illumination, the teacher never demands fromhis pupils more than he himself is willing to give; hesuffers patiently with them and is a model of self-control and wisdom. In other tales, the opposite isshown, the vicious hypocrite who stuffs himself withfood while his disciples are fasting, or the lecherousold man who seduces nubile girls while publiclypreaching chastity. These images of the saint and the

sinner—patterned after those of the hero and thevillain, in another type of tale—are always present inKogi thought and, in many aspects, are statements ofthe importance society attributes to the role of thepriesthood. Some of these tales are really quite sim-plistic in that they tend to measure a máma’s staturemerely in terms of his cunning, his reconciliatoryabilities, rote memory, or miracle-working capacity,but other tales contain examples of true psychologi-cal insight, high moral principles, and readiness forself-sacrifice. The image of the teacher is thus welldefined—though somewhat stereotyped—in Kogiculture and is also referred to in situations that liequite outside the sphere of priestly training and thatare connected—to give some examples—to the ac-quisition of skills, the tracing of genealogical ties, orthe interpretation of natural phenomena. On the onehand, then, it is plain that not all mámas are thoughtto be adequate teachers and to be trusted with theeducation of a small child. On the other hand, not allmámas will accept disciples; some live in abjectpoverty, others are in ill health, and others still feeldisinclined to carry the responsibilities that teachingentails. Old age is not of the essence if it is not ac-companied by an alert mind and a manifestly “pure”behavior, and quite often a fairly young máma hasgreat renown because of his high moral status, whileolder men are held in less esteem.

The novices should spend most of their wakinghours inside the ceremonial house. In former timesthey used to live in a small enclosure (hubi) withinthe ceremonial structure, but at present they sleep inone of the neighboring huts. This hut, which is simi-lar to the ceremonial house but smaller, has an elab-orate roof apex and the walls of plaited canes havetwo doors at opposite points of the circumference,while the hut of the máma’s family lacks the apexand has only one door. All during their long trainingthe novices must lead an entirely nocturnal life andare strictly forbidden to leave the house in daylight.Sleeping during the day on low cots of canes placedagainst the walls, the novices rise after sunset and, assoon as darkness has set in, are allowed to take theirfirst meal in the kitchen annex or outside the máma’shouse. A second meal is taken around midnight anda light third meal shortly before sunrise. Even duringthe night, the novices are not supposed to go outsideexcept in the company of a máma and then only fora short walk. The principal interdictions, repeated





most emphatically over and over again, refer to thesun and to women; a novice should be educated,after weaning, only by men and among men, andshould never see a girl or a woman who is sexuallyactive; and throughout his training period, he shouldnever see the sun nor be exposed to his rays. “Thesun is a máma,” the Kogi say; “And this máma mightcause harm to the child.” When there is a moon, anovice should cover his head with a specially wovenbasketry tray (güíshi) when leaving the house atnight.

During their training period the novices are su-pervised and strictly controlled by one or two atten-dant wardens (hánkua-kúkui), adult men who havejoined the máma’s household, generally after havingspent some years as novices under his guidance.These wardens are mainly in charge of discipline,but may occasionally participate to some degree inthe educational process, according to the máma’sorders.

Apart from the little group of people who consti-tute the settlement—the máma and his family, thewardens, and some aged relatives of either—thenovices should avoid any contact with other people;in fact, they should never even be seen by an out-sider. The manifest danger of pollution consists inthe presence of people who are in contact withwomen; should such a person see a novice or shouldhe speak to him, the latter would immediately losethe spiritual power he has accumulated in the courseof his apprenticeship. It is supposed, then, that thecommunity consists only of “pure” people, that is, ofpersons who abstain from any sexual activity andwho also observe very strict dietary rules.

As in many primitive educational systems, theobservance of dietary restrictions is a very importantpoint in priestly training. In general, a novice shouldsoon learn to eat sparingly and, after puberty hasbeen reached, should be able to go occasionally with-out food for several days. He should eat very littlemeat, but rather fowl such as curassow, and shouldavoid all foodstuffs that are of non-Indian originsuch as bananas, sugar cane, onions, or citrus fruits.He should never, under any circumstances, consumesalt, nor should he use any condiments such as pep-pers. A novice, it may be added here, should nottouch his food with his left hand because this is the“female” hand and is polluted. During the first nineyears the prescribed diet consists mainly of some

small river catfish and freshwater shrimp, certainyellow-green grasshoppers of nocturnal habits, landsnails collected in the highlands, large black túbibeetles, and certain white mushrooms. Vitamin Dappears to be sufficient to compensate for the lack ofsunlight during these years. Three or four differentclasses of maize can also be eaten, as well as somesweet manioc, pumpkins, and certain beans. Somemámas insist that all food consumed by the novicesshould be predominantly of a white color: whitebeans, white potatoes, white manioc, white shrimps,white land snails, and so forth. Only after pubertyare they allowed to eat, however sparingly, the meatof game animals such as peccary, agouti, and ar-madillo. These animals, it is said, “have great knowl-edge, and by eating their flesh the novices will par-take in their wisdom.” In preparing their daily food,only a clay pot made by the máma himself should beused and all food should be boiled, but never friednor smoked. Shoe-shaped vessels (or, rather, breast-shaped ones) are used especially for the preparationof a ritual diet based on beans.

The boys are dressed in a white cotton clothwoven by the máma or, later on, by themselves,which is wrapped around the body, covering it fromunder the armpits to the ankles, and held in placeby a wide woven belt. For adornment they wearbracelets, armlets, necklaces, and ear ornaments, allof ancient Tairona origin and made of gold, gildedcopper, and semiprecious stones. There is emphasison cleanliness and at night the boys go to bathe in thenearby mountain stream.

In former times, that is, perhaps until three orfour generations ago, it was the custom to educatealso some female children who, eventually, were tobecome the wives of the priests. The girls were cho-sen by divination and then were brought up by thewife of a máma. Aided by other old women, the girlswere taught many ancient traditions primarily refer-ring to the dangers of pollution. They were trainedto prepare certain “pure” foods, to collect aromaticand medical herbs, and to assist in the preparation ofminor rituals. At present, the education of girlsunder the guidance of a máma’s wife is institutional-ized in some parts, but the aim is not so much to pre-pare spouses for future priests than to educate cer-tain intelligent girls “in the manner of the ancients”and send them back to their families after a few yearsof schooling, so they can teach the women-folk of





their respective villages the traditions and preceptsthey have learned in the máma’s household, and bethus living examples of moral conduct.

But I must return now to the boy who has beentaken into a strange family and who is now under-going a crucial period of adaptation.

The novice is exposed to the varied influences ofa setting that differs notably from that of his ownfamily. Although the child will find in the máma’shousehold a certain well-accustomed set of familialbehavioral patterns, he is made aware that he nowlives in a context of nonkin. This is of special rele-vance where the novice was educated for the firstthree or four years by his own family and has thusacquired a certain cultural perspective that, in hisnew environment, is likely to differ from the de-mands made by the máma’s kin. Between teacherand pupil, however, there generally develops a fairlyclose emotional tie; the novice addresses the mámawith the term hátei (father), and he, in turn, refers tohis disciples as his “children,” or “sons.” Only afterthe novice has reached puberty does the apprentice-master relationship usually acquire a more formaltone.

During the first two years of life, Kogi childrenare prodded and continuously encouraged to accel-erate their sensory-motor development: creeping,walking, speaking. But in later years they are physi-cally and vocally rather quiet. A Kogi mother doesnot encourage response and activity, but rather triesto soothe her child and to keep him silent and unob-trusive. Very strict sphincter training is instituted,and by the age of ten or twelve months the boy is ex-pected to exercise complete control during the day-time hours. Play activity is discouraged by all adultsand, indeed, to be accused of “playing” is a very se-rious reproach. There are practically no children’sgames in Kogi culture and for this reason a teacher’scomplaints refer rather to lack of attention or tooverindulgence in eating or sleeping, than to anyboisterous, playful, or aggressive attitudes.

Although older children are sometimes scoldedfor intellectual failures, the Kogi punish or rewardchildren rather for behavioral matters. Punishmentis often physical; a máma punishes an inattentivenovice by depriving him of food or sleep, and quiteoften beats him sharply over the head with the thinhardwood rod he uses to extract lime from hisgourd-container when he is chewing coca. For more

serious misbehavior, children may be ordered tokneel on a handful of cotton seeds or on some smallpieces of a broken pottery vessel. A very painfulpunishment consists in kneeling motionless withhorizontally outstretched arms while carrying aheavy stone in each hand.

In practically all ceremonial houses one can see alarge vertical loom leaning against the wall, with ahalf-finished piece of cloth upon it. The weaving ofthe coarse cotton cloth the Kogi use for the garmentsof both sexes is a male activity and has a certainritual connotation. But to weave can also become apunishment. An inattentive novice—or a grown-upwho has disregarded the moral order—can be madeto weave for hours, sitting naked in the chill nightand frantically working the loom, while behindhim stands the máma who prods him with his limerod, sometimes beating him over the ears and say-ing: “I shall yet make you respect the cloth you arewearing!”

Life in the ceremonial house is characterized bythe regularized scheduling of all activities and thusexpresses quite clearly a distinct learning theory. Wemust, first of all, look at the general outline of theaims of education. In doing so, it is necessary to usecategories of formal knowledge in the way they aredefined in our culture, a division that would make nosense to a Kogi, but which is useful here to give anorder to the entire field of priestly instruction. Themain fields of a máma’s learning and competenceare, thus, the following:

1. Cosmogony, cosmology, mythology

2. Mythical social origins, social structure, andorganization

3. Natural history: geography, geology, meteoro-logy, botany, zoology, astronomy, biology

4. Linguistics: ceremonial language, rhetoric

5. Sensory deprivations; abstinence from food,sleep, and sex

6. Ritual; dancing and singing

7. Curing of diseases

8. Interpretation of signs and symbols, dreams,animal behavior

9. Sensitivity to auditory, visual, and otherhallucinations





The methods by which these aims of priestly edu-cation are pursued are many and depend to a high de-gree upon the recognition of a sequence of stages inthe child’s mental and physical development. Duringthe early years of training, at about five or six years ofage, the child is literally hand-reared, in that he is invery frequent physical contact with or, at least, prox-imity to, his teacher. While sitting on a low bench, themáma places both hands upon the hips of the boywho stands before him and rhythmically pushes andbends the child’s body to the tune of his songs orrecitals, or while marking the pace with a gourd-rattle. During this period, the Kogi say, the child “firstlearns to dance and only later learns to walk.”

During the first two years of training, the teach-ing of dances is accompanied only by the hummingof songs and by the sound of the rattle; only later onare the children taught to sing. During these prac-tices the children always wear heavy wooden maskstopped with feather crowns and are adorned with allthe heavy ornaments mentioned above. The peculiarsmell of the ancient mask, the pressure of its weight,and the overall restriction of body movementscaused by the stiff ceremonial attire and the hands ofthe teacher produce a lasting impact on the child,and even decades later, people who have passedthrough this experience refer to it with a mixture ofhorror and pride. For hours on end, night after night,and illuminated only by torches and low-burningfires, the children are thus taught the dance steps, thecosmological recitals, and the tales relating to theprincipal personifications and events of the Creationstory. Many of the songs and recitations are phrasedin the ancient ceremonial language which is compre-hensible only to an experienced máma, but whichhas to be learned by the novices by sheer memoriza-tion. During these early years, myths, songs, anddances become closely linked into a rigid structurethat alone—at least, at that time—guarantees the cor-rect form of presentation.

One of the main institutionalized teaching con-cepts consists in iterative behavior. This is empha-sized especially during the first half of the curricu-lum, when the novices are made to repeat the myths,songs, or spells until they have memorized not onlythe text and the precise intonation, but also the bodymovements and minor gestures that accompany theperformance. Rhythmic elements are important andthe learning of songs and recitals is always combined

with dancing or, at least, with swaying motions ofthe body. This is not a mere mechanistic approach tothe learning process and does not represent a neu-rally based stimulus-response pattern, but the childis simultaneously provided with a large number ofinterpretative details that make him grasp the con-text and meaning of the texts.

Between the end of the first nine-year cycle of edu-cation and the onset of the second cycle, the novicereaches puberty. It is well recognized by the Kogithat during this period significant personalitychanges occur, and for this reason allowance is madefor the eventual interruption of the training processor, as a matter of fact, for its termination. Havingreached puberty, a boy who fails to display a trulypromising attitude toward priesthood, demon-strated, above all, by his repressive attitude towardsexuality, is allowed to return to his family. At notime is such a boy forced to stay on, even if he shouldwish to do so; if his master believes that the youthdoes not have the calling to become a máma, he willinsist on his returning to his people. But these casesseem to be the exception rather than the rule; moreoften puberty is reached as a normal transition, anda few years later, at the age of fourteen or fifteenyears, the boy is initiated by the máma and receivesfrom him the lime container and the little rod—afemale and a male symbol—together with the per-mission to chew from now on the coca leaves theyouth forthwith toasts in a special vessel.

Ideally, a Kogi priest should divest himself of allsensuality and should practice sexual abstinence, butthis prohibition is contradicted in part by the rulethat all nubile girls must be deflowered by the mámawho, alone, has the power to neutralize the graveperils of pollution that according to the Kogi are in-herent in this act. Similar considerations demandthat, at puberty, a boy should be sexually initiated bythe máma’s wife or, in some cases, by an old womanspecially designated by the máma. During the pu-berty ritual of a novice, the master’s wife thus initi-ates the youth, an experience frought with great anx-iety and which is often referred to in later years as ahighly traumatic event.

During the second cycle, the teachings of the mas-ter concentrate upon divinatory practices, the prepa-ration of offerings, the acquisition of power objects,and the rituals of the life cycle. During this period,education tends to become extremely formal because





now it is much more closely associated with ritualand ceremony. The youth is taught many divinatorytechniques, beginning with simple yes-or-no alterna-tives, and going on to deep meditation accompaniedby exercises of muscular relaxation, controlledbreathing, and the “listening” to sudden signs orvoices from within. Power objects are acquiredslowly over the years and consist of all kinds of “per-mits” (sewá) granted by the spirit-owners of Nature.Most of these permits consist of small archaeologicalnecklace beads of stone, of different minerals,shapes, colors, and textures, that are given to thenovice as soon as he has mastered the correspondingknowledge. At that age, a novice will need, for ex-ample, a permit to chew coca, to eat certain kinds ofmeat, to perform certain rituals, or to sing certainsongs. During this period the novices are also taughtthe complex details of organization of the greatyearly ceremonies that take place in the ceremonialcenters, higher up in the mountains.

The novices have ample opportunity to watchtheir master perform ritual actions, a process duringwhich a considerable body of knowledge is transmit-ted to them. The seasons of the year are paced withspecial ritual markings: equinoxes and solstices,planting and harvesting, the stages of the individuallife cycle. Now that they themselves begin to per-form minor rituals, the recurrent statements con-tained in the texts, together with the identical behav-ioral sequences, become linked into a body of highlypatterned experiential units. The repetition of theformulas, “This is what happened! Thus spoke ourforefathers! This is what the ancient said!” insistsupon the rightness, the correctness of the actions andcontents that constitute ritual.

During the education of a novice there is no skilltraining to speak of. Kogi material culture, it hasbeen said already, is limited to an inventory of a fewlargely undifferentiated, coarse utilitarian objects,and the basic skills of weaving or pottery making—both male activities—are soon mastered by anychild. There is hardly any specialization in the man-ufacture of implements and a máma is not expectedto have any manual or artistic abilities. He is not amaster-craftsman; as a matter of fact, he shouldavoid working with his hands because of the ever-present danger of pollution.

Language training, however, is a very differentmatter. In the first place, since early childhood the

novice learns a very large denotative vocabulary.The Kogi are fully aware that any intellectual activitydepends upon linguistic competence and that only avery detailed knowledge of the language will permitthe precise naming of things, ideas, and events, as afundamental step in establishing categories and val-ues. In part, linguistic tutoring is concerned with cor-rectness of speech, and children are discouragedfrom using expressions that are too readily associ-ated with their particular age group. As most of thelinguistic input comes from a máma, the novicessoon demonstrate a very characteristic verbal behav-ior consisting of well-pronounced, rather short, sen-tences, with a rich vocabulary, and delivered in aneven but very emphatic voice.

While in normal child-training techniques care istaken to transmit a set of simple behavioral rules thattend to advance the child’s socialization process, intraining for the priesthood socialization is not a de-sirable goal. An average child is taught to collaboratewith certain categories of people and is expected tolend a helping hand, to share food, to be of service toothers. Emphasis is placed on participation in com-munal labor projects such as road building, the con-struction of houses or bridges, or on attendance atmeetings in which matters of community interest arebeing discussed. But priestly education does notconcern itself with these social functions of the indi-vidual. On the contrary, it is evident that a máma isquite intentionally trained not to become a groupmember, but to stand apart, aloof and superior. Tothe Kogi, the image of the spiritual leader is that of aman whose ascetic hauteur makes him almost unap-proachable. A máma should not be too readily acces-sible, but should keep away from the discussion ofpublic affairs and the petty details of local powerpolitics, because only by complete detachment andby the conscious elimination of all emotional consid-erations can he become a true leader of his people.

This aloofness, this standing alone, is, in part, theconsequence of the narrow physical and social envi-ronment in which the novices spend their long for-mative years of schooling. They are socialized, ofcourse, but they are socialized in a context of a verysmall and very select group of people associated intoa unit that is not at all representative of the largersociety. It is a fact that the novice learns very littleabout the practical aspects of the society of which he iseventually becoming a priest. Life in the ceremonial





house or in the small group of the máma’s familydoes not give the novices enough social contacts toenable them to obtain a clear picture of the wider so-ciety. It is a fact that, during the years of a priest’straining period, he hardly becomes acquainted withthe practical aspects of land tenure and land use, ofseed selection and soil qualities, or of the ways inwhich gossip, prestige, envy, and the wiles of womenare likely to affect society. A novice brought up quiteapart from society forms an image of the widerscene, which, at best, is highly idealized, and atworst, is an exaggeration of its evils and dangers.

In Kogi culture, sickness and death are thought tobe the direct consequences of sin, and sin is inter-preted mainly in terms of sex. Even in those relation-ships that are culturally approved, that is, in mar-riage between partners belonging to complementaryexogamic units, the Kogi always see an element ofpollution, of contamination, because most men areperiodically engaged in some ritual demanding pu-rity, abstinence, fasting, attendance at nightly ses-sions in the ceremonial house, or prolonged travel tosome sacred site. Kogi women are often, therefore,quite critical of male religious activities, being inturn accused by their husbands of exercising a“weakening” influence upon their minds, which arebent upon the delicate task of preserving the balanceof the Universe. Kogi priests live in a world ofmyth, of heroic deeds and miraculous events of timespast, in which the female characters appear cast inthe role of evil temptresses. To a young priest who,after years of seclusion, finally returns to village lifeand community affairs, women constitute the maindanger to cultural survival and are a direct threat tothe moral order. Therefore, it again takes severalyears before the máma learns about life in societyand acquires a practical understanding of the dailyproblems of life.

Moral education is, of course, at the core of apriest’s training. Since childhood, a common methodof transmitting a set of simple moral values consistsin the telling and retelling of the “counsels,” caution-ary tales of varying length that contain a condensedsocial message. These tales are a mixture of myth,familial story, and recital, and often refer to specificinterpersonal relations within the family setting:husband and wife, elder brother and youngerbrother, son-in-law and father-in-law, and so on.Other tales might refer to some famous máma of the

past, to culture heroes and their exploits, or to ani-mals that behave like humans. The stories are recitedduring the nightly sessions when a group of men hasgathered or they are told to an individual who hascome for advice. In all these stories, what is con-demned is overindulgence in food, sleep, and sex;physical aggressiveness is proscribed; theft, disre-spectful behavior, and cruelty to children and ani-mals are disapproved of, and inquisitiveness byword or deed is severely censured, especially inwomen and children. Those qualities that receivepraise are economic collaboration, the sharing offood, the willingness to lend household utensils, re-spectful attitudes towards one’s elders, and activeparticipation in ritual. The behavioral message isquite clear and there are no ambivalent solutions: theculprits are punished and the virtuous are rewarded.These counsels, then, do not explain the workings ofthe Universe and are not overburdened with esoterictrivia, but refer to matters of daily concern, to com-monplace events and to average situations. Theyform a body of entertaining, moralizing stories thatcan be embroidered or condensed to fit the situation.It may be mentioned here that it is characteristic ofthe highly impersonal quality of social relationsamong the Kogi that friendship is not a desirable in-stitution. It is too close, too emotional a relationship,and social rules quite definitely are against it.

It is evident that the counsels constitute a verysimplistic level of moral teaching. These stories areuseful in propagating some elementary rules amongthe common people; they are easy to remember andtheir anecdotal qualities and stereotyped charactershave become household words. Everyone knows thestory of Sekuishbúchi’s wife or how Máma Sheháforfeited his beautiful dress. But it is also obviousthat there is another, deeper level where the moralissues are far more complex.

According to the Kogi, our world exists and sur-vives because it is animated by solar energy. This en-ergy manifests itself by the yearly round of seasonsthat coincides with the position of the sun on thehorizon at the time of the solstices and equinoxes. Itis the máma’s task to “turn back the sun” when headvances too far and threatens to “burn the world,”or to “drown it with rain,” and only by thus control-ling the sun’s movements with offerings, prayers,and dances can the principles of fertility be conserved.This control of the mámas, however, depends on the





power and range of their esoteric knowledge andthis knowledge, in turn, depends upon the purity oftheir minds. Only the pure, the morally untainted,can acquire the divine wisdom to control the courseof the sun and, with it, the change of the seasons andthe times for planting and harvesting. It is for thisreason that the Kogi, both priests and laymen, aredeeply concerned about the education of future gen-erations of novices and about their requirements ofpurity. Their survival as well as that of all mankinddepends on the moral stature of Kogi priests, nowand in the future; and it is only natural, then, that thecorrect training of novices should be of profoundconcerns to all.

The Kogi claim to be the “elder brothers” ofmankind and, as they believe they are the possessorsof the only true religion, they feel responsible for themoral conduct of all men. There is great interest inforeign cultures, in the strange ways of other peo-ples, and the Kogi readily ask their divine beings togrant protection to the wayward “younger brothers”of other nations. The training of more novices is,therefore, a necessity not only for Kogi society, butalso for the maintenance of the wider moral order.

From the preceding pages it would, perhaps, ap-pear that, during all these years of priestly educa-tion, most knowledge is acquired by rote memory orby the endless repetition of certain actions meant totransmit a set of socioemotional messages that arenot always fully understood by the novice, but haveto be dealt with nevertheless. But it would be a mis-take to think that training for the priesthood consistsonly, or mainly, of these repetitious, empty elementsof a formalized ritual. The true goals of education arequite different and the iterative behavior describedabove is only a very small part of the working be-havior of the novices.

First of all, the aim of priestly education is to dis-cover and awaken those hidden faculties of the mindthat, at a given moment, enable the novice to estab-lish contact with the divine sphere. The mámasknow that a controlled set or sequence of sensoryprivations eventually produces altered states of con-sciousness enabling the novice to perceive a widerange of visual, auditory, or haptic hallucinations.The novice sees images and hears voices that explainand extol the essence of being, the true sources ofNature, together with the manner of solving a greatvariety of common human conflict situations. In this

way, he is able to receive instructions about offeringsto be made, about collective ceremonies to be orga-nized, or sickness to be cured. He acquires the fac-ulty of seeing behind the exterior appearances ofthings and perceiving their true nature. The conceptof aluna, translated here as “inner reality,” tells himthat the mountains are houses, that animals are peo-ple, that roots are snakes, and he learns that thismanipulation of symbols and signs is not a simplematter of one-to-one translation, but that there existdifferent levels of interpretation and complex chainsof associations. The Kogi say: “There are two ways oflooking at things; you may, when seeing a snake, say:‘This is a snake,’ but you may also say: ‘This is a ropeI am seeing, or a root, an arrow, a winding trail.’”Now, from the knowledge of these chains of associa-tions that represent, in essence, equivalences, he ac-quires a sense of balance, and when he has achievedthis balance he is ready to become a priest. He thenwill practice the concept of yulúka, of being in agree-ment, in harmony, with the unavoidable, with him-self, and with his environment, and he will teach thisknowledge to others, to those who are still torn bythe doubts of polarity.

The entire teaching process is aimed at this slow,gradual building up to the sublime moment of theself-disclosure of god to man, of the moment whenSintána or Búnkuasé or one of their avatars revealshimself in a flash of light and says: “Do this! Gothere!” Education, at this stage, is a technique of pro-gressive illumination. The divine personification ap-pears bathed in a heavenly light and, from then onteaches the novice at night. From out of the dark re-cesses of the house comes a voice and the novice lis-tens to it and follows its instructions. A máma said:“These novices hear everything and know every-thing but they don’t know who is teaching them.”

To induce these visionary states the Kogi use cer-tain hallucinogenic drugs the exact nature of whichis still uncertain. Two kinds of mushrooms, one ofthem a bluish puffball, are consumed only by themámas, and a strong psychotropic effect is attributedto several plants, among them to the chestnutlikefruits of a large tree (Meteniusa edulis). But hallucina-tory states can, of course, be produced endogenouslyby sensory privations and other practices; mosttrancelike states during which the mámas officiate atcertain rituals are produced, in all probability, by acombination of ingested drugs and strenuous body





exercise. The Kogi say: “Because the mámas were ed-ucated in darkness, they have the gift of visions andof knowing all things, no matter how far away theymight be. They even visit the Land of the Dead.”

In the second place, an important aspect ofpriestly education consists of training the novice towork alone. Although a Kogi priest has many socialfunctions, his true self can find expression only in thesolitary meditation he practices in his hut when he isalone. In order to evaluate people or events, he mustbe alone; he may discuss occasionally some difficultmatter with others, but to arrive at a decision, hemust be quite alone. This ability to stand alone andstill act on behalf of others is a highly valued behav-ioral category among the Kogi, and children, al-though they often learn by participation, are trainedalready at an early age to master their fears anddoubts and to act alone. A máma’s novice might besent alone, at night, to accomplish a dangerous task,perhaps a visit to a spot where an evil spirit is said todwell, or a place that is taken to be polluted by dis-ease. A máma takes pride in climbing—alone—asteep rock, or in crossing a dangerous cleft, and hereadily faces any situation that, in the eyes of others,might entail the danger of supernatural apparitionsof a malevolent type.

But what really counts is his moral and intellec-tual integrity, his resolution when faced with achoice of alternative actions. The adequate evalua-tion of his followers’ attitudes and needs requires asense of tolerance and a depth of understanding ofhuman nature, which can only be attained by a mindthat is conscious of having received divine guidance.

The final test comes when the master asks thenovice to escape from the tightly closed and watchedceremonial house. The novice, in his trance, roamsfreely, visiting faraway valleys, penetrating into moun-tains, or diving into lakes. And when telling then ofthe wanderings of his soul, the others will say: “Youhavelearnedtoseethroughthemountainsandthroughthe hearts of men. Truly, you are a máma now!”

The education of a máma is, essentially, a modelfor the education of all men. Of course, not everyonecan or should become a máma, but all men shouldfollow a máma’s example of frugality, moderation,and simple goodness. There are no evil mámas, nowitch doctors or practitioners of aggressive magic;they only exist in myths and tales of imagination,as threatening examples of what could be. On the

contrary, Kogi priests are men of high moral statureand acute intellectual ability, measured by any stan-dards, who are deeply concerned about the ills thatafflict mankind and who, in their way, do their ut-most to alleviate the burdens all men have to carry.But they are also quite realistic in their outlook. Anold máma once said to me: “You are asking me whatis life; life is food, a woman—then, a house, a field—then, god.”

Reflecting back on what was said at the beginningof this essay where I tried to trace an outline of Kogiculture, it is clear that priestly education constitutesa very coherent system that, as a model of conduct,obeys certain powerful adaptive needs.

Kogi culture is characterized by a marked lack ofspecificity in object relations. To a Kogi, people canexist only as categories, such as women, children,in-laws, but not as individuals among whom closeemotional bonds might be established. The earlyweaning of the child is only the beginning of a seriesof mechanisms by which all affective attachmentswith others are severed. Sphincter training, accom-plished at about ten months, reinforces this indepen-dence of affective rewards. A child’s crying is neverinterpreted as an expression of loneliness and theneed for affection, and a baby is always cared for byseveral mother-substitutes such as older siblings,aunts, or most any woman who might be willing totake charge of the child for a while. During the firsttwo years of life, all sensory-motor development isoptimized while, at the same time, all emotionalbonds are inhibited. It is probable that the highlyimpersonal quality of all social relations amongadults is owing in a large measure to these earlychild-training patterns.

That novices chosen for the priesthood must beexposed to a máma’s teaching before they reach fiveyears of age plainly refers to the observation that, atthat precise stage of development, their cognitivefunctioning is beginning and that mental images ofexternal events are being formed. If educated withinthe social context of their families, the child woulddevelop a normative cognitive system, which has tobe avoided because the cognitive system of a priestmust be very specific and wholly different from thatof an average member of society.

As has been said, there are no children’s games,that is, there is no rehearsal for future adult behavior.Nothing is left to fantasy, can be solved in fantasy;





everything is stark reality and has to be faced assuch. And as the child grows up into an adolescent,these precepts are continuously restated and rein-forced. The youth must eradicate all emotionalattitudes, because nothing must bias his judgment—neither sex, hunger, fear, nor friendship. A man oncesaid categorically: “One never marries the womanone loves!” Moreover, most cultural mechanisms inKogi behavior are accommodative. The individualhas to adapt himself to the reality that surroundshim and cannot pretend to change the world, noteven momentarily—not even in his fantasies. Theconcept of yulúka, too, becomes an accommodativetool because it represents an undifferentiated state ofabsolute unconsciousness.

To exercise spiritual leadership over his society,the priest must be completely detached from itsdaily give-and-take, and it is evident that separation,isolation, and emotional detachment are among themost important guiding principles of priestly educa-tion. This “otherness” of the Kogi priest is expressedin his training in many ways: from his nocturnalhabits, which make him “see the world in a differentlight,” to his isolation from society, which makes ofhim a lonely observer, devoid of all affection.

The Spartan touch in Kogi culture must be under-stood in its wider historical perspective. During

almost one hundred years, from the time of the dis-covery of the mainland to the early years of the sev-enteenth century, the Indian population of the SierraNevada de Santa Marta was exposed to the worst as-pects of the Spanish conquest. After long battles andpersecutions, the chieftains and priests were drawnand quartered, the villages were destroyed, and themaize fields were burned by the invading troops. Infew other parts of the Spanish Main did the Con-quest take a more violent and destructive form thanin the lands surrounding Santa Marta and in thefoothills of the neighboring mountains. During thecolonial period, the Indians lived in relative peaceand isolation and were able to recuperate and reor-ganize higher up in the mountains. But moderntimes brought with them new pressures and newforms of violence. Political propaganda, misdirectedmissionary zeal, the greed of the Creole peasants, theignorance of the authorities, and the irresponsiblestupidity of foreign hippies have made of the SierraNevada a Calvary of tragic proportions on whichone of the most highly developed aboriginal culturesof South America is being destroyed. So far theKogi have withstood the onslaught, thanks mainlyto the stature of their priests, but it is with a feelingof despair that one foresees the future of their lonelystand.





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22

Reflections After Waco:Millennialists and the StateMichael Barkun

No question existed in the minds of the Branch Davidians that the predictions of their charismaticprophet, David Koresh, were correct; the apocalypse engineered by God and the millennia it promisedwere at hand. Their conscious attempt to change their culture under the direction of their messiah-like leader fit well the model of revitalization movements set out by Wallace (see Chapter 9). AsMichael Barkun makes clear, parties in the Waco, Texas, tragedy accurately fulfilled the millennial-ists’ prophecy of the battle between good and evil.

More than simply recounting the events at Waco, Barkun analyzes the characteristics ofmillenarianism and charismatic leadership and demonstrates that neither the Bureau of Alcohol,Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) nor the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) understood or took seri-ously the millenarian beliefs of the Branch Davidians. Falling victim to the “cult concept,” the ATFand FBI perceived the activity of Koresh and his followers not as the manifestation of a religion butas that of a psychopathology to be dealt with as they would deal with hijackers or hostage takers. Thedirect assaults on the compound at Waco were, as Barkun points out, fulfillment of the millenarian-ists’ prophecy. It is important to recall Reverend Jim Jones and the tragedy at Jonestown, Guyana, inNovember 1978 to put in proper perspective the reaction of the Branch Davidians to federal author-ity. But it appears that these types of movements may not be exclusively American. The reader is re-minded of the mass immolations of fifty-two members of the Order of the Solar Temple in Quebec andSwitzerland in 1994 and the murder-suicide ritual that took the lives of sixteen more members of thegroup in a woods near Grenoble, France, the day before Christmas, 1995, in what appears at thispoint to be a ritual timed for the winter solstice. At this writing, little is known of the Order of theSolar Temple or its deceased leader, Luc Jouret.

Barkun ends his article with two questions. First, will U.S. federal authorities come to understandthe worldview of millennialists, particularly those who follow the “posttribulationist” approaches ofsome survivalists, and change their agencies’ strategies of force? Second, and more important in thelong run, will the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion be shared equally byall groups in the future?

Not since Jonestown has the public been gripped bythe conjunction of religion, violence and communalliving as they have by the events at the Branch

Davidians’ compound. All that actually took placenear Waco remains unknown or contested. Nonethe-less, the information is sufficient to allow at least a




preliminary examination of three questions: Whydid it happen? Why didn’t it happen earlier? Will ithappen again?

As a New York Times editorialist put it, “TheKoresh affair has been mishandled from beginningto end.” The government’s lapses, errors and mis-judgments can be grouped into two main cate-gories: issues of law-enforcement procedure andtechnique, with which I do not propose to deal; andlarger issues of strategy and approach, which I willaddress.

The single most damaging mistake on the part offederal officials was their failure to take the BranchDavidians’ religious beliefs seriously. Instead, DavidKoresh and his followers were viewed as being inthe grip of delusions that prevented them fromgrasping reality. As bizarre and misguided as theirbeliefs might have seemed, it was necessary to graspthe role these beliefs played in their lives; these be-liefs were the basis of their reality. The Branch David-ians clearly possessed an encompassing worldviewto which they attached ultimate significance. Thatthey did so carried three implications. First, theycould entertain no other set of beliefs. Indeed, allother views of the world, including those held bygovernment negotiators, could only be regarded aserroneous. The lengthy and fruitless conversationsbetween the two sides were, in effect, an interchangebetween different cultures—they talked past oneanother.

Second, since these beliefs were the basis of theBranch Davidians’ sense of personal identity andmeaning, they were nonnegotiable. The conven-tional conception of negotiation as agreement aboutsome exchange or compromise between the partieswas meaningless in this context. How could any-thing of ultimate significance be surrendered to anadversary steeped in evil and error? Finally, such abelief system implies a link between ideas and ac-tions. It requires that we take seriously—as appar-ently the authorities did not—the fact that actionsmight be based on something other than obviousself-interest.

Conventional negotiation assumes that the par-ties think in terms of costs and benefits and will cal-culate an outcome that minimizes the former andmaximizes the latter. In Waco, however, the govern-ment faced a group seemingly impervious to ap-peals based upon interests, even where the interestsinvolved were their own life and liberty. Instead,they showed a willingness to take ideas to their log-ical end-points, with whatever sacrifice that mightentail.

The Branch Davidians did indeed operate with astructure of beliefs whose authoritative interpreterwas David Koresh. However absurd the systemmight seem to us, it does no good to dismiss it. Ideasthat may appear absurd, erroneous or morally re-pugnant in the eyes of outsiders continue to drivebelievers’ actions. Indeed, outsiders’ rejection maylead some believers to hold their views all the moretenaciously as the group defines itself as an island ofenlightenment in a sea of error. Rejection validatestheir sense of mission and their belief that they alonehave access to true knowledge of God’s will.

These dynamics assumed particular force in thecase of the Branch Davidians because their beliefsystem was so clearly millenarian. They anticipated,as historian Norman Cohn would put it, total, im-mediate, collective, imminent, terrestrial salvation.Such commitments are even less subject than othersto compromise, since the logic of the system insiststhat transcendent forces are moving inexorablytoward the fulfillment of history.

Federal authorities were clearly unfamiliar anduncomfortable with religion’s ability to drive humanbehavior to the point of sacrificing all other loyalties.Consequently, officials reacted by trying to assimi-late the Waco situation to more familiar and lessthreatening stereotypes, treating the Branch Davidi-ans as they would hijackers and hostage-takers. Thistactic accorded with the very human inclination toscreen out disturbing events by pretending they aresimply variations of what we already know. Further,to pretend that the novel is really familiar is itself re-assuring, especially when the familiar has alreadyprovided opportunities for law-enforcement officialsto demonstrate their control and mastery. The FBIhas an admirable record of dealing effectively withhijackers and hostage-takers; therefore, acting as ifWaco were such a case encouraged the belief thathere too traditional techniques would work.


“Reflections After Waco: Millenialists and the State” byMichael Barkun. Copyright © 1993 Christian Century.Reprinted with permission from the June 2–9, 1993, issue of theChristian Century.




The perpetuation of such stereotypes at Waco, aswell as the failure to fully approach the religious di-mension of the situation, resulted in large measurefrom the “cult” concept. Both the authorities and themedia referred endlessly to the Branch Davidiansas a “cult” and Koresh as a “cult leader.” The term“cult” is virtually meaningless. It tells us far moreabout those who use it than about those to whom itis applied. It has become little more than a labelslapped on religious groups regarded as too exotic,marginal or dangerous.

As soon as a group achieves respectability bynumbers or longevity, the label drops away. Thusbooks on “cults” published in the 1940s routinely ap-plied the term to Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Wit-nesses, Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists, noneof whom are referred to in comparable terms today.“Cult” has become so clearly pejorative that to dub agroup a “cult” is to associate it with irrationality andauthoritarianism. Its leaders practice “mind con-trol,” its members have been “brainwashed” and itsbeliefs are “delusions.” To be called a “cult” is to belinked not to religion but to psychopathology.

In the Waco case, the “cult” concept had two dan-gerous effects. First, because the word supplies alabel, not an explanation, it hindered efforts to un-derstand the movement from the participants’ per-spectives. The very act of classification itself seemsto make further investigation unnecessary. To com-pound the problem, in this instance the classificationimposed upon the group resulted from a negativeevaluation by what appear to have been basicallyhostile observers. Second, since the proliferation ofnew religious groups in the 1960s, a network of so-called “cult experts” has arisen, drawn from theranks of the academy, apostates from such religiousgroups, and members’ relatives who have becomeestranged from their kin because of the “cult” affilia-tions. Like many other law-enforcement agencies,the FBI has relied heavily on this questionable andhighly partisan expertise—with tragic consequences.It was tempting to do so since the hostility of those inthe “anti-cult” movement mirrored the authorities’own anger and frustration.

These cascading misunderstandings resulted inviolence because they produced erroneous views ofthe role force plays in dealing with armed millenari-ans. In such confrontations, dramatic demonstra-tions of force by the authorities provoke instead

of intimidate. It is important to understand thatmillenarians possess a “script”—a conception of thesequence of events that must play out at the end ofhistory. The vast majority of contemporary millenar-ians are satisfied to leave the details of this script inGod’s hands. Confrontation can occur, however, be-cause groups often conceive of the script in terms ofa climactic struggle between forces of good and evil.

How religious prophecy is interpreted is insepa-rable from how a person or a group connects eventswith the millenarian narrative. Because these be-lievers’ script emphasizes battle and resistance, itrequires two players: the millenarians as God’sinstruments or representatives, and a failed butstill resisting temporal order. By using massive forcethe Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms onFebruary 28, and the FBI on April 19, unwittinglyconformed to Koresh’s millenarian script. Hewanted and needed their opposition, which theyobligingly provided in the form of the initial assault,the nationally publicized siege, and the final tankand gas attack. When viewed from a millenarianperspective, these actions, intended as pressure,were the fulfillment of prophecy.

The government’s actions almost certainly in-creased the resolve of those in the compound, sub-dued the doubters and raised Koresh’s stature byin effect validating his predictions. Attempts afterthe February 28 assault to “increase the pressure”through such tactics as floodlights and sound bom-bardment now seem as pathetic as they were counter-productive. They reflect the flawed premise that theBranch Davidians were more interested in calculatingcosts and benefits than in taking deeply held beliefsto their logical conclusions. Since the government’sown actions seemed to support Koresh’s teachings,followers had little incentive to question them.

The final conflagration is even now the subjectof dispute between the FBI, which insists that theblazes were set, and survivors who maintain that atank overturned a lantern. In any case, even if theFBI’s account proves correct, “suicide” seems an in-adequate label for the group’s fiery demise. UnlikeJonestown, where community members took theirown lives in an isolated setting, the Waco deaths oc-curred in the midst of a violent confrontation. If thefires were indeed set, they may have been seen as afurther working through of the script’s implications.It would not have been the first time that vastly

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outnumbered millenarians engaged in self-destructivebehavior in the conviction that God’s will required it.In 1525, during the German Peasants’ Revolt, ThomasMünzer led his forces into a battle so hopeless thatfive thousand of his troops perished, compared to sixfatalities among their opponents.

Just as the authorities in Waco failed to under-stand the connections between religion and violence,so they failed to grasp the nature of charismatic lead-ership. Charisma, in its classic sociological sense,transcends law and custom. When a Dallas reporterasked Koresh whether he thought he was above thelaw, he responded: “I am the law.” Given such self-perception, charismatic figures can be maddeninglyerratic; they feel no obligation to remain consistentwith pre-existing rules. Koresh’s swings of moodand attitude seemed to have been a major factor inthe FBI’s growing frustration, yet they were whollyconsistent with a charismatic style.

Nevertheless, charismatic leaders do confrontlimits. One is the body of doctrine to which he or sheis committed. This limit is often overcome by thecharismatic interpreter’s ingenuity combined withthe texts’ ambiguity (Koresh, like so many millenni-alists, was drawn to the vivid yet famously obscurelanguage of the Book of Revelation).

The other and more significant limit is imposedby the charismatic leader’s need to validate his claimto leadership by his performance. Charismatic lead-ership is less a matter of inherent talents than it is acomplex relational and situational matter betweenleader and followers. Since much depends on fol-lowers’ granting that a leader possesses extraordi-nary gifts, the leader’s claim is usually subject to re-peated testing. A leader acknowledged at one timemay be rejected at another. Here too the Waco inci-dent provided an opportunity for the authorities in-advertently to meet millennialist needs. The pro-tracted discussions with Koresh and his ability to tiedown government resources gave the impression ofa single individual toying with a powerful state.While to the outer world Koresh may have seemedbesieged, to those in the community he may wellhave provided ample evidence of his power by im-mobilizing a veritable army of law-enforcement per-sonnel and dominating the media.

Given the government’s flawed approach, whatought to have been done? Clearly, we will neverknow what might have resulted from another strat-

egy. Nonetheless, taking note of two principlesmight have led to a very different and less violentoutcome. First, the government benefited more thanKoresh from the passage of time. However amplethe Branch Davidians’ material stockpiles, thesesupplies were finite and diminishing. While theirresolve was extraordinary, we do not know how itmight have been tested by privation, boredom andthe eventual movement of public and official atten-tion to other matters. Further, the longer the timethat elapsed, the greater the possibility that Koreshin his doctrinal maneuvering might have con-structed a theological rationalization that wouldhave permitted surrender. Messianic figures, eventhose cut from seemingly fanatic cloth, have occa-sionally exhibited unpredictable moments of pru-dential calculation and submission (one thinks, forexample, of the sudden conversion to Islam of theseventeenth century Jewish false messiah SabbataiZevi). Time was a commodity the government couldafford, more so than Koresh, particularly since a sig-nificant proportion of the community’s memberswere almost certainly innocent of directly violatingthe law.

As important as patience, however, would havebeen the government’s willingness to use restraint inboth the application and the appearance of force. TheATF raid, with its miscalculations and loss of life,immediately converted a difficult situation into onefraught with danger. Yet further bloodshed mighthave been averted had authorities been willing bothto wait and to avoid a dramatic show of force. Fed-eral forces should have been rapidly drawn down tothe lowest level necessary to prevent individualsfrom leaving the compound undetected. Thoseforces that remained should have been as inconspic-uous as possible. The combination of a barely visiblefederal presence, together with a willingness to wait,would have accomplished two things: it would haveavoided government actions that confirmed apoca-lyptic prophecies, and it would have deprivedKoresh of his opportunity to validate his charismaticauthority through the marathon negotiations thatplayed as well-rehearsed millenarian theater. Whilethere is no guarantee that these measures wouldhave succeeded (events within the compound mightstill have forced the issue), they held a far betterchance of succeeding than the confrontational tacticsthat were employed.





The events in Waco were not the first time in recentyears that a confrontation between a communalgroup and government forces has ended in violence.Several years ago the Philadelphia police accidentallyburned down an entire city block in their attempt toevict the MOVE sect from an urban commune. In 1985surrender narrowly averted a bloody confrontationat Zarephath-Horeb, the heavily armed ChristianIdentity community in Missouri organized by theCovenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord. In August1992 a federal raid on the Idaho mountaintop cabin ofa Christian Identity family resulted in an eleven-dayarmed standoff and the deaths of a U.S. marshal andtwo family members. In this case, too, the aim was thearrest of an alleged violator of firearms law, RandyWeaver, whose eventual trial, ironically, took placeeven as the FBI prepared its final assault on theBranch Davidians. In retrospect, the Weaver affairwas Waco in microcosm—one from which, appar-ently, the ATF learned little.

These cases, which should have been seen to sig-nal new forms of religion-state conflict, were untypi-cal of the relationships with government enjoyed byearlier communal societies. While a few such groups,notably the Mormons, were objects of intense vio-lence, most were able to arrive at some way of livingwith the established order. Many, like the Shakers,were pacifists who had a principled opposition toviolence. Some, like the German pietist sects, wereprimarily interested in preserving their cultural andreligious distinctiveness; they only wanted to be leftalone. Still others, such as the Oneida perfectionists,saw themselves as models of an ideal social order—exemplars who might tempt the larger society to re-form. In all cases, an implied social contract operatedin which toleration was granted in exchange for thecommunity’s restraint in testing the limits of societalacceptance. When external pressure mounted (as itdid in response to the Oneida Community’s practiceof “complex marriage”), communitarians almostalways backed down. They did so not because theylacked religious commitment, but because these com-munities placed such a high value on maintainingtheir separate identities and on convincing fellow cit-izens that their novel social arrangements had merit.

The Branch Davidians clearly were not similarlymotivated, and it is no defense of the government’spolicy to acknowledge that Koresh and his followerswould have sorely tested the patience of any state.

Now that the events of Waco are over, can we saythat the problem itself has disappeared? Are armedmillenarians in America likely to be again drawn orprovoked into violent conflict with the establishedorder? The answer, unfortunately, is probably yes.For this reason Waco’s lessons are more than merelyhistorically interesting.

The universe of American communal groups isdensely populated—they certainly number in thethousands—and it includes an enormous variety ofideological and religious persuasions. Some religiouscommunities are millenarian, and of these some growout of a “posttribulationist” theology. They believe,that is, thatArmageddon and the Second Coming willbe preceded by seven years of turmoil (the Tribula-tion), but they part company with the dominantstrain of contemporary Protestant millennialism inthe position they assign to the saved. The dominantmillenarian current (dispensational premillennial-ism) assumes that a Rapture will lift the saved off theearth to join Christ before the tribulation begins, a po-sition widely promulgated by such televangelists asJerry Falwell. Posttribulationists, on the other hand,do not foresee such a rescue and insist that Christiansmust endure the tribulation’s rigors, which includethe reign of the Antichrist. Their emphasis uponchaos and persecution sometimes leads them towarda “survivalist” lifestyle—retreat into defendable, self-sufficient rural settlements where they can, they be-lieve, wait out the coming upheavals.

Of all the posttribulationists, those most likely toignite future Wacos are affiliated with the ChristianIdentity movement. These groups, on the outermostfringes of American religion, believe that white“Aryans” are the direct descendants of the tribes ofIsrael, while Jews are children of Satan. Not surpris-ingly, Identity has become highly influential in thewhite supremacist right. While its numbers are small(probably between 20,000 and 50,000), its penchantfor survivalism and its hostility toward Jews andnonwhites renders the Christian Identity movementa likely candidate for future violent conflict with thestate.

When millenarians retreat into communal settle-ments they create a complex tension between with-drawal and engagement. Many communal societiesin the nineteenth century saw themselves as show-cases for social experimentation—what historianArthur Bestor has called “patent office models of





society.” But posttribulationist, survivalist groups aredefensive communities designed to keep at bay aworld they despise and fear. They often deny the le-gitimacy of government and other institutions. Forsome, the reign of Antichrist has already begun. Towhite supremacists, the state is ZOG—The ZionistOccupation Government. For them, no social con-tract can exist between themselves and the enemy—the state. Their sense of besiegement and their linksto paramilitary subcultures virtually guarantee that,no matter how committed they may be to lives of iso-lation, they will inevitably run afoul of the law. Theflash-point could involve firearms regulations, thetax system, or the treatment of children. . . .

If this prognosis is valid, what should govern-ment policy be toward millennial groups? As I havesuggested, government must take religious beliefsseriously. It must seek to understand the groups thathold these beliefs, rather than lumping the moremarginal among them in a residual category of“cults.” As Waco has shown, violence is a product ofinteraction and therefore may be partially controlledby the state. The state may not be able to change agroup’s doctrinal propensities, but it can control itsown reactions, and in doing so may exert significantleverage over the outcome. The overt behavior ofsome millenarian groups will undoubtedly forcestate action, but the potential for violence can bemitigated if law-enforcement personnel avoid dra-matic presentations of force. If, on the other hand,they naively become co-participants in millenarians’end-time scripts, future Wacos will be not merely

probable; they will be inevitable. The government’sinability to learn from episodes such as the Weaveraffair in Idaho provides little cause for short-termoptimism. The lesson the ATF apparently took fromthat event was that if substantial force produced lossof life, then in the next case even more force must beused. Waco was the result.

Admittedly, to ask the government to be moresensitive to religious beliefs in such cases is to raiseproblems as well as to solve them. It raises the possi-bility of significant new constitutional questions con-nected with the First Amendment’s guarantee of thefree exercise of religion. If the state is not to consignall new and unusual religious groups to the realmof outcast “cults,” how is it to differentiate amongthem? Should the state monitor doctrine to distin-guish those religious organizations that requireparticularly close observation? News reports sug-gest that Islamic groups may already be the subjectsof such surveillance—a chilling and disturbingprospect. Who decides that a group is dangerous? Bywhat criteria? If beliefs can lead to actions, if thoseactions violate the law, how should order and secu-rity be balanced against religious freedom? Can be-lief be taken into account without fatally compromis-ing free exercise?

These are difficult questions for which Americanpolitical practice and constitutional adjudicationprovide little guidance. They need to be addressed,and soon. In an era of religious ferment and millen-nial excitation, the problems posed by the BranchDavidians can only multiply.


Suggested Readings

Fuller, C. J.1984 Servants of the Goddess: The Priests of a South Indian Temple. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Johnson, Douglas, H.1994 Nuer Prophets: A History of Prophecy from the Upper Nile in the Nineteenth and Twentieth

Centuries. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press.

Kehoe, Alice Beck2000 Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking. Prospect Heights,

Ill.: Waveland Press.





Kendall, Laurel1985 Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life. Honolulu:

University of Hawaii Press.

Leavitt, John, ed.1997 Poetry and Prophecy: The Anthropology of Inspiration. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press.

Lewis, I. M.1971 Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism.

Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. (Rev. ed. 1978.)

Spiro, Melford E.1971 Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Vitebsky, Piers1995 The Shaman. Boston: Little, Brown.

Walter, Mariko Namba, and Eva Jane Neumann Fridman2004 Shamanism: An Encyclopedia of World Beliefs, Practices, and Culture, vols. I and II. Santa

Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO.


5. Altered States of Consciousness and the Religious Use of Drugs


184

CHAPTER FIVE

Altered States ofConsciousnessand the ReligiousUse of Drugs

Ordinary human consciousness includes a number of discrete, recognizable states, includ-ing different levels of alertness and relaxation, different forms of sleep and dreaming, and awide gamut of experiences ranging from moments of creative inspiration and flow todrowsiness and boredom (Bourguignon 1996.) All states correspond to activities in thecentral nervous system and can be observed as psychobiological phenomena. The mostdramatic forms of consciousness, which in some cases may be induced deliberately, can begrouped under the umbrella term altered states of consciousness, often referred to by theacronym ASC. Michael Winkelman and Philip M. Peek describe how what happens in thebrain provides the potential for particular culturally shaped experiences:

The altered state of consciousness is a natural response to many different conditions thatresult in the production of slow-wave brain discharges in the serotonergic connections be-tween the limbic system and brain stem regions. . . . Altered states of consciousness integrateinformation from the lower levels of the brain into the processing capacity of the frontalcortex, particularly integrating nonverbal emotional and behavioral information into thefrontal brain. This integration of information from preverbal brain structures into the language-mediated activities of the frontal cortex provides intuition, understanding, enlightenment, asense of unity, and personal integration (2004:11).

Altered states are studied by scholars in a number of fields, including psychology andmedicine, but it is when altered states are interpreted as religious phenomena that anthro-pologists become especially interested.

Altered states are particularly appropriate for anthropological consideration becausethey represent a biological capacity common to all humans, yet have been defined, inter-preted, cultivated, and institutionalized differently, if at all, in different cultures and histor-ical periods. One of the foremost anthropological authorities on ASC, Erika Bourguignon,compared ethnographic data from 488 societies and found that an astounding majority arereported to have one or more culturally patterned forms of altered states of consciousness(Bourguignon 1973:9–11.) She notes:

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The presence of institutionalized forms of altered states of consciousness in 90% of our sam-ple societies represents a striking finding and suggests that we are, indeed, dealing with amatter of major importance, not merely a bit of anthropological esoterica. It is clear that weare dealing with a psychobiological capacity available to all societies, and that, indeed, thevast majority of societies have used it in their own particular ways, and have done so pri-marily in a sacred context. Yet some societies have not done so, or had abandoned the prac-tice before the time period [of the report.] (ibid.:11).

In the anthropological literature, works documenting trance, possession, ecstasy,visions, drug use, and shamanism can all be considered studies of altered states. Anthro-pologists have not always been consistent in their use of terminology related to ASC,though a good deal of scholarship has been devoted to clarifying and standardizing therelevant vocabulary. For example, Bourguignon offers a careful distinction between posses-sion as an idea or concept used to interpret behavior within a culture, and possession trance,the experience of a person who is changed in some way through the presence of a spiritentity or power (1973:7–8). Working along slightly different lines, I.M. Lewis’s article in thepresent volume argues that trance is a cover term that includes spirit possession, an integralcomponent of shamanism.

Regardless of terminology, ASC vary in the their desirability, their means of induction,and their personnel. For example, throughout Christian history many forms of possessionhave been recognized, variously seen as demonic and requiring exorcism, or as a spiritualgift such as the ability to speak in tongues (glossolalia) or to prophesize. Similar distinctionscan be found around the world, with spirit possession either being diagnosed as a problemto be solved, or as a valued and sought-after state, depending on the cultural circumstances.These responses tend to fall into broad patterns around the world, in part related to thedominant religions of a region.

Most trance––whether or not it is interpreted as possession—must be induced in cultur-ally patterned ways that people are accustomed to and which serve as triggers. These meth-ods range from sensory deprivation (being alone, abstaining from food) to sensory overload(drumming, chanting, dance, or use of hallucinogenic drugs). In some contexts, specialistsenter trance on behalf of clients and in order to assist their community, as in shamanism. Inother cases, trance or possession offer participants opportunities for voicing dissent, socialcriticism, and personal reflection that would otherwise be impermissible. The ethnographicwork of Janice Boddy, who studies the zar cult among women in Sudan, provides an out-standing example of the latter (1989). Boddy documents how, in the village in which shestudied, women under the possession of spirits engage in behaviors forbidden to women inordinary life, such as drinking alcohol, speaking loudly, dressing like men, wieldingswords, and burping, all guided and interpreted by older women.

For many students of anthropology, a fascinating aspect of ASC is their inductionthrough the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Humans on all continents, and likely since veryancient times, have utilized plant and animal substances to produce dramatically powerfulaltered states. In many examples, drug use for religious purposes has been carried out notby everyday participants but by specialists, usually placed by anthropologists into the cat-egory of shaman, who control the spirit world for the benefit of their community. Psy-chotropic substances provide the shamans with their visions of the supernatural realm.What one society considers real or unreal is not always shared by another society. MichaelHarner’s article in this chapter demonstrates, for example, that the Jívaro of the EcuadorianAmazon consider reality to be what is found in the hallucinogenic state that results from drink-ing a tea made from the Banisteriopsis vine; the nonhallucinogenic, ordinary state is consid-ered to be an illusion. Cultural variation occurs as well in the classification of substances as

INTRODUCTION | 185




186 | ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE RELIGIOUS USE OF DRUGS

psychotropic; some drugs not considered hallucinogens in Western pharmacology are uti-lized elsewhere to bring about a visionary state, for example tobacco as used by shamans inSouth America (Wilbert 1987).

Anthropology, of course, never exists in a vacuum, and certain areas of inquiry can arguablybe traced to a social environment or zeitgeist that supports their study. Such is the case with hal-lucinogens and culture, and with ASC in general. There was a heyday of sorts in their study,with researchers from numerous fields working actively in the 1960s and 1970s, inspired byand to some extent possibly enabling counter-cultural interest in mind-altering substances.Much of the anthropological and ethnobotanical work referenced here comes from that period,as does much laboratory research into ASC, sometimes sponsored by government agenciessuch as the Central Intelligence Agency (cf. Lee and Shlain 1985). In an attempt to better un-derstand the role of drugs in religious life, some anthropologists have ingested hallucinogensthemselves. Celebrated accounts include Michael Harner’s description of using ayahuascaamong the Conibo of Peru (1980), and Napoleon Chagnon’s narratives of using ebene snuffwhile carrying out fieldwork in Venezuela (originally 1968). Nonetheless, cross-cultural com-parison demonstrates not only that drugs are perceived differently but also that they may ac-tually have different effects on the users from one society to the next, due to different culturallybased expectations. Ayahuasca or peyote as taken in a ritual context, by a population with par-ticular social tools for interpreting the experience, will in significant ways have a different ef-fect than on an urban, middle-class tourist––or anthropologist––from abroad.

The articles selected for this chapter introduce a variety of examples and issues relatedto the study of altered states of consciousness, including the religious use of drugs. Theopening article by I.M. Lewis considers numerous contrasting examples in order to clarifythe definitions of trance, possession, and shamanism.

The second article by Sydney Greenfield draws attention to the trance experiences of pa-tients undergoing surgery by Brazilian healer-mediums.

In the third article, Thomas J. Csordas introduces the reader to Mike Kiyaani, a Navajoleader of peyote rites. Kiyaani recounts his first introduction to peyote.

Furst and Coe’s “Ritual Enemas” is an ethnohistorical reconstruction of Maya drugusage through an analysis of their pottery.

In “The Sound of Rushing Water,” Michael Harner offers an insight into Jivaro reality, astate that can be achieved only through consumption of the hallucinogenic drink natema.

In the concluding article, our focus moves to altered states of consciousness intentionallysought by contemporary North Americans and Europeans. Scott Hutson argues that therave––which for some participants may include drug use––can be interpreted as a form ofspiritual healing.

References

Boddy, Janice 1989 Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison, WI:

University of Wisconsin Press.

Bourguignon, Erika1976 Possession. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.1996 Altered States of Consciousness in Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, eds. David

Levinson and Melvin Ember. NY: Henry Holt and Company, pp. 48–50.

Bourguignon, Erika, ed.1973 Religion, Altered States of Consciousness, and Social Change. Columbus: Ohio State

University Press.




Chagnon, Napoleon1968 Yanomamo: The Fierce People. NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Harner, Michael1980 The Way of the Shaman. NY: Harper and Row.

Lee, Martin A. and Bruce Shlain1985 Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion. NY: Grove Press, Inc.

Wilbert, Johannes1987 Tobacco and Shamanism in South America. New Haven and London: Yale University

Press.

Winkelman, Michael and Philip M. Peek, eds.2004 Divination and Healing: Potent Vision. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

INTRODUCTION | 187




188

Trance and Altered States of Consciousness

“Altered States of Consciousness” is an umbrellaterm, applied to psychological and sociologicalphenomena regularly encountered in the study oftrance, possession, and shamanism––all of whichhave significant if problematic links with music. This

article1 reviews what is implied in relation to ASC bythese terms, which have become common-place inthe anthropological study of religion.

Altered States of Consciousness are most clearlyexhibited externally in the form that we commonlycall ‘trance.’ When I think of trance states, apart frommy own private experience of rapturous momentsand episodes (so-called “peak-experiences”), I think

23

Trance, Possession, Shamanism, and SexI. M. Lewis

Anthropologists confront altered states of consciousness when studying trance, possession, andshamanism. However, the definition and delimitation of these three terms has often been imprecise. Inthe following article, I. M. Lewis identifies the general characteristics of trance––as the core or mostbasic form of altered consciousness––and notes common features in examples from a variety of cul-tures and historical periods. Throughout the article, Lewis observes similarities between trance andsexual experiences, noting that both are simultaneously physiological, social, psychological, anddeeply symbolic.

While trance can be measured and explained through neurochemistry, it conforms to and is un-derstood through local cultural expectations. Therefore trance is interpreted in different ways by dif-ferent cultures. The most common interpretation is that the human body has been invaded by a spirit,one that either has been invited or needs to be expelled through exorcism. Thus to Lewis, spirit pos-session is a form of trance activity. Most anthropologists separate spirit mediums from shamans (seearticle by Vitebsky in Chapter 4), yet Lewis notes that the trance experience involved for both is es-sentially the same. The difference between a spirit medium and a shaman lies with the social role andrecognition of the religious specialist within the community.

I. M. Lewis is noted for his ethnographic work in the Horn of Africa and for his publications ontrance, possession, and related phenomena. His Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study ofSpirit Possession and Shamanism (1971) is considered a definitive source on the anthropologicalstudy of altered states of consciousness.

From: Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 20–39, 2003.

1. Paper given at Seminar on “Music and States of AlteredConsciousness: A Still Open Question,” Intercultural StudiesInstitute for Comparative Music, Fondazione Giorgio Cini,Venice, January 2002.




particularly of two dramatic examples, involving oth-ers, which I witnessed. The first was at a women’sspirit possession séance in the Sudan which I attendedwith a female colleague who was carrying out anthro-pological research on the famous zar cult in Khartoum(see Constantinides 1977 and Lewis et al. 1991).

The séance took place in a large barn which hadbecome a dancing hall regularly used for spirit cere-monies by the zar adherents. There was a largecrowd of women, and a few male transvestite homo-sexuals, dressed in the costumes favored by theirregular spirit partners. The air was heavy with in-cense and perfume and the women were dancing tothe music, dedicated to the spirits, and beaten out onfour drums in syncopation and with an increasingtempo. Led by a spirit cult leader (sheikha), thewomen were dancing round a large round stone reg-ularly used for grinding corn. Suddenly one of thewomen, very obviously pregnant and as obviously,deeply in trance, began to pound her stomach vio-lently against the grinding stone, thus endangeringher baby. Other participants explained that thewoman was possessed by a violent southern spirit(associated with the non-Islamic peoples of thesouthern Sudan). Immediately several other dancingwomen, with glazed eyes, who appeared also to bein trance, wordlessly sat down on the stone, and thusprevented the frenzied dancer from continuing tobeat her body on the stone. It is obvious that theseentranced women were not totally oblivious to whatwas going on round them. Their perception was con-centrated on the ritual and the spirits for whom theywere dancing, but this did not exclude peripheral at-tention to other movement in their surroundings.

My other example occurred in a very differentand, from some points of view, a more exotic setting,at an international scientific conference on the para-normal held some years ago in a luxury hotel inLondon (the Hilton). Most of the eighteen partici-pants, well-known figures in this field, were clearlybelievers, but there were a minority of equally obvi-ous skeptics, including the English specialist on theparanormal, Eric J. Dingwall, the psychological an-thropologist George Devereux and myself. As at aregular European séance, we sat round a large table.At one point in the discussion, as Devereux and Iwere expressing strongly skeptical views on the real-ity of ESP, one of the most credulous of the partici-pants, a white South African who claimed to have

been initiated as a “witchdoctor” suddenly collapsedin his chair. Several of the participants with medicalexpertise, including a well-known Italian psychoan-alyst who was also a believer in the paranormal,rushed to the witchdoctor’s side to see if he requiredmedical attention. This, however, soon appearedunnecessary since, in the trance-like state intowhich our colleague had fallen, he suddenly startedspeaking––not fully “in tongues”––but with a strangeguttural muttering in which he could be heard say-ing: “They are knocking it out of us, they are knock-ing it all out of us . . . ”

Devereux and I took this as a defensive reaction toour skeptical and ironical remarks. Everyone, includ-ing our psychiatrist colleagues, was embarrassed bythis episode from which after about ten minutes ourwitchdoctor recovered to resume his normal de-meanor, carrying on as if nothing had happened andmaking no reference to the little drama. In contrast tothe Sudanese séance, trance here was an unexpectedindividual reaction and there was no musical stimu-lus, only the pressure of conflict and disbelief towhich trance here seemed a significant reaction.

I was also myself recently involved in a muchmore banal and familiar incident, when someonecrashed his car into mine while I was stationary. Thedriver apologized profusely for his negligence andsimply said, rather strikingly in the present context,that “he was far away, and had not noticed my car.”I took this to mean, and he certainly had a glazed fa-cial expression, that his mind was elsewhere, almostas if he were in trance. While not all degrees of dis-traction from a person’s immediate surroundingsimply “trance” in a serious sense, they can be close toit as I think we all recognize.

As these examples, like most people’s casual per-sonal experience of exalted states of being illustrate,trance is appropriately defined as an altered state ofconsciousness, variable in its intensity, and at itsheight resembling hypnosis. Along these lines, psy-chologists define it as a condition of dissociation,characterized by the lack of voluntary movement,and frequently by automatisms in action andthought, illustrated by hypnotic and mediumisticconditions. As our séance examples illustrate, trancealso typically involves “an enhanced internal or ex-ternal focus of attention” (Overton 1998).

As such, while it is obviously felt as a private, in-dividual experience, particularly in its intense forms,

LEWIS • TRANCE, POSSESSION, SHAMANISM, AND SEX | 189




it is also a transpersonal, transcultural conditionwhich can be externally observed and, with sometechnical difficulty, even measured in variations inbrain rhythm as recorded by EEG tests. Such per-sonal, psychological experiences may, of course, beshared and mutually intensified as in spirit cultséances, evangelical religious services, pop con-certs, political rallies, football crowds, etc. The dis-covery of natural euphoriates (endorphins) in theblood stream in the early 1970s provided a plausi-ble chemical explanation of trance and linked itwith the effect of psychotropic drugs, thus giving anovel and unexpected meaning to Marx’s famousdefinition of religion as “the opium of the people”—more accessible, and less mysterious than he everimagined.

Trance Induction

That such neurochemistry is implicated in trance expe-riences does not invalidate its status as culturally con-ventionalized behavior, recognized cross-culturally,and readily observable to the anthropologist who hasno means available to test endorphin levels or mea-sure EEGs. Contrary to what the French Tungus spe-cialist Hamayon (1995) appears to argue, nor doesthe ultimate involvement of such neuro-physicalprocesses reduce the validity of trance as a sociolog-ical as well as psychological phenomenon. This is nomore the case than it would be with sexual orgasm,which is obviously a psychological and social, aswell as physiological, phenomenon with profoundcultural coloring and meaning. If women’s popularmagazines are to be believed, like trance it is more-over subject to artifice and pretence. This does notreduce the value of sexual climax as a symbol of inti-macy and transcendence.

More generally, in all known cultures and civi-lizations, we find essentially two, at first sight contradictory processes which induce trance. Oneinvolves sensory deprivation––trauma, stress, ill-ness, isolation, fasting, and deliberate physical mor-tification as in many mystical religious traditions.The other equally common stimulus involves sen-sory overloading––with musical and other sonicbombardment (especially monotonous drumming),strobe lighting effects, the ingestion of hallucino-genic drugs, and more mundane procedures likeover-breathing and even strenuous exercise such as

jogging (which has been shown experimentally to in-crease endorphin levels) (Banyai 1984; Prince 1982).

As far as music’s role is concerned, the French eth-nomusicologist Gilbert Rouget concludes his magis-terial study of music and trance by declaring that“music’s great achievement is to be able to inducetrance in the manner that an electric current can set atuning fork vibrating with the same frequency.” Butat the same time, he questions those such as Neherwho have claimed that drumming induces convul-sive effects through its influence on the alpharhythm of the brain. (More recently, Maxfield (1990),has reported that “monotonous drumming, character-ized cross-culturally by a rhythm with 4–7 beats persecond induces a corresponding increase in the so-called theta rhythm in the EEG.”) I do not knowwhether Rouget would accept this. In any case, hesays that music is: “less significant in triggeringtrance than in sustaining it. It is indispensable forproviding the cult member with the means of mani-festing identification (with the spirit) and hence ex-ternalizing trance.” This is so, according to Rouget,because “music is the only language to speak at onceto the head and legs, since it is through music thatthe group holds up to the individual the mirror inwhich to behold his borrowed identity.” Followingthis, Rouget is led to pursue what he sees as an anal-ogy between opera in modern culture and the pos-session séance in traditional cultures, indeed he callsopera “lyric possession.” It seems to me, however,that a more obvious analogy is with ballet, and in-deed it is significant to record here that in western-ized circles in contemporary Egypt, a folkloristicversion of the north-east African zar cult has beendeveloped into a new “Oriental” form of ballet (seethe ballet magazine Arabesque 1978, 1983).

We must remember, however, that such an em-barrassment of riches in the wealth and variety ofsensual stimulants headed by music is not the onlyroute to trance: sensory deprivation may not be so al-luring but it is equally effective. These contrastingeliciting forces are consistent with the contradictoryexperiences commonly reported in trance: over-whelming sensations of despair, often associated withimages of death and birth, alternating with sensa-tions of ineffable joy. Interestingly here, psychiatristsemploying LSD and similar psychotropic drugs inclinical treatment report that drugged female patientsoften become confused as to whether they are being






born or giving birth (see Grof 1977: more recently,Grof has launched ‘Breath-work,’ in which numbersof subjects lie on mattresses for up to a whole day en-gaging in deep breathing exercises to a backgroundprogram of music culled from the cinema. Most ofthose involved seem to have trance experiences).

The opposition of these themes, and their resolu-tion is, according to Reichel-Dolmatoff (1971), vividlyexpressed by the Amazonian Tukano shamans ofColumbia. Tukano state that their creator deity, theSun-father, committed incest with his own daughterat the time of creation. This act produced the hallu-cinogen (the bannisteriopsis caapi vine) regularlyemployed by them to achieve ecstatic visions. Thistrance experience is explicitly compared to incestuoussexual intercourse. Hallucination and sexual inter-course, according to Reichel-Dolmatoff, are viewedby the Tukano Indians as equivalent and full of anx-iety because of their relation to the idea of incest. TheTukano declare that they take the drug in order to re-turn to the uterus, source and origin of all things,where the individual confronts the tribal divinities,the creation of the universe and of humanity, the firsthuman couple, the creation of the animals, and the es-tablishment of social order with the laws of exogamy.With this example we have broached the question ofthe meaning of trance (here a transcendent religiousexperience), and the range of possible interpreta-tions of it in different cultures and sometimes in dif-ferent contexts in the same culture.

The Interpretation of Trance

Despite its range of sensory modalities and mean-ings, trance in my view is a universal phenomenon,theoretically and to a certain extent actually open, aswe have seen to identification and description. Ournaturalistic, scientistic definition of trance and dis-sociation is not unique and is found in some tradi-tional societies. Amongst the Samburu pastoralists ofNorthern Kenya, for example, trance states are asso-ciated with situations of tension and danger andregarded as a sign of machismo and self-assertionappropriate to members of the warrior age-grade inthis gerontocratic society. Rather similarly, amongthe Abelan tribe of New Guinea, young bachelorssometimes exhibit similar symptoms which are de-scribed as “deafness.” This is not ascribed to spiri-tual intervention. Again among the Tungus reindeer

herders of Siberia, who represent the locus classicus ofshamanism to which we refer later, hysterical states,involving trembling and the compulsive imitation ofwords and gestures, do not always signify posses-sion by a spirit. They may simply indicate that thosewho manifest this behavior, called olon, are in a stateof involuntary fear, so that this represents a kind of“startle” reaction.

The well-known Italian culture complex of taran-tism,2 in its medieval, dancing mania manifestation,represents a more complex phenomenon involvingnon-mystical and mystical components. The ostensi-ble naturalistic explanation for this compulsion todance viewed it as a disease and traced it to the poi-sonous bite of the tarantula spider. Two cures werefavored: dance therapy to the brisk rhythm of thetarantella played on fife, clarinets and drums when,it was believed the poison was expelled as perspira-tion; and religious exorcism at the shrines of particu-lar saints. However, in his brilliant study, La terra delrimorso (1966), de Martino decisively demonstratedthat the phenomenon was much more complicatedand far from being a simple matter of “poisoning” asthose afflicted appeared to believe. In fact it involveda form of spirit possession by a hybrid spider-saint(for more recent information on the cult’s vestiges insouthern Italy today and the continuing significanceof its symbolism, see Pizza 1997).

Again, in some cultures, trance may be seen as amanifestation of “soul-loss,” as for example amongmany of the North American Indians. To some extentthis is also true of the !Kung bushmen, where in heal-ing dance ceremonies, to a musical accompanimentof hand-clapping and singing, men work themselvesup into trance states in which the intrinsic “boilingenergy” (or soul) is released from their bodies tofight those evil powers causing illness in others.

But the most common explanation of trance acrosscultures is that it is a manifestation of the invasion of

2. In contemporary Apulia, tarantism and its pizzicatamusic has been folklorized and is now a familiar part ofthe local pop scene, with large scale festivals which attractthrongs of tourists in the summer. Tarantism has becomean important element in the construction of a new, neo-traditional local identity in Salento––a sub-Southern Ital-ian local nationalism. This movement is also associatedwith the local Greek dialect which is increasingly taught inlocal schools.





the human body by an external spirit agent. This may,or may not, be coupled with the idea of soul-loss in-volving the displacement of the host’s soul by thealien spirit. As classical tarantism illustrates, we reg-ularly find naturalistic and spiritual explanations oftrance competing in the same culture and invoked indifferent contexts. Possession by an external spiritualforce is, of course, a culturally specific explanation ofbehavior or of a state of being. It does not necessarilycoincide with trance. Indeed it is often invoked to ex-plain minor maladies (even those as trivial as consti-pation!) where there is no evidence or expectation oftrance. Nevertheless, the two phenomena do coincideat the peak of ecstatic activity, in possession rituals,for example, where members of a possession groupare dancing in honor of their possessing spirits (as inour zar example), and when the spirit troubling a newvictim is being interrogated to establish its identity sothat it can be treated appropriately.

Here we must note that virtually universally, theinitial diagnostic treatment of what is often pre-sented as an illness or affliction leads to two opposedpossible outcomes. One, aimed at expelling thespirit, is of course, exorcism, with which we are fa-miliar from our own Christian culture and which isequally common in Islam. The other contrastingtreatment, referred to usefully by Luc de Heusch as“adorcism,” instead of seeking to expel the intrusivespirit, endeavors to come to terms with it, reachingan accommodation with it, by paying it cult. Posses-sion then becomes the first step in initiation into aspirit cult. Trance is critical in both cases, since as haslong been noted, it is most marked at the dramaticclimax of exorcism as the exorcist wrestles with theintrusive spirit prior to successfully casting it out.

We should note that in male-dominated societieswhere such women’s spirit possession cults flourish,men usually prefer their womenfolk to seek exor-cism for their problems rather than induction intosuch a cult. Hence in this context exorcism becomesa further implement in the control and subjection ofwomen—as I have argued elsewhere (Lewis 1996).This sociologically significant point is well-illustratedin the famous 11th-century Japanese literary classic,The Tale of the Genji where, as Doris Bargen (1997) hasdemonstrated, Japanese noblemen sought to controltheir rebellious “women’s weapon” of spirit posses-sion by insisting on exorcism as the proper treatment.Thus, although exorcism and spirit accommodation

(adorcism) have normally very different outcomesand social implications, they are equally signaled bythe coincidence of trance and possession, in a “peak”experience, one marking an exit and the other the en-trance to the routine cult of ecstasy. (In keeping withthis common peak experience, it has at once to be ac-knowledged that this imparts an ambiguity to active(trance) possession which enables some possessioncults to masquerade as exorcism: see, e.g., Davis 1980;Lewis 1996; de Heusch 1997; Hell 1997).

Trance and Shamanism

These ecstatic cults—secret religions for women andlow-status males—have spirit-inspired leaders whograduate from the ranks of the possessed. These cultleaders are empowered by their special relationship(regularly represented explicitly as a marital union)with particular spirits who become their spirit part-ners and guides. In Haiti, such spiritual unions mayeven be formally solemnized in actual marriage certificates (Metraux 1959:215). As in the myths ofancient Greece and other cultures, such celestialmarriages are regularly believed to be blessed withprogeny. Thematically, there is an interesting analogyhere between possession and pregnancy (cf. Graham1977): but possession is not, as some have argued, in-herently related to gender through the biologicalexperience of sexual intercourse. Not surprisingly,such spirit unions are seen as standing in contrastto the human marriages of the female devotees con-cerned, creating rival loyalties and potential conflict.Amongst the Tamils of south India (Nabokov 1997),young brides may succumb to possession by lustypey spirits which force their prey to elope with them,and “not only sexually enjoy their victims’ but incitethem to reject their lawful husbands by kicking andbiting them” (Nabokov 1997: 301). Equally generally,such conjugal spirits are said to ride or “mount”their human hosts who, in their turn, in someAfrican cultures, are described as the “Mares of theGods.”

On the human side, devotees demonstrate theirintimacy with the spirits by going into trance whendancing to their tunes. Those cult members whograduate to become inspired priestesses behave andpractice in the same way as shamans (who are pre-dominantly male) in shamanic religions (Lewis 1982;cf. Hell 1995: 411ff.). Such possession cult leaders are





often women past menopause and/or widows andare consequently ascribed male qualities.

Trance, which is sometimes referred to as “halfdeath” or “little death,” may involve actual sexualorgasm—both, where adorcism is practiced, or itsopposite, exorcism. In the latter case, for instance, inChristian Sri Lanka, female pilgrims are reported toexperience orgasm as they are exorcised at a localshrine where they rub their genitals on the holycross and, at the climax, claim they are penetratedby Christ himself (Stirrat 1977; Gombrich andObeyesekere 1988).

The same sexual aura shrouds adorcism in theChristian and Muslim traditions. In the former, SaintMarie of the Incarnation worshipped Jesus as her“Beloved.” For her part, St. Teresa of Avilla recordedthat in her transports of mystical feeling she hadachieved “spiritual marriage” with Christ. Her mostsublime experiences she described as unfolding inthree stages: “union,” “rapture,” and the climactic“wound of love.” As has been recently pointed out(Fales 1996), St. Teresa was a member of a familywhich had been forced to convert from Judaism toChristianity during the religious persecution admin-istered by the Inquisition in 15th-century Spain. As awoman, a spinster, and a member of a convert fam-ily, despite the latter’s wealth, she was in several im-portant respects a marginal figure and, like others inthese circumstances in traditional cultures, a strongcandidate for spiritual attention. In such a setting,St. Teresa appears to have very successfully employedher spiritual intimacy with Christ as a form of per-sonal empowerment and even political criticism. Insimilar language if with less political ambition, thewell-known 7th-century Muslim Sufi poet of Basra,Rabi’al-‘Adawiyya, expressed her passionate devo-tion to the Prophet Mohammed in many ardentpoems using this conjugal imagery. Similarly, in thoseNorth African saints’ cults, associated with the for-mer slave populations and known as “black brother-hoods,” ecstatic female dancers explicitly comparetheir feelings after experiencing trance to those ofsexual intercourse (Crapanzano 1973).

These lusty themes are familiar, of course, in theDionysian cults of ancient Greece as presented inEuripides’ drama the Bakchai and in other sources(Dodds 1951; Devereux 1974; Maffesoli 1993). In-deed, in a rather tortuous and not entirely convinc-ing argument, Devereux even claims to distinguish

between female followers of Dionysus who experi-enced true sexual climax in the orgiastic rites, andthose whose ecstasy took the form of a “grand hys-terical seizure,” without actual orgasm (These heconsiders experienced trance as “a coitus and or-gasm equivalent.” Most women, he adds, “who havesuch attacks are vaginally frigid”).

This sexual aspect was also strongly emphasizedin the earlier tarantist cult and expressed in songsaddressed to the hybrid figure of the Spider-Saint(Paul) as in this invocation sung by female devoteesat St. Paul’s chapel in Galatina (Apulia): ”My St. Paulof the Tarantists who pricks the girls in their vaginas;My St. Paul of the Serpents who pricks the boys intheir testicles” (de Martino 1966).

Trance, as I am arguing, is cross-culturally themost conclusive public demonstration that a humanbeing has been seized by a spirit, and, in the case ofthose who develop ongoing relationships with spir-its, the regular expression of that relationship. Con-sequently, it is hardly surprising that trance behaviorshould be conventionalized and culturally standard-ized. As a socio-cultural phenomenon, trance neces-sarily responds and conforms to local expectations: ifit did not it could not be securely recognized as a sig-nal of spiritual intervention in human affairs. Hence,while it is also a cross-culturally recognizable state,regularly induced and sustained by particular musi-cal rhythms, it nevertheless respects the culturalform given it in a particular society. In this it clearlyresembles the female sexual climax which, despite itsphysiological features, is also affected by culturalconventions—to which the vast literature, popularand learned, on the subject testifies.

We have so far been dealing with trance in the so-cial context of marginal cults involving women andlow-status categories of men where the cult leaders,in my view, exercise a shamanic role. We now cometo shamanism proper where the social contextshifts to the center of the stage and is concernedwith public morality and order in the widest sense.Here in these “main morality” religions, shamansare typically males and it is their special relation-ship with the spirits that is the central issue. As weshall see, however, the same imagery and symbol-ism is used to describe and sanctify shaman-spiritrelationships.





The importance of inspirational spirit possessionin shamanism disproves the allegedly crucial dis-tinction between these phenomena, promoted byMircea Eliade (1951) who was himself, of course, nota primary source of ethnographic evidence. On thebasis of an inaccurate and partial reading of theprimary sources of other scholars, Eliade, as is wellknown, claimed that the defining feature of shaman-ism was the shaman’s “mystical flight,” in which heexperienced “the ecstasy provoked by the ascensionto the sky, or the descent to Hell” (Eliade 1951:434).This erroneous distinction between possession andshamanism, as essentially separate cultural phenom-ena, was given a sociological twist and furtherelaborated rather imaginatively by Luc de Heusch(1962; 1971).

Although the term shaman comes originally fromthe Tungus reindeer herders of Siberia and is obvi-ously associated there with the local (but externallyinfluenced) cosmology, I do not see the word as lim-ited to that particular ethnological context, nor de-spite Eliade’s advocacy, does it necessarily excludepossession. As I have argued elsewhere at length, weneed a wider understanding of the term (Lewis 1971etc.). Thus, I agree with the French Siberian specialistE. Lot-Falck (1973), who writes: “To be a shaman doesnot signify professing particular beliefs, but ratherrefers to a certain mode of communication with thesupernatural.”

Many lines of communication are open here, butcontrary to Eliade and his eminent Belgian disciplede Heusch, the crucial one is possession by a spiritor spirits. Shirokogoroff (1935), a medical doctor andour brilliant first-hand source on Tungus shaman-ism, as it was before and at the beginning of theRussian Revolution, emphasizes how the shaman’secstatic trance behavior, signifying the intimacy ofhis relations with the spirits, was central to his role.As he puts it himself: the shaman is a master ofspirits, and his body is a “placing,” or receptacle, forthe invading spirits during the séance. Here, in hisclassic description, “The rhythmic music and singing,and later the dancing of the shaman, graduallyinvolve every participant more and more in a col-lective action. When the audience begins to repeatthe refrains together with his assistants, only thosewho are defective fail to join the chorus. The tempoof the action increases, the shaman with a spirit is no more an ordinary man or relative, but is a

“placing” (i.e. incarnation) of the spirit; the spiritacts together with the audience, and this is felt byeveryone. The state of many participants is now nearto that of the shaman himself, and only a strong be-lief that where the shaman is there the spirit mayonly enter him, restrains the participants from beingpossessed en masse by the spirit. This is a very im-portant condition of shamanizing which does not,however, reduce mass susceptibility to the sugges-tion, hallucinations, and unconscious acts producedin a state of ecstasy. When the shaman feels that theaudience is with him and follows him he becomesstill more active and this effect is transmitted to theaudience.

The contemporary French Tungus specialistRoberte Hamayon provides further detailed infor-mation on the nature of the shaman’s relations withhis spirit guides to whom, as elsewhere, he is boundby marriage. Indeed, here again, the centrality of themarriage alliance between shamans and spirits illuminates the sexual imagery which abounds inshamanic discourse, as is also emphasized by theItalian scholar Zolla (1986). The séance is of course adrama and the shaman’s “play acting” in his animalcostume, as Hamayon puts it, mimes the act of rut-ting or coupling with his animal spirit partner. Thewords employed to describe them clearly demon-strate the sexuality of these actions and gestures thatcollectively constitute sexual play. In harmony withthis strong emphasis on the shaman’s séance as asexual encounter, even the shaman’s drum anddrum-stick, beaten vigorously while he leaps andbounds ritually, are representative of sexual inter-course. This is in keeping with the etymology of theword shaman itself, as expounded by Siberian spe-cialists, who stress that the root sam signifies the ideaof violent movement and of dancing exuberantly,throwing one’s body about. Romano Mastromattei(1988) reports that orgasmic seizures occur in theparallel shamanic rituals in Nepal.

Our classical authority, Shirokogoroff, the med-ical doctor who was such a meticulous observer (inagreement with most other first-hand observers),insisted on the key role of trance as the sine qua nonof the shaman’s séance performance. “No one,”Shirokogoroff reported, “can be accepted as a shamanunless he can demonstrably experience ecstasy—ahalf delirious condition ‘abnormal’ in Europeanterms” (Shirokogoroff 1935: 274). Shirokogoroff also





gives a vivid impression of the highly chargedpsychological atmosphere of the séance and of theemotionally intense interaction between the shamanand his audience as he works himself up into thestate he describes as “ecstasy.”

“After shamanizing, the audience recollects vari-ous moments of the performance, their great psycho-physiological emotion and the hallucinations ofsight and hearing which they have experienced.They then have a deep satisfaction—much greaterthan that from emotions produced by theatrical andmusical performances, literature and general artisticphenomena of the European complex, because inshamanizing the audience at the same time acts andparticipates.” (These contrasts could not, of course,be sustained with reference to shamanism andmodern Western theatre—nor, indeed, the theatreof Shakespeare’s day.) Shirokogoroff also noted thephysiological changes in the shaman’s comportmentduring and after ecstasy. During the séance theshaman expended such tremendous energy that, atthe end he was covered in perspiration and wasunable to move, his pulse weak and slow, his breath-ing shallow.

The ritual drama of the Siberian séance has beenelegantly confirmed by the distinguished Finnish spe-cialist on shamanism, Anna-Leena Siikala (1978), whoemploys the term “counter roles” for the shaman’sspirit guides which he enacts with such full ecstaticvirtuosity.

In relation to this highly developed drama of theshamanic séance, which is so thoroughly docu-mented, it seems perverse of Roberte Hamayon toclaim that the psychological overlay of trance perfor-mances invalidates their key significance: all themore so in that she emphasizes the sexual imageryand symbolism of the shaman’s relations with thespirits, which would imply that this trance repre-sents a kind of spiritual sexual climax. Moreover, as

we have already noted earlier, sexual intercourseand sexual climax are not merely physiological actsbut have also a complex psychological overlay, andare far from being immune from cultural influenceand even fashion. Such considerations, however, cer-tainly do not reduce their significance cross-culturallyas defining particular relationships.

More generally, ritual sexual congress in a num-ber of African cultures is used to signify religiousblessing and fertility. In this vein to take a specific ex-ample, amongst the Kikuyu, as Bernardo Bernardihas shown, the traditional term for the sacred meansmore colloquially simply human sexual intercourse.

Why sexual images and symbolism are so widelyutilized in expressing religious feeling is an old prob-lem. I believe that Manning Nash suggests a plausi-ble answer. “Erotic love,” he argues, is frequently atemplate for religious meaning since this form ofstrenuous play provides a readily available expres-sion of self-transcendence.

This seems to me to elucidate very well the per-vasiveness of eroticism in describing the relationsbetween humans and spirits. More directly to ourpurposes here, although every instance of trancecannot, of course, be considered an experience ofactual orgasm, at their peak, both seem likely tooverlap. In this regard it is suggestive that there arereports from Western ESP contexts of successfulmediumistic performances involving actual orgasmon the part of the medium (see Devereux 1974: 50).Sexual congress seems thus to offer a rich store ofpsychological and physiological experience uponwhich trance draws, just as the conjugal relationshipprovides an armory of powerful symbols to describeand articulate intimate relations between humansand their spirit partners. In this sensual perspective,although the precise modalities of music and tranceseem still imprecisely defined, music is neverthelessevidently the food of love.




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24

Hypnosis and Trance Inductionin the Surgeries of BrazilianSpiritist Healer-Mediums1Sidney M. Greenfield

In what is surely one of the most fascinating long-running ethnographic studies in recent anthro-pology, Sidney M. Greenfield has documented the healing practices of Spiritist mediums in Brazil.Related psychic surgeries in the Philippines have received considerable attention from outsiders, in-cluding celebrities and professional magicians who claim that the techniques involve sleight-of-hand.Greenfield asserts that the dramatic examples in Brazil are different in that the actual flesh of the pa-tient is cut open, and implements such as scalpels, tweezers, and even rotary saws are inserted; noanesthesia is used, and apparently few patients experience infections or complications. In the follow-ing article, Greenfield is not interested in evaluating efficacy or potential fraudulence, however, butasks how altered states of consciousness facilitate the surgeries.

He begins the article with a series of detailed descriptions of individual healers at work. Conform-ing to the beliefs of Spiritism, each healer serves as a medium for deceased medical physicians from thepast and enters trance before beginning work. The altered states of healers are well-documented in theanthropological literature, but Greenfield shifts focus to the trance states of the patients, to determinehow they are able to undergo surgery without anesthesia. Because the patients do not undergo anykind of deliberate trance induction, Greenfield looks to features in Brazilian culture that might accountfor the ability to enter a hypnotic state merely in response to a powerful patron, the healer.

While not discussed in Greenfield’s article here, some Brazilian healer-mediums now have interna-tional clientele and have attracted media attention, both skeptical and affirming. Information on thehealer John of God (João de Jesus), for example, is accessible on various web sites, some of which in-clude video footage of surgeries, testimonials from clients, and offers for guided travel arrangements.

Sidney M. Greenfield is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and has recently published a book-length account of his study, Spirits with Scalpels:The Cultural Biology of Religious Healing in Brazil (Left Coast Press, 2008).

From: Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 2, Issue 3–4, pp. 20–25, 1991.

1. Revised version of a paper presented at a symposiumon “Hypnosis, Trance and Healing in Cross-Cultural Per-spective,” at the 89th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, LA, November, 28–December 2, 1990.




GREENFIELD • HYPNOSIS AND TRANCE INDUCTION IN THE SURGERIES OF BRAZILIAN SPIRITIST HEALER-MEDIUMS | 197

Introduction

In Part I of this paper I describe several surgical pro-cedures performed by José Carlos Ribeiro, EdsonQueiroz and Antônio de Oliveira Rios, three of themany Brazilian Spiritist2 healer-mediums I have ob-served and studied since the early 1980s. What is un-usual, if not spectacular, about these surgeries, atleast from the perspective of Western science andmedicine, is that the healer-medium actually cutsinto the flesh of the patients, extracting human tissuewithout either anesthesia or antisepsis.3 In spite ofthis, most patients experience little if any pain, bleedbut minimally if at all, and few if any cases of infec-tions or other complications have been reported.4

While performing these surgeries the healer-medi-ums are in an altered state of consciousness (ASC)which they enter during a brief ritual usually partici-pated in by their followers and supporters. The pa-tients, I shall argue, also are in an ASC. However, thereare no rituals in which they participate during whichthey can be seen to enter a trance state. Furthermore,the healer-mediums do not consciously induce theminto ASCs, as for example do western surgeons, physi-cians, and other therapists who use hypnosis in treat-ing patients. They participate in no formal rituals dur-

ing which they can be seen to enter an ASC. In Part IIof the paper, after briefly summarizing the results ofstudies of hypnosis that help at least in part to accountfor what is described in Part I, I outline, as an hypoth-esis, a model explaining how specific aspects of Brazil-ian culture and social structure combine to move indi-viduals, when presented with appropriate cues inidentifiable social contexts, from what may be consid-ered their ordinary states of consciousness into ASCs.5

The Healers and the Surgeries

José Carlos Ribeiro

The first healer-medium whose surgeries I describe isJosé Carlos Ribeiro. When I first met him in 1982 I wasliving in the city of Fortaleza, capital of the northeast-ern Brazilian state of Ceará. I first learned of his pres-ence in the city from an article in the newspaper. Afterreading the story, I went to the address given where Iintroduced myself, my wife and my daughter to him. Itold him of my interest in his work and asked if I mightobserve him. His reply was that not only was I wel-come to see what he did, but that I would assist him.Without another word he placed a tray in my hands onwhich there were a few scalpels, several pairs of surgi-cal scissors, a few pairs of tweezers of assorted sizes, asyringe, some cotton, some gauze, adhesive tape and aglass of water. He then turned to a poorly dressed, darkskinned man who had been waiting with his wife.62. Spiritism of Kardecism is a possession-trance (or

“mediumistic”) religion that is widespread in Brazil.3. This contrasts the practices of the Brazilian healer-mediums with those of the more celebrated healers fromthe Philippines who often do not cut but rather appear toopen the bodies of their patients with their hands. ThePhilippine tradition often has been referred to as psychicsurgery. The Brazilians discussed below do actual surgery,with instruments, as opposed to psychic surgery—although at times I have also seen bodies opened withoutthe use of scalpels, scissors or other instruments. I havevideotaped most of the Brazilian Spiritist healer-mediumsI have observed and have shown the tapes to physicians,surgeons and others familiar with surgical procedures.They assured me unanimously that the bodies of the pa-tients had been entered surgically. Any reader who doubtsthis is welcome to view my tapes.4. This is not to say that pain is never experienced, exces-sive bleeding never occurs and there are never infections.Instead it is to say that over the period of a decade of ob-servations I have noted few expressions of pain, even afterdeep incisions were made in tender areas, relatively littlebleeding, and have been able to find very few complaintsof infections caused by the procedures of healer-mediums.

5. The ASCs of the patients also are to be seen in the tapes.6. Patients treated by Spiritist healer-mediums come fromall sectors of the population. Although I have never exam-ined their composition systematically, based on my infor-mal observations over a 10 year period they appear to berepresentative of the general population of Brazil, exceptthat they are considerably older. In contrast with the largenumber of Brazilians under the age of 18, most of the pa-tients seeking help from healer-mediums are considerablyolder. But there are rich and poor, Black and white in num-bers that roughly approximate the percentages of thesecategories in the general population. While some of thepatients are Spiritist practitioners, and others admit tobeing interested in and/or knowing something aboutSpiritism, the majority claim they are not Spiritists, butrather Roman Catholics, Protestants, etc. Many patients,especially the more affluent ones, turn to healers only afterunsuccessful attemps to obtain relief from conventionalmedical sources. The poor, however, most of whom cannotafford medical treatment, often turn to a healer-mediumwhen they first develop symptoms.




The woman started to tell the healer about hermate’s problem with his vision. As she did so JoséCarlos directed his eyes away from her towards theceiling. He then mumbled some words I was notable to understand and began to shake. He was en-tering into a self-induced trance state. An instantlater he interrupted the woman abruptly to ask aquestion and to issue a command. He did this withan authority not previously demonstrated, and hespoke in a sharp accent that contrasted with the softtone he usually used. It sounded to me as if he werea native speaker of Spanish trying to communicatein Portuguese.

He asked the couple if they believed in God. Be-fore they could answer, he picked up a scalpel fromthe tray in my hand and, while ordering them bothto think of God, plunged it with his right hand intothe man’s left eye, under the lid. With a series of jab-bing and twisting movements he slid the instrumentdown under the eye. As he did this he substitutedthe back of a pair of tweezers taken from the traywith his left hand for the scalpel. While doing this heeased the eye forward, tilting it out of its socket. Hethen scraped the lens of the protruding eye with thescalpel still held in his right hand.

More than twenty people—mostly friends, for-mer patients, and patients to be seen by him later—had crowded into the small, hot, poorly ventilatedroom to watch the healer. Several of them gasped asthe scalpel was thrust into the eye, and one womanwas unable to stifle a scream. My wife, who had beenplaced directly behind the healer, felt faint. As theblood left her face, José Carlos, though unable to seeher, moved his left hand quickly in her direction,leaving the tweezers dangling momentarily from itsplace under the protruding eye. As he did so heagain mumbled something I could not understand.As the blood returned to her cheeks, the healer se-cured his grip on the dangling tweezers. After a fewmore scraping motions with the scalpel still held inhis right hand he slid the tweezers, held securelyagain in his left hand, back to the top of the eyeunder the lid where he had first introduced thescalpel. As he covered the eye with gauze and someadhesive tape, he asked the man if he had felt anypain. To his negative reply the patient added that hehad been aware of all that had happened. The proce-dure I estimated had lasted a little more than aminute.

José Carlos then wrote a prescription that seem-ingly flowed from the pen itself. He looked at neitherthe pen nor the pad but instead off into space as hewrote. As he handed it to the somewhat startledwoman, he quickly listed things the patient was todo and not do, and foods he was to eat or avoid. Hethen dismissed the patient telling him that he wouldbe well.

The healer then turned to the next patient onwhom he also performed eye surgery, using thesame scalpel and tweezers that had been returned tothe tray in my hands without being cleaned. Diagno-sis, surgery, bandaging, writing of a prescription forpost-operative medication, and the dictation of a listof behavioral restrictions and a special diet took onlya few minutes.

As the morning progressed, José Carlos alter-nated between the performance of other surgery—the removal of several cysts and tumors—and thewriting of prescriptions that were to cure patients orprepare them for return visits and possible surgeryat a later date.

Edson Cavalcante de Queiroz

The second healer whose surgeries I describe isEdson Cavalcante de Queiroz who when I met himwas a resident of Recife, the capital of the neigh-boring northeastern state of Pernambuco. In con-trast with José Carlos who had attended the uni-versity but never completed his course work andAntônio de Oliverira Rios, the third healer to bediscussed below who has but a first grade educa-tion, Edson was a trained and licensed physician, agraduate of the medical school of the Federal Uni-versity of Pernambuco.7 He earned his livelihoodby providing medical services for a fee at a privateclinic specializing in gynecology and surgery.Away from the clinic, at a center he founded inhonor of his spirit guide, he performed Spiritisthealing and surgeries.

The first surgical procedure I present was doneon a young woman who had a growth on her rightshoulder. She had been brought to Edson by hermother who had heard stories about patients not


7. I use the past tense because Edson, as he was knownto his patients and supporters, was killed in October[1991].




experiencing pain when he operated on them. Fatimabecame uncontrollably irrational at the thought ofthe possible pain she might experience should adoctor try to remove the growth on her shouldersurgically.8

As the healer approached her, the professionalnurse who regularly assisted handed him a scalpelstill wrapped in its sterile packaging. The patient,seated on a small operating table, did not move nordid she make a sound when he unwrapped the in-strument and then thrust it into her shoulder. Asmall trickle of blood appeared that stopped afterbeing patted with a piece of gauze. Fatima did notreact when Edson next put down the scalpel andjabbed a pair of scissors into the opened wound. Shedid not flinch as he pulled at the growth first withthe scissors and then with his unwashed fingers9

which he inserted into the opening. After tearing loose and removing the infected ma-

terial Edson handed it to a pathologist who preparesa report on all of the healer’s cases.

The patient meanwhile sat motionlessly on thesurgical table. The healer then placed a piece of ad-hesive tape over the open wound saying that therewas no need for suturing.10 The nurse completed the

bandaging and then directed Fatima, assisted byher mother—who stood at her side throughout theprocedure—to the other side of the room where shewas given a glass of special water to drink. Edsonthen wrote a prescription which, as had been thecase with José Carlos, appeared to flow from thepen. He looked at neither his hand nor the paper.The entire procedure had taken no more than aminute or two.11

A second patient seen by the healer the sameevening had been suffering from sinus problemsand a perennially stuffed nose. To treat her a pair ofscissors were driven up each of her nostrils, deepinto the sinus cavity.12 To demonstrate that in spiteof the apparent lack of asepsis there would be no in-fection, Edson asked a bystander to spit on thegauze he wrapped around one of the pairs of scis-sors before driving it into the sinus cavity. Thehealer regularly asked those observing him to in-troduce germs and other contaminants into openwounds.

Earlier that same evening he had jammed severalsyringe needles (about two to two and one-halfinches in length) into the back of a woman whocould scarcely walk. She had made the journey to theCenter on crutches assisted by her relatives. Edsonforcefully inserted the needles in a line about two tothree inches apart, along her spinal column. As heplaced the final one just above the base of the spine,he ordered the pathologist to bring him a test tube—to collect the spinal fluid that that was starting toflow. When the tube was about one-third full, heslapped the patient’s back forcefully and rapidly re-moved the needles. As he dismissed the somewhatstartled woman—telling her that she would be


8. Prior to seeing any patients Edson had entered a trancestate to the reading of a passage from The Scriptures—asinterpreted by Allan Kardec—by a close associate and remained in an ASC until the last patient left the Centerseveral hours later.9. Edson does not wear gloves when performing surgeryand he does not wash his hands after each surgery. Hewill not wash his hands until he has attended all of thepatients to be seen on a given night. To the best of ourknowledge, however, no cases of infection, or other post-surgical complications have been reported thus far by any of his patients.10. I am unable to generalize as to the use of suturing. Attimes I have seen wounds opened by healer-mediumssewn closed while at other times they were simply ban-daged and left to heal. Some healers used sutures moreoften than others. Antônio, as we shall see below, had allsurgeries sutured closed; but this was because he claimednot to be doing the healing. He simply opened up the pa-tient so that the spirits could cure them. Then his assis-tants sutured closed the wounds he opened. Edson, JoséCarlos and others who claimed to heal when they oper-ated, sutured at times and not at others independent of thesize or depth of the incision.

11. Fatima was her usual outgoing, vivacious self when Isaw her on Friday morning when she returned to theSpiritist Center to have the bandage changed by the nurse.She restated her fear of doctors and the pain they inflictand expressed her relief in no longer having to be con-cerned about the growth on her shoulder.12. Inserting scissors, or more often needles, into the bodyof a patient is a treatment that Edson often uses. While intrance he explains that the procedure itself is not a cure;the needles and/or scissors instead direct energy from thespiritual plane that will dematerialize growths and otherforeign objects in the patient’s body thus effecting thecure.





fine—he handed the test tube to the pathologist andordered a complete analysis.13

On another occasion Edson removed a growthof film from the eye of a poor, elderly diabeticwoman. She said that she had come to him, ratherthan going to a conventional doctor, not only be-cause he charges no fee,14 but more importantly because she feared that she might not survive thechemical anesthesia used in hospitals by conven-tional surgeons.

As the nurse directed her to lie on the table, Edsontold her to think of God. Then, as he secured the endof the growth with a pair of tweezers held in his lefthand, the healer ordered her not to move the eyewhile he worked. Snipping at the film with a pair ofscissors in his blood-stained right hand, he ex-plained that this procedure takes between 30 and40 minutes when done in the operating room of ahospital. It took him about 25 seconds.

Before starting the procedure, however, Edson in-vited a visitor to assist him by holding the patient’seye lids open while he cut out the growth. Afterhanding the excised tissue to the pathologist, thehealer ordered the stranger to spit into the eye. Thiswas to show that in spite of the apparent absence ofasepisis there would be no infection.15

As the nurse bandaged the eye the healer, lookingelsewhere, wrote a prescription that he handed to thepatient after she drank the special (fluidified) watergiven to each patient after treatment. As she left she

told me that she had experienced no pain and wasconfident that she would be well.

The final surgery to be described was per-formed on a distinguished looking man in his six-ties wearing a well-tailored three-piece suit. Hiscard indicated that he was a physician with hisown clinic in Copacabana, an elite section of Rio deJaneiro. He had a large bandage on the left side ofhis neck. When Edson removed it, he exposed aninfected, festering growth. One of those assisting,who happened to be a physician, could not holdback the question on the mind of all present: “Howcould he (the patient), a trained doctor, permitsomething like this to go on so long without treat-ing it?”

Unmoved, Edson ordered the patient to take offhis jacket and lie down on the table. As he did, thehealer picked up a scalpel and pierced the woundwhich he secured with a pair of tweezers. He liftedas he cut. When blood started to spurt, he put downthe scalpel to place pieces of gauze, handed to himby the nurse, over the wound.

He then told those observing that he had permit-ted the bleeding in order to show that this washuman blood and not a trick, as has been reportedabout “psychic” healers in the Philippines who usethe blood of a chicken and do not actually open theskin of their patients.

When the bleeding subsided, Edson picked upthe scalpel and started to cut again. Cutting andstopping to control the bleeding, the growth wasabout half removed when he paused for questions.During surgeries Edson often stopped for questionswhich he answered with short sermons on Spiritistthemes.

When he finished speaking he turned back tothe patient, cutting away at the growth with re-newed vigor. Within minutes it was removed, leav-ing a raw, slightly concave wound. More gauzewas applied to control the bleeding. The excisedflesh was handed to the pathologist. The openwound then was covered with an ointment, al-though the healer said that it really was not neces-sary. A bandage, which the healer told the patientcould be removed within a few days, was placedover the area. It will heal and there will be no scar,Edson promised.

Before he left the room I asked the patient to tellme what he had experienced. In a soft, dignified

13. In another patient, who had complained to me earlierof a problem with her adenoids, Edson thrust needles intoher throat. As the young woman sat motionlessly and didnot utter a sound, the healer jammed eight needles, one atat time, into her throat only to pull them out with equalforce a few seconds later. When I asked the startled patientif she had felt any pain, she at first did not answer. Thehealer meanwhile kidded me, saying that she did not un-derstand my Portuguese. When she realized what washappening, she apologized explaining that she could nothear in her right ear. Immediately the healer thrust twoadditional needles into the ear. When he removed themthe shocked woman claimed that she could now hear thequestions I was asking.14. All healing is done by Spiritists as charity.15. In similar surgeries he had others run their fingeracross the bottom of their shoe and then rub it into theopen wound.





voice he said that he had felt the cutting, but had ex-perienced no pain. Stating that he now felt fine, headded that he was relieved that it was over. I askedhim why he, a doctor, had come to Edson and notgone to a conventional physician when the growthfirst developed. With his head erect and a straightlook he responded, as would most believers in Spiri-tist doctrine, that it was because he wanted to get atthe source of the problem. Conventional doctors weknow, he said with conviction, only treat symptomsand work at the surface. If you want to get at thecause you go to a Spiritist healer; and since Edson isthe best, he had waited until he was able to see himin Recife.

A year later I had the opportunity to visit thedoctor at his penthouse home on Avenida Atlánticaoverlooking Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro.He appeared to be, and said that he was, in excel-lent health. He had had no reaction to the surgeryand when he showed me his neck I could find notrace of a scar.

Antônio de Oliveira Rios

In contrast with Edson, José Carlos, and most Spiri-tist healers who work in large urban centers, Antôniode Oliveira Rios treated patients in the small town ofPalmelo, about 100 kilometers from the nationalcapital of Brasília in the interior state of Goias.16

Semi-literate, with only a first-grade education, anda bricklayer by trade, Antônio diagnosed illnessesfrom photographs brought to him by patients. EachSaturday large crowds lined up outside the Centerwaiting to see him. Each brought with them a photo-graph of themselves, or a friend or relative—the sickperson did not have to be present. When their turncame the healer would look at the picture and after afew seconds write, in an almost illegible, child-likescript—that had to be rewritten for the patient (or hisrepresentative) by his wife who assisted him—a di-agnosis and a course of treatment that often com-bined medications, diet, and a visit to the Center forsurgery.

In one of the surgeries I witnessed, an educated,sophisticated, business man, who had traveled byplane from São Paulo, had his stomach opened by the

healer.17 The man was lying on a gurney outside theCenter when Antônio, already in trance, approachedhim. Pushing a cart on which surgical instrumentswere laid out, the healer, wearing gloves, a whitejacket, and a mask, picked up a scalpel that hebrought towards the patient. Before he could beginto cut, however, the man engaged him in conversa-tion, asking about the procedure and other matters.The healer responded and before long the two weredeep in conversation. Antônio, however, did notstop the surgery. As he chatted with the man on thegurney, with a hundred or more observers watchinghim, he thrust the scalpel into the man’s chest, belowthe ribs, sliding it down some six to eight inches. Hethen took a pair of scissors with which he spread theopening he had made apart. Blood flowed and anartery soon resembled a fountain. As Antônio placedgauze inside the opening, eventually stopping theflow of blood, the patient, seemingly oblivious towhat was being done to him, continued his conver-sation with the healer. After a minute or so of cutting,Antônio left to work on another patient, leaving thebusiness man with his stomach open on the table inthe street. Not bothered in the least, the patient, afterbending over to look at the open wound, put hishead back and quietly closed his eyes.

A few minutes later Antônio’s wife came out thedoor with a needle and surgical thread in her hands.As she sutured closed the opening, which was bleed-ing very little now, the patient opened his eyes andengaged her in conversation as he had Antônio.When she completed her task, covering the sutured

16. I also use the past tense because Antônio also waskilled in 1990 after being attacked by bees while fishing.

17. In contrast with José Carlos, Edson, and the otherSpiritist healers with whom I have worked, Antônio, as Iobserved in footnote 10, said that he did not actually oper-ate on the patients. He claimed only to cut them open. Thetherapeutical procedure that benefited them was per-formed by one of the spirits (see below) who worked withhim. His wife or an assistant then sutured the patientwhile Antônio went off, almost in assembly-line fashion,cutting open other patients.

For treatment patients were placed on surgical tables inthe several small rooms of the center. Additional patientswere placed on gurneys and rolled out under an extensionof the roof on the concrete side walk that faced onto thedirt road that ran through the town. On an average Sundayand Monday, when Antônio operated, there were usuallyseveral hundred people standing in the road waiting to betreated or to observe the surgeries.





area with gauze and tape, she helped the patient,who still was chatting with her, to stand up. In frontof the somewhat startled crowd she wrapped a ban-dage around his chest and stomach and instructedhim to put on his shirt. As he did so, he informed methat had had felt no discomfort, as he had not theprevious time Antônio had operated on him. Hethen took out his business card and invited me tovisit him in S~ao Paulo to follow his progress.

The final patient whose surgery I describe alsowas placed on a gurney outside the Center. He toldme prior to being treated that he had been the victimof a bullet wound some ten years previously and stillhad no use of his legs.

Antônio started by injecting something into theupper part of his back.18 He then took a scalpelfrom his instrument cart and made an incision some10 to 12 inches in length and about one-half inchdeep along the spinal column. He patted the smallamount of blood that flowed with some gauze. Hethen took a pair of scissors and jammed them at anangle into the open wound. He took another pair ofscissors and used them to hammer the first pairdeeper so that they could be heard hitting against thebone. After a pause he repeated the procedure.

Antônio then took from the lower shelf of the in-strument cart what appeared to be a rotary, or buzzsaw. The people in the street moved closer to watchwhat was to come next when he connected the in-strument to an extension cord handed to himthrough an open window at the side of the build-ing. The patient meanwhile remained motionless,apparently unaware of the saw. Antônio turned onthe instrument and inserted its churning blade intothe open wound, running it along the spinal col-umn. A small amount of blood spurted up as theopening in the patient’s back was enlarged. The on-lookers gasped. The patient, however, did not react.

After running the blade up and down the pa-tient’s back a few times, Antônio turned off thesaw, disconnected it from the extension cord, re-moved the blade, and returned the parts to the shelfon the cart. Without stopping to look at the patient, hepushed the cart hurriedly through the door into thebuilding, stopping it in front of what was to be his nextpatient. The man lying quietly on the gurney in thestreet with his back open was left unattended.

A few minutes later Antônio’s wife exited thebuilding with a needle and surgical thread in herhands. She sutured closed the patient’s back andcovered the area with a bandage. Before I could getto him several of the onlookers questioned himabout what he had experienced. He had felt no painand was only slightly uncomfortable when the sawblade entered his back. As he left with the friendswho had helped him travel to the healer he gave mehis address in S~ao Paulo so that I could visit him onmy next visit to that city.

The Patients and Trance States inBrazilian Culture

Having described a small sample of the somewhatunusual, if not spectacular, surgeries I have observedand video taped over the past decade, proceduresthat if for no other reason than that the patients sur-vive, let alone get better, challenge some of the basictruths of Western science and medicine, I turn nowto their explanation. The question I address in thesecond part of this paper is: How do we explain oraccount for the fact that patients on whom surgeriesare performed by Brazilian Spiritist healer-mediumswho do not use antisepsis or anesthesia, and whooften not only do not wash their hands between pro-cedures but deliberately introduce contaminantsinto open wounds, experience little or no pain, bleedbut minimally and rarely if ever become infected ordevelop other complications?19 The answer I pro-pose starts from the assumption that the patients arein an ASC when surgery is performed on them.

During the nineteenth century, it must be remem-bered, after the Marquis de Puysegur’s refinement andelaboration of Franz Anton Mesmer’s hypnotic ther-apy, and before the introduction of chemical anesthe-sia, we have documentation of numerous successfulsurgeries by Elliotson (Hilgard and Hilgard 1975:4,63)and Esdaile (1975[1850]) that share at least some of thefeatures of what has been described above. And today

19. This, of course, is an overgeneralization. Some patients,as we have seen above, do bleed, at times profusely. Othersoccasionally feel excruciating pain and still others developpost-surgical complications. Given the number of surgeriesperformed by the healer-mediums, hundreds at each ses-sion, those reacting negatively are such a tiny fraction ofthe total that the majority effect calls out for explanation.18. I was unable to learn what was in the syringe.





20. At the symposium in New Orleans when this paperwas first presented a videotape was shown of a hysterec-tomy performed on a patient who had been induced intohypnotic trance. On the same videotape I showed some ofthe procedures described in Part I of this paper.

we have documented cases of surgeries performedin hospitals on patients in a state of hypnotic trancethat also show results comparable in part withwhat has been described above.20

Ernest L. Rossi (1986) has proposed what thus faris perhaps the most comprehensive, though contro-versial, theory of the psychophysiology of the rela-tionship between trance states and healing. Usinginformation theory as a metaphor, he has developeda communications model as a way around the Carte-sian mind-body dualism. He proposes thinking ofthe human organism as a communication system inwhich by means of a series of translations (or trans-ductions) information is conveyed from the mind tothe several bodily systems—the autonomic nervoussystem, the endocrine system, the immune system,and the neuropeptide system—and back, with eachsystem encoding what is received from the others.Information vital to its own functioning and to thatof the total organism then is constantly flowing fromone bodily system to the others.

Information, Rossi hypothesizes, is transmittedand then encoded in each system under specific con-ditions related to the unique experiences of the indi-vidual. This learned information, which itself at timesmay precipitate symptomatic conditions, may be ac-cessed for treatment. Since the mind (and the culturalcontent to which it has been exposed) in this frame-work is a part of the communications network, it canbe used to obtain information about illness, the condi-tions under which it was encoded, etc. It also canconvey information that can be used to modify the sit-uation resulting in the possible disappearance of thesymptoms. Rossi proposes hypnosis, the ASC his as-sociate Milton Erickson reintroduced into Westernpsychotherapy and used so effectively, as a means ofaccessing what he calls state dependent learning—theunique conditions under which the information asso-ciated with an illness (that may be causing it) first wasencoded. In trance a patient often can access, throughtranslations from the bodily system that is malfunc-tioning, information that can help in treatment.Accessing state dependent memory may be, as Rossi

(1986:55) proposes, “the common denominator be-tween traditional Western medicine and the holistic,shamanistic, and spiritistic approaches to healing thatdepend upon highly specialized cultural belief sys-tems, world views, and frames of reference.”

According to Brazilian Spiritists, however, thesurgeries described here were done not by the heal-ers, but rather by the spirits of Ignatius of Loyola,Dr. Adolph Fritz, Dr. Ricardo Stams and others.Spiritism teaches that there are two worlds, or planesof reality, the one in which we live and another in-habited by spirits, the assumed vital force in the uni-verse. In seeking moral advancement individual spir-its are believed to return periodically to the materialworld, reincarnating as human beings to learn lessons(see Cavalcanti 1983; Greenfield 1987; Greenfieldand Gray 1988; Kardec n.d.). Humans, according tothis view, are spirits incarnate temporarily in a mate-rial body.

Spiritists also believe that communication andcontact are possible between the material world andthe world of the spirits. They further maintain thatspirits in the other plane can return for short periodsto this world through the bodies of special individu-als who are called mediums. José Carlos Ribeiro,Edson Queiroz and Antônio de Oliveira Rios aremediums, special mediums able to receive and in-corporate spirits who in previous incarnations weretrained as and practiced as physicians, surgeons andhealers. In Spiritist parlance they are known ashealer-mediums. Using their bodies the spirits ofdisincarnate physicians and healers—wishing to ad-vance spiritually without reincarnating—are able toreturn to the material world to do the good works(charity) of treating the sick (see Greenfield 1987;McGregor 1967; Renshaw 1969). Dr. Adolph Fritz, aGerman physician who is believed to have lastbeen incarnate during the First World War, for ex-ample, works through Edson Queiroz. Dr. RicardoStams, another German of World War I vintage,treats patients through the healer-medium Antôniode Oliveira Rios,21 while Ignatius of Loyola ministers

21. Drs. Fritz and Stams, in the tradition of modern medicineare said to be assisted by a team of disincarnate healers eachof whom takes over the medium’s body when their specialtyis required. On each team there is said to be an anesthetistand someone providing asepses. This is the explanation forthe absence of pain, infections and other complications.





to the ill through the mediumship of José CarlosRibeiro.

To receive their spirit guides, José Carlos, Edson,Antônio and other healer-mediums go into trance atthe beginning of each treatment session, usually in thepresence of associates who assist them.22

Spiritist writers, and most observers, go into greatdetail describing and analyzing how mediums gointo trance and the changes that take place in themwhen their spirits arrive. Writing about another partof the world Michele Stephen (1989:218) provides yetanother example of what to me is misplaced atten-tion. “In Western techniques, such as hypnotism . . . ,”she writes,

the patient is usually encouraged to experience an altered state of consciousness (told to relax, for example), while guided by the suggestions and instructions of the therapist. A contrast, which I think has so far gone unnoticed, is that in shamanism and other traditional healingtechniques, it is the healer, not the patient, whoinduces an altered state in himself, wherein heexperiences the healing imagery.

Focusing on the healer and not the patient may beappropriate for symbolic analysis; it is not if we wishto understand the psychophysiology of the healingprocess.

Most of the patients treated by Brazilian Spiritisthealers also are in an ASC when being operated onor otherwise treated.23 Spiritist healer-mediums and

other believers, however, deny—often vehemently—that patients are in trance when being treated.24 Theysay this, I believe, because no one is consciouslyaware of hypnotizing, or otherwise trying to inducepatients into ASCs, and unlike the mediums, pa-tients participate in no ritual during which they maybe seen to enter a trance state.

If patients are in an ASC when being treated,however, and this helps to explain the unusual if notspectacular results achieved by the healers, how dothey enter a trance state without an induction proce-dure? The answer, I suggest, is to be found in Brazil-ian culture which has patterned certain contexts inwhich individuals, in response to a range of cues,learn to enter trance states.25 To understand how thisworks let me turn briefly first to some of the basicfeatures of hypnosis and then to Brazilian cultureand a hypothesized model of how it patterns tranceinduction.

Hypnosis, the ASC that has been best studiedscientifically, refers to two interdependent features: 1)a state of heightened suggestibility said to resem-ble sleep; and 2) the procedure for its induction.“Hypnotic suggestibility” refers to both a trait or ca-pacity and the state in which an individual accepts,as true, with varying degrees of intensity of receptiv-ity, information, presented in a particular way andunder particular conditions.

The procedure for an individual entering an hyp-notic ASC centers on the establishment of a specialrelationship between the hypnotist and a subject orclient—“hypnotic rapport.” Two other traits alsoappear to be critical: 1) fantasy proneness of thesubject—his or her capacity to imagine and believewhat is imagined; and 2) the capacity for total atten-tion (absorption).

Hypnotic induction then centers on the establish-ment of a special relationship between a personbeing hypnotized and a hypnotist and it works beston people who are fantasy prone and can concentrate(focus) their attention.

22. The medium himself, or some member of the group,will begin a brief ritual by first invoking God and askingHis blessing and cooperation and then appealing to JesusChrist—who is not seen as the son of God, but as a greathealer and one of the most advanced spirits ever to appearon this planet. Someone then reads a passage from thescriptures—as interpreted by Allan Kardec. During thereading the healer-medium goes into trance incorporatingthe spirit who then takes over the session.23. This first was brought to my attention by a group ofstage magicians to whom I showed videotapes of thesurgeries described above at a magician’s convention.While confirming that the healers really were cutting intothe flesh of the patients—and that there was no sleight ofhand—they pointed out the signs that indicated that thepatients also were in a trance state that in their words resembled hypnosis, not that induced during a formalprocedure, but like what some of them were able to dowith members of an audience.

24. The most common statement is that the patients havenot been hypnotized, nor have they been magnetized. Theuse of the word magnetized is evidence of the historicalconnection between Spiritist beliefs and the thinking ofFranz Anton Mesmer.25. For the development of this insight I am deeply indebted to my friend and colleague Patric Giesler.





Let me begin with the importance of fantasy-pronesubjects for hypnotic induction. Brazilian culture, incontrast with our own, for example, teaches, rein-forces, and rewards fantasy. Children (and adults)who claim to see the Virgin Mary, Saint Francis, someother saint, or other supernatural being not only arenot punished or taken to a therapist—as they wouldbe in North America and Western Europe—but arerewarded and held up for praise. Those who claim to“receive” a spirit, whether a doctor from the past likeAdolph Fritz or Ricardo Stams, or a deity from Africasuch as Iemanja, Oxala, etc. as in Candomble, Xangoor Batuque, or the spirit of a former slave (a pretovelho) or an Indian (a caboclo) as in Umbanda (Brown1986; Greenfield and Gray 1989; Greenfield and Prust1990; Pressel, 1974), not only are believed, but theirhelp is sought by others who treat them deferentiallyand with respect. Participants in the Spiritist tradi-tion, or in one of the several Afro-Brazilian religions,learn to go into trance and to believe that they, orothers around them, are possessed. And since mostBrazilians, from just about all geographical regions,classes and segments of the population are exposed toand participate to some degree in these alternative re-ligious (and healing traditions—including “Popular”Catholicism), we may conclude that Brazilians in gen-eral, like good hypnotic subjects in North Americaand Western Europe, are able to imagine and believewhat they imagine.26

Besides creating a society composed of a largenumber of fantasy prone individuals, Brazilian cul-ture also patterns social relationships in ways thatshare elements similar to that between hypnotistand client. I refer here to social relationships of pa-tronage and clientage that have long characterizedthe society (see Greenfield 1968, 1972, 1977, 1979;Hutchinson 1966; Roniger 1981, 1987, 1990; Strickonand Greenfield 1972).

Many of the new urban religious leaders functionas patrons to their client-followers (see Brown 1986;Greenfield 1990; Greenfield and Prust 1990).27 They

fill a social and economic void, providing neededservices, as the society has urbanized and modern-ized. The spirits—and/or deities—they receive havecome to be viewed as supernatural patrons who val-idate and reinforce the social acceptance of theirmediums. Desperate urban clients then willingly ac-cept the help of the new patrons. They place theirtrust in the religious leaders and in return for thehelp given them are willing to do almost anythingasked of them. They obey every suggestion, not tospeak of command, made by their religious leader,healer-patron. The patron-client relationship inurban Brazil then shares many of the features of thatbetween successful hypnotist and client.

Countless Brazilians then are fantasy prone andsincerely believe that the supernaturals and otherentities they imagine both are real and will helpthem in their daily life. They learn to enter tranceeasily and ASCs are a part of their ordinary life. Fur-thermore, they have learned to trust their patron,who often is a medium for helping spirits and/ordieties. Like clients in a hypnotist-client relationship,dependents in a patron-client relationship trust theirpatron and willingly accept as true and act positivelyin response to what he or she tells them.

Therefore, although no formal induction proce-dures are used by religious leaders and healers, theirclient-dependents, who have been socialized to rec-ognize and acknowledge ASCs, and to enter them,often go effortlessly into trance when they are in thepresence of a José Carlos Ribeiro, an Edson Queiroz,an Antônio de Oliveira Rios or other healer who isknown to be a medium for spirits who are believedto be able to heal them and perhaps also help themwith a range of their other problems, problems theyhave no other way to resolve.

We may conclude from this that Brazilians, inthe absence of formal induction procedures, tend toenter trance states easily, usually in response tocues not consciously intended, by a religious leaderand/or healer. And although the latter may not beaware of what he or she is doing, the result may wellbe that patients become receptive to suggestionsthat enable them to access their bodily systems andprocesses in ways they could not do in an ordinarystate of consciousness. They may be able, as arehypnotized subjects in the laboratory or clinic, tocontrol pain, alter the flow of their blood—to slowdown bleeding or speed it up to heal wounds more

26. It is interesting to add that the elaborate costumesmade and worn for Carnival are called “fantasias.”27. Edson Queiroz, for example, had been elected to the leg-islature of the State of Pernambuco less than two years be-fore he was killed. Other Spiritists, Umbandistas and leadersof alternative religious groups also have been elected to of-fice or have been influential in electing other public officials.




rapidly—and probably also access state dependentmemories that may enable them to communicatechanges, as Rossi hypothesizes, that result in theirbeing able to heal a variety of symptomatic condi-tions. Unaware of what they are doing or what ishappening to them, I would propose that largenumbers of fantasy prone clients of Brazilian reli-gious leaders and/or healers are induced into trancestates by the mere presence of a powerful patronwho often also is the medium for a powerful super-natural. Once in trance the client-patient responds

to suggestions as do hypnotized subjects. The dif-ference is that in Brazil there is no need for a formalinduction procedure. Given the cultural assump-tions and the socialization process, relating to a pa-tron in certain contexts induces the dependent intoa trance state in which he or she accepts as real, andacts on, the suggestions of his (or her) patron. Wherethe patron is a healer, much of what happens during asuccessful hypnotic induction takes place with the pa-tient demonstrating some of the extreme behavioralresponses we are just beginning to understand.





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On the Peyote RoadMike Kiyaani and Thomas J. Csordas

The peyote religion—or “Peyote Way,” as it is known by its members—is followed by some 250,000American Indians. Peyote (the name is derived from the Aztec word peyotl) was used by Indians incentral and northern Mexico in pre-Columbian years, its use spreading north to the Indians in theUnited States and Canada around 1890. Since 1918, peyotists have been organized as the NativeAmerican Church, and, despite recurring legal issues (peyote contains the hallucinogenic agentmescaline and thus is classified as a controlled substance), it has become an important religiousmovement among North American Indians. Although there are tribal and community differences inthe ceremonies and beliefs of Native American Church members, the practice of peyotism is decidedlysimilar across groups. The leader of a peyote rite is known as a road man because he leads the groupalong the peyote road to a life of dignity and respect for nature and for other people. In this brief se-lection, Thomas J. Csordas introduces the reader to one such road man, Mike Kiyaani. Kiyaani, aNavajo who first used peyote in the late 1940s, served in World War II as a marine “code talker.”(Due to its complexity, the Navajo language proved to be an ideal way to communicate secret infor-mation.) Kiyaani recounts his first introduction to peyote and how it changed his life, then briefly de-scribes a peyote ceremony and how ingestion of the peyote buttons affects the individual. Kiyaaniends the selection by expressing his worry about white people becoming involved with peyote,observing that Native Americans use the herb with more sincerity.

Most Americans know peyote only as a cactus con-taining an illegal psychotropic substance, but tosome 250,000 American Indian adherents of the pey-ote religion, it is a sacrament and a spirit. To live ac-cording to its inspiration is to follow the peyote roadof personal dignity and respect for nature and forother people. Those recognized as having the abilityto lead others along this path are known as “roadmen.” Mike Kiyaani, who underwent his own longapprenticeship, is such a road man. Now seventy-seven, Kiyaani is a Navajo who first used peyote inthe late 1940s, after returning to his native Arizona

as an honored veteran of military service. He hadserved in an elite Marine unit, along with otherNavajos who used their complex native language tocommunicate sensitive information—a code that de-fied penetration.

The peyote religion, formally institutionalized asthe Native American Church, was introduced to theNavajos in the 1930s by members of several PlainsIndian tribes. Its practices and spirituality differfrom those of the traditional Navajo religion, al-though both are fundamentally concerned with heal-ing. Traditional Navajo medicine men—Kiyaani’sown father was one—lead ceremonies known aschants. Lasting as long as nine consecutive nights,chants involve prayers in the form of songs, specificacts by the healer and patient, and the creation of po-tent visual symbols such as sand paintings. A peyote

“On the Peyote Road” by Mike Kiyaani and Thomas Csordasreprinted from NATURAL HISTORY, March 1997, pp. 48–50;copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 1997.




ceremony, in contrast, is a prayer meeting duringwhich peyote is eaten by participants under the lead-ership of a road man. Combining singing, drum-ming, and prayers, the ceremony typically lasts onenight, from dusk to dawn.

Assembled in a tepee or hogan, the participantsfocus their prayers on an altar or fire place. In thestyle learned by Mike Kiyaani, the centerpiece of thefire place is a crescent of heaped-up earth on whichrests a special cactus button known as the chief pey-ote. The road man cherishes his chief peyote andmay pass it down through several generations.Kiyaani concentrates on his chief peyote and the fireplace to facilitate his dialogue with nature. He saysthat whereas white people talk directly to God, thehumble prefer going through the intermediary ofnature—the air and the sunshine, which are God’screations. Kiyaani is not a shaman who takes spiritflights to other worlds but a healer who praysthrough the elements of nature in which, for him,God already resides.

Mike Kiyaani’s mentor was Truman Dailey, anOto Indian who instructed him not to imitate PlainsIndian ways but to take the medicine home andadapt its use to the Navajo culture and way of life.For Dailey, the elements of the altar represent partsof the eagle, which is sacred to his clan. Kiyaanistresses the Navajo understanding of corn as a sym-bol of growth and life. He performs the traditionalcorn pollen blessing, sprinkling some grains to makea path that corresponds to the peyote road. He alsouses a song learned from his father that metaphori-cally connects the prayer meeting to the growth ofthe life-giving corn plant.

Navajo adherents of the peyote religion oncefaced opposition from their own tribal government,which decreed the religion illegal in 1940 and did notmove for tolerance until 1966. Only in 1994 did thefederal government adopt a law that guarantees theright of American Indians to practice the peyote reli-gion. Mike Kiyaani remains deeply concerned that,against the background of a long struggle for free-dom of religion, the use of peyote be protected for itsimportance in healing, spirituality, and identity. Hehas traveled widely to describe his work to audi-ences of health care professionals, and on the reser-vation his reputation as a road man keeps him ingreat demand by Navajos who travel considerabledistances to seek his assistance.—T.J.C.

I’m a Navajo veteran—World War II, NavajoCode Talker, wounded in action. My clan is SaltClan. I got my name from Kiyaani; that’s my grand-father’s clan. When I came back from the war, I wasa sick man. There was something wrong with mymind, something wrong all over my body. No pain,but I felt kind of lousy. My father had died in 1944,and I guess that’s what got into me. One man I gotacquainted with took me to Oklahoma. I met thisman Truman Dailey there, and he noticed my condi-tion. He said, “You take this peyote,” and gave me atwenty-five-pound flour sack filled with Mexicandry peyote. I took that back home.

During that time I was way up there where no-body lives, herding sheep, and I used peyote. Just alittle bit during the day, every day. It seemed like itwent all through my system. Then one particularday I felt like eating, and I had fifty buttons. In aboutanother hour and a half, I ate another fifty buttons—maybe four times, fifty buttons. At midnight every-thing started coming. My life seemed to be coming toan end. That’s the way the medicine showed me, butI still kept on eating until morning. Everythingbegan coming out different. There was a lot of sage-brush out there, and everything was too beautiful.But every time I looked to the peyote, it wasn’tpleasant to look at.

Then toward noon I looked for that peyote, andnow I saw it was real pure, real white. It kind oftalked to me, “Your body is like that, your body ispure. Now you don’t need treatment, you’re a wellman. You wanted to get well, now you’re well.” I un-derstood it to be that way. At that time I sure cried. Iwas all right then. After that I was pretty much onthe go most of the time performing ceremonies forsick people. I kind of experimented with the peyoteeating, how it works, how it can heal.

At the start of the ceremony, I don’t know what’sailing the patient, but when you take some peyoteinto your system, the peyote affects you, and thenyou kind of know. A lot of people just say, “I’m sick,”that’s all. They don’t know exactly what’s botheringthem. But peyote does wonderful things. My patienteats peyote. He has peyote in his system. Peyote is inmy system, too. He’s talking; then I kind of know. Ikind of see things, what’s wrong in that way. It’s thepeyote that shows me things. It’s my patient talkinghis mind—the way he talks, the way he expresseshimself. It might be his action in there that’s kind of





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unusual; that tells me. But I don’t watch him directly,I keep my eyes on the fire all the time.

I say, “You come to me, and I want you to helpyourself; whatever it is that’s bothering your mind,whatever it is you think that’s bothering your health,get your mind off of it. You get on to this medicine,this fire place, this singing that you hear, the prayersthat you are hearing in here, which are all for you.The people sitting here, they’re talking for you. They’resinging for you. Everybody wants you to get well.Whatever’s bothering you—maybe it’s an evil, maybeit’s that lightning struck near you, maybe somethingelse. Get your mind off of it.” He might have a hardtime [from nausea] through the peyote effect, butthat’s going to help him. That’s the time he’s going tofigure out what’s wrong, why he’s sick.

I go outside for a special ceremony at midnight. Iget my bone whistle out. Some medicine men taketheir flashlight out there or maybe take somebodywith them out there. I don’t do those things. I’drather be in the dark, praying by myself. A lot ofNavajos, while they’re out there, they see something,visualize something. I don’t look for those things.But I might be hearing that the patient’s mind isbothered by witchcraft or maybe some lightningstruck that might be affecting his body, his mind.

Peyote. You eat it and it goes through your body,your blood veins, your flesh, your bone, your brain,and we talk to this peyote. And this peyote goes

through all the patient’s blood veins, goes to hisbrain, brain vessel; it seems like we talk to the peyotelike that. Talking with nature; that’s all it is. What-ever you do, peyote knows it, nature knows it.Whatever is wrong inside here, nature knows it. TheAlmighty knows it, so there’s no way you can getaway from this peyote, from this Almighty, from na-ture. If at some place you get off the road, then younotice it. Then you come back and pray. You go backto the Almighty, back to peyote. You get back on theroad.

The spirit peyote came up among the Navajo peo-ple on a very hard road. But peyote found its wayhere, and so you see it has some kind of power. Itfound its way into the Navajo people, into theNavajo hogan, into the heart. Where the heart is, thispeyote goes in there. So I want this thing to go on,this peyote religion, peyote worship. It’s somethingfor Indians who are humble. Just like in the Bible—itsays the meek shall inherit the earth.

Now I’m worried the white man is going to go forit. That’s what they usually do. That’s what we don’twant to happen. I don’t think it’s for the white peo-ple. This natural herb peyote is used by NativeAmericans with more sincerity. Indian people aremore serious in their mind, in their heart, in the waythey worship. Just let the Indians have it, let theIndians use it the way they want it, just natural. Ouridentity is there.




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Ritual EnemasPeter T. Furst and Michael D. Coe

As we have seen in earlier articles, many of the world’s cultures contain religious specialists andlaypeople who routinely undergo, for ritual purposes, an altering of their normal state of conscious-ness. Although this state can be obtained by non-drug-related methods, it is not uncommon to findethnographic accounts of drugs being used to enhance and quicken an altered state of consciousness.This article is about the religious use of various psychoactive substances among the Mayan Indiansof central Mexico. The authors note that, although hallucinogenic mushrooms, morning glories, andother psychedelic plants were known and used by the Maya, yet another substance seems to have beenemployed—intoxicating enemas. This phenomenon quite clearly appears in Maya art as early as thefirst millennium A.D.; it is curious that it has not been described in the literature over the years. Rit-ual enemas were well known in South America, where rubber tree sap was used for bulbed syringes.Furst and Coe reason that a rectal infusion of intoxicants could result in a more quickly and moreradically changed state of consciousness, with fewer negative side effects.

When the Spaniards conquered Mexico in the six-teenth century, they were at once fascinated andrepelled by the Indians’ widespread use not only ofalcoholic beverages but also of numerous hallu-cinogenic plants.

From the Spaniards’ point of view, however, bothserved the same purpose—to conjure up visions ofdemons and devils and to take imbibers from theirdaily life to supernatural realms.

Distillation was unknown in the New World be-fore the conquest, but Mesoamerican Indians weremaking, as they still do, a variety of intoxicating rit-ual drinks, principally by fermenting cactus fruit;agave, or century plant, sap; or maize kernels.Among the Maya, the ritual beverage was balche,made from fermented honey mixed with a bark ex-tract from the balche tree, Lonchocarpus longistylus.These concoctions were all taken orally.

But according to a Spanish writer known only asthe Anonymous Conqueror, the Huastec people ofnorthern Veracruz and southern Tamaulipas hadpulque (fermented agave sap) “squirted into theirbreech,” meaning that they used intoxicating ene-mas. There are indications that the Aztecs, as well asseveral other Mesoamerican groups, also followedthis practice.

Mesoamerican Indians generally used liquoronly on sacred occasions, when, according to suchsixteenth-century observers as Bishop Diego de Landaof Yucatán, the Indians often drank themselves intostates approaching oblivion. Similarly, the use ofmany botanical hallucinogens, first described byFray Bernardino de Sahagún and his contempo-raries, was strictly limited to occasions when directcommunication with the otherworld was required.Today, the best known of these is peyote, Lophophorawilliamsii, a small, spineless cactus native to thenorth-central desert of Mexico and southern Texas.The plant now serves as sacrament for 225,000 ad-herents of the Native American Church and alsoplays an important role in the religious life of the

“Ritual Enemas” by Peter T. Furst & Michael D. Coe reprintedfrom NATURAL HISTORY, March 1977, pp. 88–91; copyright© Natural History Magazine, Inc., 1977.




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Huichol Indians of western Mexico. Before the con-quest, peyote was widely traded throughout Mexico,where the Aztec priests numbered it among their im-portant magical and medicinal plants.

At the time of the conquest the seeds of the white-flowered morning glory Turbina corymbosa were awidely used hallucinogen. In 1960, Albert Hofmann,the Swiss discoverer of LSD (a synthetic hallucino-genic drug), isolated the active alkaloids in thismorning glory species and a related species, thepurple- or blue-flowered Ipomoea violacea, and foundthem to be lysergic acid derivatives closely resem-bling LSD-25. The latter species is often referred to as“heavenly blue” in the United States.

Mushrooms also played an important role in pre-conquest Mesoamerican Indian life. Certain species,most of them now known to belong to the genusPsilocybe, were perhaps the most extraordinary nat-ural hallucinogens in use in Mexico. The Aztecscalled them teonanácatl, or “God’s flesh.” Psychedelicfungi were widely employed in Mexico when theSpaniards came, and their use in divination and su-pernatural curing survives to this day in centralMexico, as well as in the state of Oaxaca (see “Drugs,Chants, and Magic Mushrooms,” Natural History,December 1975). The Indians even used tobacco toinduce ecstatic trance states, which the Spanish onlysaw as diabolic communication.

While Spanish writers of the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries left us relatively detailed accounts ofthe use of hallucinogens in central Mexico, there is lit-tle mention of this intriguing aspect of native religionamong the Maya, who lived farther to the south. Thesilence is the more puzzling because we have circum-stantial evidence of a very early cult of sacred mush-rooms in the Maya highlands of Guatemala and theadjacent lowlands, in the form of more than 250mushroom effigies made of carved stone, many dat-ing to the first millennium B.C.

The Maya were an integral part of Mesoamericancivilization and shared many of its basic assump-tions about the nature of the universe and the rela-tionship of humans to the natural and supernaturalenvironment. Like the central Mexicans, they di-vided the cosmos into upperworlds and under-worlds with their respective gods, believed in thecyclical destruction and regeneration of the earthand its inhabitants, and followed the 260-day ritualcalendar.

In view of these many similarities, as the Mayascholar J. Eric Thompson has written, it was hard tobelieve that the Maya did not use intoxicating plants.Thompson searched the pages of sacred traditionalbooks of the Yucatec Maya, set down in the Europeanalphabet in the colonial period, for hints of ecstatic vi-sionary trances through which the priests made theirprophecies. In the Books of Chilam Balam (jaguar-priest) of Tizimín and Maní, he found mention oftrancelike states but no hint whatever of any hallu-cinogenic plants. He also discovered scattered scenesin Maya relief sculpture that suggested visionary ex-periences characteristic of hallucinogenic ritual.

This is slim evidence, however, compared withthe data from central Mexico, and some Maya schol-ars are not convinced that the Maya practiced thekinds of ecstatic shamanistic rituals or vision questswith botanical hallucinogens that played so perva-sive a role in central Mexico, or among the Zapotecs,Mixtecs, Mazatecs, and other peoples of Oaxaca.

The silence of Spanish colonial writers on thesubject of hallucinogenic plants or rituals amongthe Maya accords well with the view, once widelyheld among scholars, that the Maya were quiteunlike their Mexican contemporaries in tempera-ment, being less preoccupied with warfare and theDionysian excesses than with the contemplativeinterpretation of the heavens and the passage oftime. But the discovery at Bonampak, Chiapas, ofmural paintings that depict, among other events, afierce battle among Maya warriors, indicate that thistraditional view is very wide of the mark.

As specialists have more closely examined Maya artand iconography in recent years, they have accumu-lated increasing evidence that among the classic Maya,ecstatic ritual was important. One suggestion for thisis that some of the major Mexican hallucinogens—among them the morning glories and the hallucino-genic mushroom Stropharia cubensis—occur in theMaya country. These and other psychedelic plantswere undoubtedly known to the Maya.

Had Maya specialists looked more closely at theearliest dictionaries of the Quiché and Cakchiquellanguages, compiled in the first centuries after theconquest of highland Guatemala, they would havediscovered mention of several varieties of mush-rooms with hallucinogenic properties. One is calledxibalbaj okox (xibalba means “underworld,” or “landof the dead,” and okox, “mushroom”), said by the





sixteenth-century compiler to give those who eat itvisions of hell. If the association of this species withthe Maya underworld left any doubt of its psyche-delic nature, it is dispelled by a later reference to thesame species in Fray Tomas Coto’s dictionary of theCakchiquel language. According to him, xibalbaj okoxwas also called k’aizalah okox, which translates as the“mushroom that makes one lose one’s judgment.”Still another fungus, k’ekc’un, had inebriating charac-teristics, and another, muxan okox, apparently broughton insanity or caused one to “fall into a swoon.”

We have recently come across a wholly unex-pected use of psychoactive substances among theMaya—the ritual use of intoxicating enemas, unmis-takably depicted in classic Maya art of the first mil-lennium A.D., but not mentioned either in the colonialor the modern literature. This practice is well docu-mented among the inhabitants of South Americantropical forests as well as among the Inca and theircontemporaries in the Andes, where archeologistshave discovered enema syringes.

Sixteenth-century sources describe the Incas asregularly intoxicating themselves with infusions ofwillka, now known to be the potent hallucinogenicseeds of the acacialike Anadenanthera colubrina tree.Lowland Indians also used tobacco enemas.

South American Indians were the first peopleknown to use native rubber tree sap for bulbedenema syringes. While medical enemas had a longhistory in the Old World, having been used by an-cient Sumerians and Egyptians, as well as by Hindus,Arabs, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans, the rubberbulb syringe was unknown in Europe until twocenturies after the discovery of the New World.

The native Amerindian enema was distinguishedfrom its Old World counterpart in that its primarypurpose was to introduce medicines and intoxicantsinto the body, while the Old World enema was em-ployed principally to clear the bowels. During theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the enema as arelief for constipation, real or imagined, became acraze in Europe—so much so, that Louis XIV hadmore than 2,000 enemas administered to him duringhis reign, sometimes even receiving court functionar-ies and foreign dignitaries during the procedure.

The wide dissemination of the intoxicating enemain South America suggests the discovery by Indiansthat the rectal administration of intoxicants couldradically alter one’s state of consciousness morerapidly, and with fewer undesirable side effects,

such as nausea, than oral administration. The physi-ological reason is simple: Substances injected intothe rectum enter the colon, the last segment of thelarge intestine; the principal function of the large in-testine is the reabsorption of liquids into the systemand the storage of wastes until they can be evacu-ated. The absorbed liquid immediately enters thebloodstream, which carries it to the brain. An intoxi-cant or hallucinogen injected rectally closely resem-bles an intravenous injection in the rapidity of itseffects.

The first evidence that not only the Huastecs,whose language is related to the Maya languages,but also the classic Maya knew of and employed theintoxicating enema came to light this past yearthrough the examination of a painted vase in a pri-vate collection in New York. This polychrome jar,with a high, vertical neck and flaring rim, was prob-ably painted in the heavily forested Petén district ofnorthern Guatemala during the classic Maya phase,which dated from the third century A.D. to the firstdecades of the seventh century. Seven male-femalepairs, the women easily distinguished by their robesand long hair, are depicted in two horizontal rows.That one woman is fondling a child suggests a famil-ial setting. The activity being portrayed would havebrought blushes to the cheeks of the traditionalMaya specialist, for while one man is inserting a sy-ringe into his rectum, this delicate task is being car-ried out for another male by his consort. One malealso has a bulbed enema syringe tucked into his belt.

Nine vases, identical in shape to the actual vessel,are painted between the couples, and painted dots atthe mouth of each represents a foaming, fermentedliquid that is probably balche, the common alcoholicdrink among the Maya at the time of the conquest.We must conclude that the people on the vase aretaking intoxicating enemas, a practice previously un-recorded for this culture.

An understanding of the scenes depicted on theMaya vase was only the first link in a chain of icono-graphic discovery of the Mesoamerican enema phe-nomenon. Suddenly, several previously enigmaticscenes and objects in classic Maya art had new mean-ing. A small clay figurine from a burial excavated in1964 by Mexican archeologists on the island of Jaina,in the Gulf of Campeche, depicts a male in squattingposition, his hand reaching back to his rectum. For along time Maya experts were puzzled because thefigure’s position seemed to represent defecation. But




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would the Maya have interred such a scene as an of-fering to their dead?

A small hole in the anus suggested that a piecewas missing—that some small object previously in-serted there had either become lost during excava-tion or had been made of some perishable material,long since decayed. The discovery of the enema vasefrom the Petén district seems to have solved the rid-dle. The little Maya was probably not defecating butwas in the act of giving himself an enema.

The gods themselves were also depicted as in-dulging in the enema ritual. One Maya vase has thefigures of thirty-one underworld deities painted onit. A naturalistically designed enema syringe danglesfrom the paw of one of the principal figures. Mayaexperts did not recognize the significance of the ob-ject until they had examined the enema vase in NewYork. As another example, a polychrome bowl fromYucatán, now in the National Museum of Anthropol-ogy in Mexico City, shows a naked being with apointed head injecting himself with liquid.

The ritual importance of the intoxicating enema ishighlighted by the involvement in the rite of one ofthe greatest underworld deities, an old lord associ-ated with earth, water, and agricultural fertility. TheMaya may have believed that this god—now identi-fied by Mayanists only by the letter N, but very likelythe same deity as the ancient Yucatecan godPauhatun—consisted of four parts, each part livingin the underworld and supporting the four cornersof the earth.

The quadripartite god is depicted on a fine vasein a private collection in Chicago. Each of the fourparts has a characteristically chapfallen face. Fouryoung and fetching consorts are apparently prepar-ing each of the god’s representations for the enemarite. Enema pots with syringes on top are in front oftwo of the consorts. The female consorts may wellrepresent the important Mother Goddess of theMaya, known as Ixchel, as several figurine examplesof the god N embracing this goddess have beenfound.

The same association of the god N, females andenemas is depicted on another pottery vase, with aconsort shown standing behind each god representa-tion and untying his loincloth. Again, the sameenema pots are in front of the consorts. So often arethe pottery forms and syringes encountered togetherthat we must conclude that they were commonlyused in the enema rite.

The explicit depiction of enema rituals on Mayavases has led us to take a new look at a hithertopuzzling type of clay figurine from central Veracruz,which also dates from the classic Maya period. Somearcheologists have interpreted these curious sculp-tures as representing human sacrifice. They areusually of males whose facial expressions suggestpleasure or ecstatic trance, not death. Their legs areraised, either draped over a high pillow or someother type of support of else slightly spread, with thefeet up in the air. The posture—and the enrapturedlook—suggest the intoxicating enema. The recliningposition also conforms to the Anonymous Con-queror’s description of the method of enema intoxi-cation among the Huastecs.

The hallucinogenic or intoxicating enema has ap-parently not disappeared altogether from MiddleAmerica. While conducting linguistic research in theSierra Madre Occidental in western Mexico someyears ago, ethnographer Tim Knab was shown apeyote apparatus reportedly used by an elderlywoman curer. The bulb was made from a deer’sbladder and the tube from the hollow femur of asmall deer. The curer prepared peyote by grinding itto a fine pulp and diluting it with water. Instead oftaking the peyote by mouth, as for example, theHuichols normally do, either whole or ground (see“An Indian Journey to Life’s Source,” Natural History,April 1973), she injected it rectally, experiencing itseffects almost at once while avoiding its bitter andacrid taste and the nausea that even some experi-enced Indian peyoteros continue to feel as they chewthe sacred plant.

We do not know what materials the ancient Mayaused for their syringes. The deer was sacred to theMaya, as it still is to Indians in western Mexico. Still,to make the transition from contemporary westernMexico to the Maya requires an enormous jump intime and space. Fish bladders and the bones ofbirds, which are prominent in Maya art, might haveserved for the syringe, as might rubber from thelatex tree, which is native to the Maya region. Moreimportant than the precise technology, however, isthe discovery that, no less than the simpler folk ofthe South American tropical rain forests, the creatorsof the most flamboyant and intellectually advancednative civilization in the New World hit upon theenema as a technique of intoxication or ecstasy—apractical means of ritually altering or transformingthe ordinary state of consciousness.




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27

The Sound of Rushing WaterMichael Harner

Native peoples of the Amazon region, as in the case of forest dwellers everywhere, have a tremendousdepth of understanding of the chemical properties of plants indigenous to their habitats. Extracts ofplants are prepared as medicines that are used both in the Western pharmacological sense and in thesupernatural sense. Preparations take a variety of forms and range from ebene, the snuff used by theYanomamo of Brazil and Venezuela, to the hallucinogenic drink natema, used by the Jívaro ofEcuador. Both contain hallucinogenic properties, provide the taker entry into the spirit world, andoffer powers otherwise unattainable without ingestion of potent alkaloid compounds. However, else-where, as among the Warao of South America, nonhallucinogenic drugs, such as tobacco, are con-sumed by shamans to achieve a similar ecstatic state, which, as in the case of ebene and natema, pro-vides visions of spirit helpers and other agents of the supernatural world (Wilbert 1972).Comparisons such as these give anthropologists insight into the importance of shared belief systemsand suggestibility. Describing the use of the Banisteriopsis vine by Jívaro shamans, Michael Harnerdraws on his field data to illustrate the use of the hallucinogenic drink natema. Called by a varietyof names in other Amazonian societies, this drug gives extraordinary powers to cure or bewitch, andshamans specialize in either one or the other.

He had drunk, and now he softly sang. Gradually,faint lines and forms began to appear in the dark-ness, and the shrill music of the tsentsak, the spirithelpers, arose around him. The power of the drinkfed them. He called, and they came. First, pangi, theanaconda, coiled about his head, transmuted into acrown of gold. Then wampang, the giant butterfly,hovered above his shoulder and sang to him with itswings. Snakes, spiders, birds, and bats danced in theair above him. On his arms appeared a thousandeyes as his demon helpers emerged to search thenight for enemies.

The sound of rushing water filled his ears, and lis-tening to its roar, he knew he possessed the power oftsungi, the first shaman. Now he could see. Now he

could find the truth. He stared at the stomach of thesick man. Slowly, it became transparent like a shal-low mountain stream, and he saw within it, coilingand uncoiling, makanchi, the poisonous serpent, whohad been sent by the enemy shaman. The real causeof the illness had been found.

The Jívaro Indians of the Ecuadorian Amazon be-lieve that witchcraft is the cause of the vast majorityof illnesses and non-violent deaths. The normal wak-ing life, for the Jívaro, is simply “a lie,” or illusion,while the true forces that determine daily events aresupernatural and can only be seen and manipulatedwith the aid of hallucinogenic drugs. A reality viewof this kind creates a particularly strong demand forspecialists who can cross over into the supernaturalworld at will to deal with the forces that influenceand even determine the events of the waking life.

These specialists, called “shamans” by anthropol-ogists, are recognized by the Jívaro as being of twotypes: bewitching shamans or curing shamans. Both

“The Sound of Rushing Water” by Michael J. Harper reprintedfrom NATURAL HISTORY, June–July 1968, pp. 28–33, 60–61;copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 1968.




HARNER • THE SOUND OF RUSHING WATER | 215

kinds take a hallucinogenic drink, whose Jívaroname is natema, in order to enter the supernaturalworld. This brew, commonly called yagé, or yajé, inColombia, ayahuasca (Inca “vine of the dead”) inEcuador and Peru, and caapi in Brazil, is preparedfrom segments of a species of the vine Banisteriopsis,a genus belonging to the Malpighiaceae. The Jívaroboil it with the leaves of a similar vine, which proba-bly is also a species of Banisteriopsis, to produce a teathat contains the powerful hallucinogenic alkaloidsharmaline, harmine, d-tetrahydroharmine, and quitepossibly dimethyltryptamine (DMT). These com-pounds have chemical structures and effects similar,but not identical, to LSD, mescaline of the peyotecactus, and psilocybin of the psychotropic Mexicanmushroom.

When I first undertook research among the Jívaroin 1956–57, I did not fully appreciate the psychologi-cal impact of the Banisteriopsis drink upon the nativeview of reality, but in 1961 I had occasion to drink thehallucinogen in the course of field work with an-other Upper Amazon Basin tribe. For several hoursafter drinking the brew, I found myself, althoughawake, in a world literally beyond my wildestdreams. I met bird-headed people, as well as dragon-like creatures who explained that they were the truegods of this world. I enlisted the services of otherspirit helpers in attempting to fly through the farreaches of the Galaxy. Transported into a trancewhere the supernatural seemed natural, I realizedthat anthropologists, including myself, had pro-foundly underestimated the importance of the drugin affecting native ideology. Therefore, in 1964 I re-turned to the Jívaro to give particular attention to thedrug’s use by the Jívaro shaman.

The use of the hallucinogenic natema drink amongthe Jívaro makes it possible for almost anyone toachieve the trance state essential for the practice ofshamanism. Given the presence of the drug and thefelt need to contact the “real,” or supernatural,world, it is not surprising that approximately oneout of every four Jívaro men is a shaman. Any adult,male or female, who desires to become such a practi-tioner, simply presents a gift to an already practicingshaman, who administers the Banisteriopsis drinkand gives some of his own supernatural power—inthe form of spirit helpers, or tsentsak—to the appren-tice. These spirit helpers, or “darts,” are the main su-pernatural forces believed to cause illness and death

in daily life. To the non-shaman they are normally in-visible, and even shamans can perceive them onlyunder the influence of natema.

Shamans send these spirit helpers into the vic-tims’ bodies to make them ill or to kill them. Atother times, they may suck spirits sent by enemyshamans from the bodies of tribesmen sufferingfrom witchcraft-induced illness. The spirit helpersalso form shields that protect their shaman mastersfrom attacks. The following account presents the ide-ology of Jívaro witchcraft from the point of view ofthe Indians themselves.

To give the novice some tsentsak, the practicingshaman regurgitates what appears to be—to thosewho have taken natema—a brilliant substance inwhich the spirit helpers are contained. He cuts partof it off with a machete and gives it to the novice toswallow. The recipient experiences pain upon takingit into his stomach and stays on his bed for ten days,repeatedly drinking natema. The Jívaro believe theycan keep magical darts in their stomachs indefinitelyand regurgitate them at will. The shaman donatingthe tsentsak periodically blows and rubs all over thebody of the novice, apparently to increase the powerof the transfer.

The novice must remain inactive and not engagein sexual intercourse for at least three months. If hefails in self-discipline, as some do, he will not be-come a successful shaman. At the end of the firstmonth, a tsentsak emerges from his mouth. With thismagical dart at his disposal, the new shaman experi-ences a tremendous desire to bewitch. If he casts histsentsak to fulfill this desire, he will become a be-witching shaman. If, on the other hand, the novicecan control his impulse and reswallow the firsttsentsak, he will become a curing shaman.

If the shaman who gave the tsentsak to the newman was primarily a bewitcher, rather than a curer,the novice likewise will tend to become a bewitcher.This is because a bewitcher’s magical darts havesuch a desire to kill that their new owner will bestrongly inclined to adopt their attitude. One infor-mant said that the urge to kill felt by bewitchingshamans came to them with a strength and fre-quency similar to that of hunger.

Only if the novice shaman is able to abstain fromsexual intercourse for five months will he have thepower to kill a man (if he is a bewitcher) or cure avictim (if he is a curer). A full year’s abstinence is





considered necessary to become a really effective be-witcher or curer.

During the period of sexual abstinence, the newshaman collects all kinds of insects, plants, and otherobjects, which he now has the power to convert intotsentsak. Almost any object, including living insectsand worms, can become a tsentsak if it is smallenough to be swallowed by a shaman. Differenttypes of tsentsak are used to cause different kinds anddegrees of illness. The greater the variety of these ob-jects that a shaman has in his body, the greater is hisability.

According to Jívaro concepts, each tsentsak has anatural and supernatural aspect. The magical dart’snatural aspect is that of an ordinary material objectas seen without drinking the drug natema. But the su-pernatural and “true” aspect of the tsentsak is re-vealed to the shaman by taking natema. When hedoes this, the magical darts appear in new forms asdemons and with new names. In their supernaturalaspects, the tsentsak are not simply objects but spirithelpers in various forms, such as giant butterflies,jaguars, or monkeys, who actively assist the shamanin his tasks.

Bewitching is carried out against a specific, knownindividual and thus is almost always done to neigh-bors or, at the most, fellow tribesmen. Normally, as isthe case with intratribal assassination, bewitchingis done to avenge a particular offense committedagainst one’s family or friends. Both bewitching andindividual assassination contrast with the large-scaleheadhunting raids for which the Jívaro have becomefamous, and which were conducted against entireneighborhoods of enemy tribes.

To bewitch, the shaman takes natema and secretlyapproaches the house of his victim. Just out of sightin the forest, he drinks green tobacco juice, enablinghim to regurgitate a tsentsak, which he throws at hisvictim as he comes out of his house. If the tsentsak isstrong enough and is thrown with sufficient force, itwill pass all the way through the victim’s body caus-ing death within a period of a few days to severalweeks. More often, however, the magical dart simplylodges in the victim’s body. If the shaman, in his hid-ing place, fails to see the intended victim, he may in-stead bewitch any member of the intended victim’sfamily who appears, usually a wife or child. Whenthe shaman’s mission is accomplished, he returnssecretly to his own home.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of thebewitching process among the Jívaro is that, as far asI could learn, the victim is given no specific indica-tion that someone is bewitching him. The bewitcherdoes not want his victim to be aware that he is beingsupernaturally attacked, lest he take protective mea-sures by immediately procuring the services of a cur-ing shaman. Nonetheless, shamans and laymen alikewith whom I talked noted that illness invariably fol-lows the bewitchment although the degree of the ill-ness can vary considerably.

A special kind of spirit helper, called a pasuk, canaid the bewitching shaman by remaining near thevictim in the guise of an insect or animal of the forestafter the bewitcher has left. This spirit helper has hisown objects to shoot into the victim should a curingshaman succeed in sucking out the tsentsak sent ear-lier by the bewitcher who is the owner of the pasuk.

In addition, the bewitcher can enlist the aid of awakani (“soul,” or “spirit”) bird. Shamans have thepower to call these birds and use them as spirithelpers in bewitching victims. The shaman blows onthe wakani birds and then sends them to the house ofthe victim to fly around and around the man, fright-ening him. This is believed to cause fever and insan-ity, with death resulting shortly thereafter.

After he returns home from bewitching, theshaman may send a wakani bird to perch near thehouse of the victim. Then if a curing shaman sucksout the intruding object, the bewitching shamansends the wakani bird more tsentsak to throw from itsbeak into the victim. By continually resupplying thewakani bird with new tsentsak, the sorcerer makes itimpossible for the curer to rid his patient perma-nently of the magical darts.

While the wakani birds are supernatural servantsavailable to anyone who wishes to use them, the pasuk,chief among the spirit helpers, serves only a singleshaman. Likewise a shaman possesses only one pasuk.The pasuk, being specialized for the service of bewitch-ing, has a protective shield to guard it from counter-attack by the curing shaman. The curing shaman,under the influence of natema, sees the pasuk of the be-witcher in human form and size, but “covered withiron except for its eyes.” The curing shaman can killthis pasuk only by shooting a tsentsak into its eyes, thesole vulnerable area in the pasuk’s armor. To the personwho has not taken the hallucinogenic drink, the pasukusually appears to be simply a tarantula.





Shamans also may kill or injure a person by usingmagical darts, anamuk, to create supernatural ani-mals that attack a victim. If a shaman has a small,pointed armadillo bone tsentsak, he can shoot thisinto a river while the victim is crossing it on a balsaraft or in a canoe. Under the water, this bone mani-fests itself in its supernatural aspect as an anaconda,which rises up and overturns the craft, causing thevictim to drown. The shaman can similarly use atooth from a killed snake as a tsentsak, creating apoisonous serpent to bite his victim. In more or lessthe same manner, shamans can create jaguars andpumas to kill their victims.

About five years after receiving his tsentsak, a be-witching shaman undergoes a test to see if he still re-tains enough tsentsak power to continue to kill suc-cessfully. This test involves bewitching a tree. Theshaman, under the influence of natema, attempts tothrow a tsentsak through the tree at the point whereits two main branches join. If his strength and aimare adequate, the tree appears to split the momentthe tsentsak is sent into it. The splitting, however, isinvisible to an observer who is not under the influ-ence of the hallucinogen. If the shaman fails, heknows that he is incapable of killing a human victim.This means that, as soon as possible, he must go to astrong shaman and purchase a new supply oftsentsak. Until he has the goods with which to pay forthis new supply, he is in constant danger, in hisproved weakened condition, of being seriously be-witched by other shamans. Therefore, each day, hedrinks large quantities of natema, tobacco juice, andthe extract of yet another drug, pirípirí. He also restson his bed at home to conserve his strength, but triesto conceal his weakened condition from his enemies.When he purchases a new supply of tsentsak, he cansafely cut down on his consumption of these othersubstances.

The degree of illness produced in a witchcraftvictim is a function of both the force with which thetsentsak is shot into the body, and also of the char-acter of the magical dart itself. If a tsentsak is shotall the way through the body of a victim, then“there is nothing for a curing shaman to suck out,”and the patient dies. If the magical dart lodgeswithin the body, however, it is theoretically possi-ble to cure the victim by sucking. But in actualpractice, the sucking is not always consideredsuccessful.

The work of the curing shaman is complementaryto that of a bewitcher. When a curing shaman iscalled in to treat a patient, his first task is to see if theillness is due to witchcraft. The usual diagnosis andtreatment begin with the curing shaman drinkingnatema, tobacco juice, and pirípirí in the late after-noon and early evening. These drugs permit him tosee into the body of the patient as though it wereglass. If the illness is due to sorcery, the curingshaman will see the intruding object within the pa-tient’s body clearly enough to determine whether ornot he can cure the sickness.

A shaman sucks magical darts from a patient’sbody only at night, and in a dark area of the house,for it is only in the dark that he can perceive thedrug-induced visions that are the supernatural real-ity. With the setting of the sun, he alerts his tsentsakby whistling the tune of the curing song; after abouta quarter of an hour, he starts singing. When he isready to suck, the shaman regurgitates two tsentsakinto the sides of his throat and mouth. These must beidentical to the one he has seen in the patient’s body.He holds one of these in the front of the mouth andthe other in the rear. They are expected to catch thesupernatural aspect of the magical dart that theshaman sucks out of the patient’s body. The tsentsaknearest the shaman’s lips is supposed to incorporatethe sucked-out tsentsak essence within itself. If, how-ever, this supernatural essence should get past it, thesecond magical dart in the mouth blocks the throatso that the intruder cannot enter the interior of theshaman’s body. If the curer’s two tsentsak were to failto catch the supernatural essence of the tsentsak, itwould pass down into the shaman’s stomach andkill him. Trapped thus within the mouth, this essenceis shortly caught by, and incorporated into, the mate-rial substance of one of the curing shaman’s tsentsak.He then “vomits” out this object and displays it tothe patient and his family saying, “Now I havesucked it out. Here it is.”

The non-shamans think that the material object it-self is what has been sucked out, and the shamandoes not disillusion them. At the same time, he is notlying, because he knows that the only importantthing about a tsentsak is its supernatural aspect, oressence, which he sincerely believes he has removedfrom the patient’s body. To explain to the laymanthat he already had these objects in his mouth wouldserve no fruitful purpose and would prevent him





from displaying such an object as proof that he hadeffected the cure. Without incontrovertible evidence,he would not be able to convince the patient and hisfamily that he had effected the cure and must be paid.

The ability of the shaman to suck depends largelyupon the quantity and strength of his own tsentsak, ofwhich he may have hundreds. His magical darts as-sume their supernatural aspect of spirit helpers whenhe is under the influence of natema, and he sees themas a variety of zoomorphic forms hovering over him,perching on his shoulders, and sticking out of hisskin. He sees them helping to suck the patient’s body.He must drink tobacco juice every few hours to “keepthem fed” so that they will not leave him.

The curing shaman must also deal with any pasukthat may be in the patient’s vicinity for the purposeof casting more darts. He drinks additional amountsof natema in order to see them and engages in tsentsakduels with them if they are present. While the pasukis enclosed in iron armor, the shaman himself has hisown armor composed of his many tsentsak. As longas he is under the influence of netema, these magicaldarts cover his body as a protective shield, and areon the lookout for any enemy tsentsak headed to-ward their master. When these tsentsak see such amissile coming, they immediately close up togetherat the point where the enemy dart is attempting topenetrate, and thereby repel it.

If the curer finds tsentsak entering the body of hispatient after he has killed pasuk, he suspects the pres-ence of a wakani bird. The shaman drinks maikua(Datura), an hallucinogen even more powerful thannatema, as well as tobacco juice, and silently sneaksinto the forest to hunt and kill the bird with tsentsak.When he succeeds, the curer returns to the patient’shome, blows all over the house to get rid of the “at-mosphere” created by the numerous tsentsak sent bythe bird, and completes his sucking of the patient.Even after all the tsentsak are extracted, the shamanmay remain another night at the house to suck outany “dirtiness” (pahuri) still inside. In the cureswhich I have witnessed, this sucking is a most noisyprocess, accompanied by deep, but dry, vomiting.

After sucking out a tsentsak, the shaman puts itinto a little container. He does not swallow it becauseit is not his own magical dart and would thereforekill him. Later, he throws the tsentsak into the air, andit flies back to the shaman who sent it originally intothe patient. Tsentsak also fly back to a shaman at the

death of a former apprentice who had originally re-ceived them from him. Besides receiving “old” mag-ical darts unexpectedly in this manner, the shamanmay have tsentsak thrown at him by a bewitcher. Ac-cordingly, shamans constantly drink tobacco juice atall hours of the day and night. Although the tobaccojuice is not truly hallucinogenic, it produces a narco-tized state, which is believed necessary to keep one’stsentsak ready to repel any other magical darts. Ashaman does not even dare go for a walk withouttaking along the green tobacco leaves with which heprepares the juice that keeps his spirit helpers alert.Less frequently, but regularly, he must drink natemafor the same purpose and to keep in touch with thesupernatural reality.

While curing under the influence of natema, thecuring shaman “sees” the shaman who bewitchedhis patient. Generally, he can recognize the person,unless it is a shaman who lives far away or in anothertribe. The patient’s family knows this, and demandsto be told the identity of the bewitcher, particularlyif the sick person dies. At one curing session Iattended, the shaman could not identify the personhe had seen in his vision. The brother of the deadman then accused the shaman himself of beingresponsible. Under such pressure, there is a strongtendency for the curing shaman to attribute eachcase to a particular bewitcher.

Shamans gradually become weak and must pur-chase tsentsak again and again. Curers tend to be-come weak in power, especially after curing a patientbewitched by a shaman who has recently received anew supply of magical darts. Thus, the most power-ful shamans are those who can repeatedly purchasenew supplies of tsentsak from other shamans.

Shamans can take back tsentsak from others towhom they have previously given them. To accom-plish this, the shaman drinks natema, and, using histsentsak, creates a “bridge” in the form of a rainbowbetween himself and the other shaman. Then heshoots a tsentsak along this rainbow. This strikes theground beside the other shaman with an explosionand flash likened to a lightning bolt. The purposeof this is to surprise the other shaman so that hetemporarily forgets to maintain his guard over hismagical darts, thus permitting the other shaman tosuck them back along the rainbow. A shaman whohas had his tsentsak taken away in this manner willdiscover that “nothing happens” when he drinks





ism and therefore can be persuaded to reveal theirknowledge, no longer having a vested interest in theprofession. This divulgence, however, does not serveas a significant threat to practitioners, for wordsalone can never adequately convey the realities ofshamanism. These can only be approached with theaid of natema, the chemical door to the invisibleworld of the Jívaro shaman.

natema. The sudden loss of his tsentsak will tend tomake him ill, but ordinarily the illness is not fatalunless a bewitcher shoots a magical dart into himwhile he is in this weakened condition. If he hasnot become disillusioned by his experience, he canagain purchase tsentsak from some other shamanand resume his calling. Fortunately for anthropologysome of these men have chosen to give up shaman-




220

Ever had an experience that makes you sit up and re-evaluate all your ideas, thoughts and incidents inyour life?1

Introduction

The question above was voiced by a young man whohad just returned from a rave: a dance party, usuallyall night long, featuring loud “techno”2 music, also

28

The Rave: Spiritual Healing inModern Western SubculturesScott Hutson

Drawing upon anthropological understandings of altered states of consciousness, the ritual process,and shamanism, Scott Hutson argues that the youth subcultural events known as raves function asa form of spiritual healing. By focusing on what participants themselves say, Hutson finds that ravesare therapeutic and comparable to ecstatic healing as documented cross-culturally. According to theauthor, the most distinctive characteristics of raves are techno dance music, long duration, and ec-static experience. Raves began in London but spread internationally, flourishing in the late 1980sand 1990s, and in many places eventually blended into the general nightclub scene.

In this article, Hutson sketches ways in which raves are connected to religion: some are hosted bychurches interested in youth outreach; some participants stimulate altered states through drug use;and even by participants, DJs are compared to “technoshamans.” The author describes features likelyto have physiological effects on participants, akin to trance induction in other cultures, such as flash-ing lights, repetitive percussive music, and dancing for long periods of time, as well as symbolic andritual features that produce feelings of communality.

Scott Hutson is primarily an archaeologist with expertise in the Americas. His study of raves isnotable in its use of anthropological theory, but raves have also attracted attention from scholars out-side of anthropology. Two among the many works available are Rave Culture and Religion, ed. GrahamSt. John (Routledge 2003) and Trance Formation: the Spiritual and Religious Dimensions ofGlobal Rave Culture, by Robin Sylvan (Routledge 2005.)

From: Anthropological Quarterly 73(1):35–49, 2000.Acknowledgments I would like to thank Byron Hamann,Megan Mooney, Michael Brown, Beth Conklin, and JamesHutson for commenting on this paper. A preliminary ver-sion was read at the 97th Annual Meeting of the AmericanAnthropological Association, December 2–6, 1998,Philadelphia.1. David King, “Why ‘Goa Trance?’” in www.thirdeye.org.uk/trip/why.html [Internet]. 7 May 1997 [cited 22 Octo-ber 1997].

2. Techno music includes various forms of pre-recorded dancemusic mixed by disc jockeys, though it can be producedlive. Electronica is a more recent term coined by U.S. mediaand record companies. The various forms or sub-genres oftechno change rapidly; many of the genres that were popu-lar five years ago no longer exist or have evolved into newgenres with their own names. Some of the genres of technothat were popular at the time of my research include house,trance, drum ‘n bass, speed garage, trip hop, and big beat.

www.thirdeye.org.uk/trip/why.html





HUTSON • THE RAVE: SPIRITUAL HEALING IN MODERN WESTERN SUBCULTURES | 221

called electronica, in which participants oftenreach ecstatic states, occasionally with the help ofdrugs.3 Initially, in the late 1980s, when they firstappeared in Britian, raves were undergroundevents, taking place in makeshift and occasionallysecretive venues such as warehouses and outdoorfields. By the mid-1990s analysts could commentthat “the scale is huge and ever increasing”(McRobbie 1994: 168). Fully licensed and often heldin nightclubs, raves now penetrated to the center ofBritish youth culture. Combined attendance atdance events in Great Britain in 1993 reached 50 mil-lion, which was substantially more than at “sport-ing events, cinemas, and all the ‘live’ arts combined”(Thornton 1995: 15). Commercially, the 1993 Britishrave market brought in approximately $2.7 billion(Thornton 1995: 15). In Germany nearly two mil-lion youngsters and post-adolescents united in theso-called “rave nation” of the mid-1990s (Richardand Kruger 1998). Following this initial north Eu-ropean florescence, rave hot spots emerged aroundthe world at Rimini (Italy), Ko Phangan (Thailand),the Balearic Islands (Spain), Goa (India), and coastalMozambique. Though they have never been as pop-ular in the United States as in Great Britain, raveshave been a fixture in San Francisco, Los Angeles,and New York since the early 1990s and some oftechno music’s strongest roots are in Detroit andChicago.

Raves today are remarkably diversified. In fact, inplaces like London where raves have their deepestroots, the rave “scene” has fragmented into many suc-cessor sub-scenes, usually centered on divergent vari-eties of techno music, such as Big Beat or Drum $‘nBass. Raves in the traditional sense––semi-legal and lo-cated in factories and outdoors––are rare. Neverthe-less, rave’s various offshoots all feature what I believeare the critical elements of rave: dance music, long du-ration, and ecstatic experience. As in London, most all-night dance parties in U.S. cities with a long traditionof raves have blended into the regular nightclub sceneand are no longer called raves. However, in smallercities and especially in the Midwest (Champion 1998)

and the Southeast, raves in the traditional sense arealive and well.4

Demographically, most people who attendraves––often called “ravers”––are between the ages of15 and 25, thus making rave a “youth” subculture (seeEpstein 1998). The socioeconomic and ethnic back-grounds of ravers are not nearly so predictable as theirages. For example, early raves in Great Britain at-tracted people of various backgrounds, mostly fromthe working classes (Reynolds 1998a: 64). This sociallymixed tradition continues today in most urbanvenues. At the other extreme, in the midwesternUnited States, for example, most ravers are white andmiddle class. Though slightly more males than fe-males attend raves, the organizers, producers, andmusicians behind the rave scene are predominantlymale (McRobbie 1994: 168, Tomlinson 1998: 198,Reynolds 1998a: 274; Richard and Kruger 1998: 169).

Much of the academic discourse on raves focuseson the rave as a hedonistic, temporary escape fromreality. Writers who support this position argue froma “neoconservative” (Foster 1985: 2), postmodernperspective that emphasizes the prominence of nos-talgia and meaninglessness in modern amusements.Though I find this view of the rave both plausible andinformative, I argue that it is incomplete because it ig-nores the poignant and meaningful spiritual experi-ences that ravers say they get from raves. In this arti-cle I attend to discourses in which ravers claim thatraves are therapeutic. Based on these testimonials,the rave can be conceptualized as a form of healingcomparable both to shamanic, ecstatic healing docu-mented in ethnographies of small-scale non-westernsocieties, and to spiritual experiences in modernwestern subcultures. Our understanding of the rave,previously approached from a cultural studies orcommunications studies perspective, might thereforebenefit from a perspective attuned to anthropologicaldiscussions of shamanism and spirituality.

Notes on Method

The primary source materials for my interpreta-tions come from testimonials posted on the internetfrom 1993 to 1997, e-mails contributed to listservs,

3. For an insider definition, see Brian Behlendorf, “The official alt.raveFAQ,” in www.hyperreal.com/raves/altraveFAQ.html# [Internet]. May 8, 1994 [cited 3 November 1997]. Hyperreal is the largest and oldest internet resource for rave music and culture:.

4. Though similar to early 1990s raves, these late 1990s raveshave many of their own peculiar features, as Champion(1998) elegantly documents.

www.hyperreal.com/raves/altraveFAQ.html#





participant-observation at raves and dance clubs inSan Francisco and the southeastern United States, andinterviews with informants. The use of web-basedsources of information exposes my study to the con-siderations of how Internet or “cyber”-ethnographydiffers from traditional, real-time ethnography(Fischer 1999). The methodological issue most rele-vant to my study is the effect of computer-mediatedcommunication on the construction of identity. Inother words, the major issue to be addressed iswhether people behave differently when correspond-ing on e-mail or posting messages to interactive websites as opposed to when engaged in traditional face-to-face communication.

A number of authors suggest that advanced infor-mation technology can modify behavior in profoundways (Hakken 1999: 44). The anonymity of muchcomputer-mediated communication removes inhibi-tions that govern normal social encounters. For example, social conventions such as courtesy andpoliteness may disappear, leading to what is referredto as “flame wars.” According to Mark Dery (1994: 1),

electronic communication accelerates the escalationof hostilities when tempers flare: disembodied,sometimes pseudonymous combatants tend to feelthat they can hurl insults with impunity.

Gotcher and Kanervo (1997) note that people exhibitanger on-line more often than in person. In manycases the emotions embedded in on-line communi-cation can be difficult to interpret due to the absenceof paralinguistic vocal cues such as stress, pitch, in-tensity, and volume (Dery 1994: 2). Cues that identifyrace, gender, and sex may also be absent in onlinecommunication, allowing for the utopian possibilityof interaction with others not on the potentially dis-criminatory bases of racialized, gendered real-lifeidentities, but on what people choose to write (p. 3).Beyond concealing real-life identity, the anonymityof computer-mediated communication also enablespeople to enact fantasies and create any number offictional identities (Turkle 1995: 12).

These considerations suggest that communicationon line is affected by largely different norms thanthose governing face-to-face communication. How-ever, David Hakken (1999) argues that identity for-mation on-line, though complex, is not qualitativelydifferent from identity formation off-line. More pre-cisely, Hakken avoids distinguishing sharply between

on-line and off-line and instead places computer-mediated communications like e-mail and MultipleUser Domains (MUDs) along a continuum of cyborgic,machine-enhanced communications. Hakken makesthe point that correspondence through e-mail mightbe quantitatively more cyborgic than correspondencethrough a telephone, but both forms of communica-tion are machine-enhanced and not qualitativelydifferent. Most importantly, identity formation in cy-berspace, just like identity formation elsewhere, issemiotic rather than empirical, depends recursivelyon socializations produced through face-to-face ex-perience, occurs within social hierarchies similar tothose found in real-life, and derives from compari-son with others (Hakken 1999: 89–91). Dibbell (1994)has noted that even in those cyberspaces where role-playing and fictional identities are most common,such as MUDs, people soon stop treating the Internetas a vast playpen for their disembodied fantasiesand begin acting with the maturity characteristic ofreal life.

Hakken’s and Dibbell’s skepticism toward therevolutionary differences of computer-mediatedcommunication leads me to think that my web in-formants do not act very different from my face-to-face informants. There is further justification for tak-ing this position. None of the texts that inform mystudy is angry or hostile, as in flame wars. Authorsoften used common names that are likely to be actualnames, which suggests that they were consciouslyaccountable for what they wrote. There were no indi-cations that authors of statements were role-playing,as in MUDs, and there were no patent incentives fordissimulation. Perhaps the form of writing mostanalogous to the sources I consulted is the travel-ogue, or, more appropriately, the “rave-log,” inwhich ravers share their experiences and delights tokindred spirits. Such a form of writing, of course,does not escape all forms of distortion. Testifyingabout the power of raves on a listserv most oftenread by other ravers may lead to partisan hype andexaggeration––a sort of community-reinforced boos-terism. On the other hand, there is no reason tobelieve that such exaggeration would not occur inface-to-face communication.

By subjecting “odd” behavior in our own societyto the same type of anthropological analysis that isoften reserved for religions of Asia, Africa, and else-where, this article joins a growing number of studies






areas of research that can be pursued more deeplyin the future.

Academic and “Native” Perspectives on the Rave: Meaning, Spirituality, Healing

The postmodern approach views the rave as cultureof abandonment, disengagement, and disappear-ance. To Fredric Jameson (1984: 60,64), postmod-ernism is typified by the disappearance of the subject.Lack of subjectivity at raves is said to be reflected inthe style of dance (Rushkoff 1994: 121; McKay 1996:110; Russell 1993:128–129), the relative anonymity ofthe DJ (disc jockey), the nature of the music (Tagg1994; Reynolds 1998a: 254, Melechi 1993: 34), theego-reducing effects of Ecstasy (the most prominentdrug at raves, known chemically as “3, 4 methylene-dioxy-metamphetamine” [MDMA] [Saunders 1995]5),and the occurrence of raves in out-of-the way places attimes when the rest of the population sleeps (Melechi1993: 33–34; Rietveld 1993). Ravers fill the void of sub-jectivity with a collage of fragments, the archetypalform of postmodernist expression (Jameson 1984: 64).Fragmentation is seen in the DJ’s sampling of variouspast and present styles of music (Connor 1997: 207,Reynolds 1998a: 41–45). Such bricolage of older stylesexemplifies Jameson’s idea that, with the decline ofthe high modernist ideology of style, the producers ofculture have nowhere to turn but the past (1984: 65).Informed by this perspective, some argue that the firstraves in London were simulacra of past all-night discoextravaganzas at tourist nightclubs in the BalearicIslands of the Mediterranean (Reynolds 1998a: 58–59;Melechi 1993: 30; Russell 1993: 119). Finally, the raveexperience is said to be hyperreal in the sense that amultiplicity of surfaces replaces singularity of depth(Jameson 1984: 62). Due to the sensory overload ofthrobbing music, exotic lighting, exhaustive dance,and sensation-stimulating drugs, the rave becomes amega-surface that gratifies a relentless and intensedesire for pleasure.

Reynolds (1998b: 90), an authoritative rave jour-nalist, summarizes the postmodern interpretationelegantly: rave culture is “geared towards fascination

that give serious treatment to experiences of heal-ing and empowerment that anthropologists oncedeemed “inauthentic.” After confronting the “intru-sion” of Western mass culture into “authentic” and“exotic” traditions of shamanism in coastal Peru,Donald Joralemon (1990: 112) stumbled upon anthro-pology’s stubborn disposition to “celebrate theexotic and disparage the familiar.” As Joralemon ex-plains, anthropologists hesitate to apply to what isculturally nearest to them the same respectful yet de-tached perspective that they habitually reserve forthe culturally distant. For example, when metaphorsof healing are embedded in oral traditions of geo-graphically localized cultures, they are seen as legiti-mate, yet when they come from diffuse, literate andeconomically empowered Westerners they are seenas ridiculous “psychobabble” (Joralemon 1990). Inthis article, I join Joralemon and others (Brown 1997;Danforth 1989) in challenging this assumption. Re-gardless of the authenticity of shamanic idioms usedby Westerners, statements about healing at raves de-serve serious study. As Joralemon points out, anthro-pologists who study modern “spiritual healing,”rather then pretending superiority and ignoring it al-together, might stand to gain unforeseen insight onbehavioral processes.

Approaching the rave with respectful detach-ment, however, does not preclude a critical analysis.When Michael Brown announced his intent toresearch New Age channels, his colleagues discour-aged him from what they thought would be a “con-taminating” research project, fearing that he would“go native” (1997: x). The solution, however, doesnot seem to be to avoid studying New Age channels,as Brown’s colleagues implied, but to engage themin the hope of fashioning a robust cultural critique(Marcus and Fisher 1986). Brown’s ethnography aswell as other ethnographies, like that of LoringDanforth (1989), in which Greek firewalkers are com-pared to New Age firewalkers in the United States,show that ”unusual” western practices can be suc-cessfully and critically engaged by anthropolo-gists. The anthropology of raves is not yet thor-ough enough to formulate a “robust” culturalcritique. Toward this end, however, I include briefcomparisons between spiritual healing at raveswith similar experiences among fundamentalistChristians, Grateful Dead fanatics, New Age chan-nels, and other groups. Such lateral moves point to

5. See also Mike Brown, “Techno Music and Raves FAQ,” inhttp://www.hyperreal.com/-mike/pub/altraveFAQ.html[Internet]. 1 December 1995 [cited 7 November 1996].

http://www.hyperreal.com/-mike/pub/altraveFAQ.html




rather than meaning, sensation rather than sensibility;creating an appetite for impossible states of hyper-simulation.” I find the postmodern approach defi-cient precisely because it fails to acknowledge mean-ing. Baudrillard believes that in the postmodernworld of simulacra, meaning is exterminated (1988:10): the joy of Disneyland, raves, and similar amuse-ments lies not in their intellectual stimulation, but intheir ability to satisfy, on a purely sensory level, ourvoracious appetite for surfaces. Once the surfacesare rendered meaningless, interpretation stops. Asa result, such interpretations are not very deep(Bruner 1994) and certainly not “thick” (Geertz 1973).The studies cited above do not consider the complexways in which symbols and surfaces connect, inter-sect, and/or conflict with the praxis of the real humanbeings who construct and consume them. Their livesare certainly not meaningless, yet those who writeabout the rave rarely solicit the voices and experi-ences of people who actually go to raves.

As an exemplar of the idea that the rave is indeeda very meaningful experience to many of those whoattend, I quote a raver named Megan:

The rave is my church. It is a sritual to perform. I hold it sacred to my perpetuality . . . we in the rave are acongregation––it is up to us to help each other, to help people reach heaven. . . . After every rave, I walkout having seen my soul and its place in eternity.6

Megan’s statement exemplifies the religiousity of therave. The analogy between rave and religion manifestsitself at various sites. In Nashville a club known as theChurch hosted raves by the name of “Friday NightMass.” Thornton (1995: 90) reports on a rave in GreatBritain that was held inside a church; the DJs operatedfrom the altar. In an introduction to rave culture BrianBehlendorf refers to the DJ as “high priest.”7 Saunders’London informants refer to the drug Ecstasy as theholy sacrament (Saunders 1995). One raver, comment-ing on a rave in Orlando, said that the DJ did not justmake him boogey, he made him “see God.”8

Noticing the similarities between raves andChristian spirituality, Matthew Fox and Chris Brain,sponsored by the Episcopal church in Sheffield, UK,have fused traditional services with raves in an effortto increase youth church membership (Reynolds1998a: 242). Brain’s services, known colloquially as“Planetary Mass,” feature ambient house music,nightclub-style lighting, and video screens withcomputer generated graphics.9 In the United States asimilar hybrid ceremony, also called Planetary Mass,takes place in the Grace Cathedral, San Francisco(p. 316).

Robin Green and other ravers disapprove of orga-nized religion’s attempts to co-opt the rave experi-ence. According to Green,

raves should influence people metaphysicallyoutside of the religious sphere. In actual effect, thisis the creation of a . . . religion without theologicalfoundation or unified expression.10

Another raver claimed

[On Sunday morning after the rave] I see peopleheaded off to church dressed in their Sunday bestand I just have to smile because I know that lastnight on the dance floor I felt closer to God thantheir church with all its doctrines and doublestandards will ever bring them.11

Rave is thus seen by some as a more “direct” form ofspirituality than organized religion.

The ravers’ own explanation of why they inter-pret their experiences in spiritual terms centersaround the concept of “technoshamanism.” Theterm was coined by Fraser Clark, who helped orga-nize two prominent London dance clubs, UFO andMegatripolis, and edited Evolution, an under-ground magazine focusing on the culture of housemusic in London (Rushkoff 1994: 121). Technoshaman-ism refers to the DJ’s role as “harmonic navigator,”“in charge of the group mood/mind.” The DJ“senses when it’s time to lift the mood, take it down,etc., just as the shaman did in the good ol’ tribal


6. Megan, “Coup d’Academe.html,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/ [internet]. [cited 16 November 1997].7. Brian Behlendorf, “The official alt.raveFAQ,” in www.hyperreal.com/raves/altraveFAQ.html# [Internet]. 8 May1994 [cited 3 November 1997].8. Anonymous, “DJ_ Journeys.html,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet]. 29 February 1996[cited 2 December 1997].

9. Bob, “Rave_Mass.html,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/culture [Internet]. 28 November 1955 [cited10 December 1997].10. Robin Green, No title. In www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/history [Internet]. [cited 4 January 1998].11. “Beautiful_Visions.html,” in www.hyperreal.org/spirit/vibes [Internet]. [cited 17 November 1997].

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days.”12 In other words, through a tapestry of mind-bending music, the DJ is said to take the dancers onan overnight journey, with one finger on the pulse ofthe adventure and the other on the turntables13

(Rushkoff 1994: 123; Thornton 1995: 65; McKay1996: 111). Though such a description of the tech-noshaman does not match all of Eliade’s criteria forthe definition of shamanism (the technoshaman, forexample does not appear to control “helper spir-its”), the DJ’s mastery of the techniques of ecstasyqualify him/her as a shaman in the more generalsense of Eliade’s definition (Eliade 1964: 4–6).

With the help of the DJ’s ecstatic techniques,ravers like Edward Lantz claim to enter “areas ofconsciousness not necessarily related to everyday‘real’ world experiences.”14 Though Ecstasy enablesaltered states of consciousness, drugs are not neces-sary (Reynolds 1998a: 9). In this sense, raves are sim-ilar to the trance dances of the Dobe Ju/’hoansi,which do not involve any mind-altering substances.In both cases, altered states of consciousness arestimulated by a combination of upbeat rhythmicdrumming, exhaustive all night dancing, and flicker-ing light (Lee 1967; Katz 1982). One raver remarkedthat techno music itself (especially genres like Goaand the suitably named “trance”) is enough to causean ecstatic experience without even dancing: “It’sthe only music that lifts you out of your body with-out putting something down your throat first.”15 Ac-cording to another raver, techno music returns toyou “the human ability to dream while awake.”16

The experiences recorded by ravers in ecstasy, specif-ically flying, also recall shamanic experiences docu-mented ethnographically. In one particular trip San

Francisco promoter Mark Heley claims to have vis-ited the dead and transformed into a puma and thenan eagle (Rushkoff 1994: 140), recalling the type ofperegrinations that shamans all over the world expe-rience as part of initiation (Eliade 1964).

Much more than a fantasy simulacrum, the al-tered states of consciousness that are part of the tech-noshamanistic journey are said to heal: according toan anonymous raver, “Our means of healing andgrowth is ritual celebration, where we gather once ina while to expand our consciousness and celebratelife with rhythm and dance.”17 Ravers most often at-test to healing of a psychological sort, as the abovequote on consciousness expansion implies. The tech-noshamanistic journey is said to bring calm: “Afterthe trip, when we finally arrive back home, the innerpeace and contentment we so deeply desired settlesour restlessness.”18 Raves restore “general feelings ofhappiness and grooviness . . . raving brings me upwhen I’m down.”19 Themes of self-empowerment arealso common in ravers’ reflections on their journeys:according to raver Sean Case, “The goal of the technojourney is for people to see themselves without thecrushing ego, to know the possibilities of the self.”20

It is through dance that I have found transcendence.Music has taught me to fly using wings I neverknew I had. It is through music and dance that mysoul is free to soar amongst the heavens . . . allowinga clearer vision of the world that I am creating.21

Because the rave experience is so often described inreligious and spiritual terms, and because the type ofhealing is of the spirit as opposed to the body, I referto the type of healing discussed above as “spiritualhealing.”

12. Fraser Clark, “Technoshamanism_Definitions.html,”in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet]. 24 May 1995 [cited 8 December 1997].13. Brian Behlendorf, “The official alt.raveFAQ,” inwww.hyperreal.com/raves/altraveFAQ.html# [Internet]. 8 May 1994 [cited 3 November 1997], and Anonymous,“Perfect_Party.html,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/hopeful [Internet]. [cited 16 November 1997].14. Edward Lantz, “Otherworlds_Experience,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet]. [Cited 2 December 1997].15. Zazgooeya, “Why ‘Goa Trance?’” in www.thirdeye.org.uk/trip/why.html [Internet]. [cited 8 November 1997].16. Jake Barnes, “Why ‘Goa Trance?’” in www.thirdeye.org.uk/trip/why.html [Internet]. [cited 24 October 1997].

17. [email protected], “Goa trance,” in www.hyperrreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet]. 16 May 1993 [cited 22 November 1997].18. [email protected], “Goa trance,” in www.hyperrreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet]. 16 May 1993 [cited 22 November 1997].19. Noah Raford, “Dance_for_tomorrow.html,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/hopeful [Internet]. [cited 11 January 1998].20. Sean Casey, “Techno_and raving.html,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet].28 December 1994 [cited 10 December 1997].21. Glenn Fajardo, “Dance_to_Transcendance.html,” inwww.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/hopeful [Internet]. 15 February 1997 [cited 11 January 1998].

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Raver testimony of “spiritual healing” also bearsa family resemblance to experiences of evangelicalconversion. There is a long history of evangelicalconversion in North America, of which the exem-plary form appeared in the British colonies duringthe Great Awakening of the 1740s. The testimony ofNathan Cole of Connecticut serves as an early exam-ple of Great Awakening conversions (Cole 1970).After hearing itinerant preacher George Whitefield,Cole felt doomed to Hell and endured two years ofmisery and inner turmoil. Finally, God appeared toCole, precipitating an unearthly disembodiment:“Now while my soul was viewing God, my fleshypart was working imaginations and saw manythings which I will omit to tell.” After the moment ofconversion, Cole writes, “My heart and soul werefilled as full as they could hold with joy and sorrow:now I perfectly felt truth . . . and all the air was love.”Other accounts of conversion show that those in cri-sis were not as lonely as Cole, receiving supportfrom small, like-minded congregations (Calhoon1994). Though evangelical conversion since the eigh-teenth century has become much more peripheraland, according to Brushman (1970: xi), “commonlydisdained,” the structure of conversion remains ap-proximately the same. Ethnographers of southernBaptist communities Susan Harding (1987) andCarol Greenhouse (1986) note that, similar to Cole’scrisis, a period of questioning accompanied by asense of being “lost” often precedes the conversion.Conversion, which may take years or minutes, re-places emptiness with a therapeutic sense of com-fort, meaning, and purpose.

Three aspects of Evangelical conversions likethat of Cole resemble raver testimony: 1) raw, per-sonal emotions of a spiritual nature, unstructuredby the norms of the church; 2) out-of-body experi-ence, sometimes involving hallucinations that bringthe convert close to God; and 3) healing and mentalhygiene experienced after conversion. Despite suchresemblances there are two major differences be-tween spiritual healing at raves and evangelicalconversion. The first of these differences has to dowith context. Despite the raw, personal emotion as-sociated with evangelical healing, the conversiontakes place in an institutionalized context. In theGreat Awakening a clergy devoted to the spiritualrevival’s advancement placed conversion in acommanding intellectual and theological structure

(Brushman 1970: 67). In Baptist communities of the1980s conversion was contextualized through hell-fire-and-brimstone preaching (Harding 1987) andclose attention to the scripture (Greenhouse 1987: 75).Furthermore, fundamentalists of the 1980s werepart of a community that, by giving witness ofGod’s grace to the unconverted, provided those incrisis with a normalizing structure. As I will demon-strate below, raves do have a doctrine, codified as“Peace, Love, Unity, Respect” (PLUR) which is rein-forced by exemplary behavior at raves and testimo-nial witnessing on the Internet. Nevertheless, theinstitutional context of rave spirituality is not nearlyas serious, perhaps because eternal salvation is not atstake. PLUR is a four-word slogan not nearly so welldeveloped or thorough, as evangelical theology.Also, passive witnesses on the Internet cannot com-pare to ponderous, hell-fire-and-brimstone preach-ing nor the extended, face-to-face witnessing thatcharacterizes evangelism.

The second difference has to do with the processof transformation. For evangelical Christians, a bur-densome period of guilt and despair, characterizedwith deep intellectual questioning, precedes salva-tion and transformation and is triggered by a crisis.Though disillusionment with society often precedesthe positive spiritual transformation at a rave, theprocess of transformation, which I will discussbelow, is usually neither painful nor triggered bypersonal crisis. Also, conversion is such an impor-tant milestone for evangelicals that it is called a sec-ond birth. Though rave experiences are remarkable,they occur frequently and are not as biographicallysalient as birth itself.

Physiological and Symbolic Processes of Healing

The previous section provided native testimony ontechnoshamanism and how the technoshamanisticvoyage releases anxieties, builds self-empowerment,and brings peace and contentment. In this section Idiscuss physiological and symbolic processes that,though not described by ravers themselves, mightalso contribute to the “spiritual healing” that raversclaim to undergo.

Flashing lights, dancing, and repetitive percus-sion, each of which are prominent features of therave, may physiologically produce altered states of






consciousness. Walter and Walter (1949: 63) note thatrhythmic light can cause visual sensations (color,pattern, or movement) unrelated to the stimulus,non-visual sensations of kinaesthetic (swaying, spin-ning, jumping, vertigo) and cutaneous (prickling,tingling) varieties, emotional and physiological experiences (fear, anger, disgust, confusion, fatigue,pleasure), hallucinations, epileptic seizures and“clinical psychopathic states.” Lights that flash to therhythm of the music and other elaborate visual ef-fects, such as spinning lasers and wall projections offractals, are frequent components of raves in bothareas of my participant observation.

Dancing is an important physiological factorbecause it is a motor activity. Extended rhythmicdancing and bodily movement brings on physicalexhaustion, vertigo, hyperventilation, and otherphysiological conditions that may alter consciousness(Lee 1967: 33, Rouget 1985: 118). Csikszentmihalyi(1975: 43) argues that dancing and other forms of playare intrinsically stimulating because they produce aholistic sensation of total involvement––a sensationthat he calls “flow.” Dance as flow merges the act withthe awareness of the act, producing self-forgetfulness,a loss of self-consciousness, transcendance of indi-viduality, and fusion with the world (p. 49).

With regard to repetitive percussion, AndrewNeher argues that trance states and unusual behav-ior observed ethnographically in ceremonies involv-ing drums result primarily from the effects of rhyth-mic drumming on the central nervous system. Neherfound observations from laboratory studies on theeffects of rhythmic stimulation and accounts of stim-ulation from anthropological drum ceremonies andfound that the responses, which included unusualperceptions and hallucinations, were comparable.Neher believes that stimulation is the result of audi-tory driving: that the sensory and motor areas of thebrain not normally affected are activated through thestimulation of the sensory area being stimulated—inthis case the ear. Neher notes that drums are mostsuccessful as auditory stimulants because the soundof the drum contains many frequencies. Because“different sound frequencies are transmitted alongdifferent nerve pathways in the brain,” the sound ofa drum should stimulate a larger area in the brain.Furthermore, drum beats with main rhythms accom-panied by slightly different reinforcing rhythms pro-duce the strongest responses. Under Neher’s criteria,

techno music would be extremely successful in pro-moting auditory driving because percussion is amajor feature of techno and because techno trackshave at least three complementary rhythms.22 Intheir own testimonies ravers state that music is a keyto their journey.

Michael Harner (1990: 50–51) has seized uponNeher’s study to support his claim that the drumand the rattle are the basic tool for evoking andmaintaining altered states of consciousness. Otherscholars question the universality of Neher’s results.Gibert Rouget (1985), who reviewed an encyclopedicrange of ethnographically documented ceremoniesinvolving spirit possession, found that drums are notalways used to initiate altered states of conscious-ness. This and the common observation that twopeople react very differently to the same music at thesame event within the same culture lead Rouget toconclude that music does not have any straightfor-ward physiological affect on consciousness. Rougetdoes not deny the importance of music; he simplycautions us not to generalize its specific effects. Inconsidering Rouget’s critique, it is important to re-member that spirit possession is a specific alteredstate of consciousness not described by ravers. Never-theless, none of the aspects discussed above––flashinglight, dancing, music––is a necessary condition foraltered states of consciousness. However, when com-bined, as at a rave, they are more likely to have aneffect: “rhythmic stimulation in more than one sen-sory mode aids the response” (Neher 1962: 155).

The physiological interpretation does not explainthe rave as a social event. If an altered state of con-sciousness is the only prerequisite to “spiritual heal-ing,” why do young people go to the trouble ofattending raves when they could attain an ecstaticstate more easily by staying at home and takingdrugs? To begin to understand how raves might“heal”––how they create a framework for therapeu-tic spiritual transformations––requires close atten-tion to the symbols surrounding the rave andembellishing ravers’ descriptions of their voyages.Much of the symbolism has to do with idealized ver-sions of small scale “primitive communities.” One

22. Usually, snare drum, base drum, cymbal, and oftenkeyboard and synthetic bass each contribute separate butaligned rhythms. Bass drum usually supplies the mainrhythm.




rave website is decorated with pictures of peoplewearing loincloths, headdresses, and bodypaint, andholding spears.23 The official Ibiza rave website iscluttered with images of Native American masks.24

Music is often described as “tribal,” and one genre ofrave music is called “jungle.” At some raves, likethose sponsored by the New Moon collective or theGateway collective, pagan altars are set up, sacredimages from “primitive” cultures decorate thewalls, and rituals of cleansing are performed overthe turntables and the dance floor.25

A second theme at raves is futurism. RenegadeRecords, which feature drum ’n bass producers Fu-ture Forces, claims to market “future beats for futurepeople.” Eklectic, a weekly San Francisco drum ’nbass club, subtitles itself “San Francisco Futurism,”and decorates its fliers with what its organizers call“neo-Tokyo” fashion: women enhanced with space-age graffiti. The name of the DJ/producer/artist re-sponsible for the neo-Tokyo style, UFO!, highlights aprevalent motif of futurism—outer space. Amongthe most common outer space icons, which rangefrom planets to fantasy space ships to actual satellitesand satellite dishes, is the friendly extra-terrestrial.Anthropomorphic, neotonized, with massive fore-head and long, slender eyes angled together in “V”formation, this friendly martian icon appears in arange of places—T-shirts, fliers, music videos, albumcover art—and is the symbol of drum ’n bass recordlabel Liquid Sky. The rave scene is also futuristic inthat it embraces advanced technology. Production oftechno music is an almost entirely digital affair, re-quiring thousands of dollars of synthesizers, sam-plers, mixers, and computers. It is no coincidencethat the wide variety of rave musics are referred tocollectively as “techno” or “electronica.” Ravers arealso savvy Internet users who design websites, whoengineer webcasts of live events, and whose atten-tions have been targeted directly by Internet firmssuch as Gomo mail and Eradio. Futurism also shows

in the preference for sans seriph, machine-like fontsand abstract, geometric, digital imagery.

The juxtaposition of primitives and martiansappears to exemplify the random, superficial playof postmodern cultural expression. However, Iargue that the predominance of these two genres ofsymbolism—future and primitive—is neither randomnor meaningless. Both genres share a sense of dis-tance from and disdain for the present age and revealan attraction to alternative possibilities. Fondness fordistant societies is in fact an explicit feature of ravediscourse. Raver Jason Parsons yearns for “a mem-ory of a time before cement cages and aloof societies;a humanity that was part of the world, not apartfrom it.”26 For raver Chris Newhard the journey in-volves reuniting with “the ancestors.”27 For others,the rave is about going back to ancient history(Rushkoff 1994: 120). According to raver Sean Casey,

techno [music] brings us back to our roots . . . [it]sings to a very visceral ancient part of us deep downinside. It draws from the “reptilian” brain, past ouregos and beckons us to dance with abandon.28

For just about everybody, the return to tribal roots ischaracterized by total unity and harmony, a “vibe”of collectivization.

Together, idealization of the past and interest in thefuture creates the incendiary combination of 1) what isseen as a model society (the past), and 2) the prospectof such a society’s reenactment (the future). This com-bination recalls what Eliade (1960) has termed the“myth of eternal return”: the nostalgic desire to re-turn to an original, primordial time and place—aparadise. The blend of characteristics that informsthe ravers’ conception of the primitive experience—the destination of the technoshamanistic voyage—resembles many features of this primordial paradise.A paradise is a timeless land of perfect and total joy,a pre-sexual age of innocence where there is no socialdiscord, no differentiation between the self and


23. Glenn Fajardo, “Dance_to_Transcendance.htm,” inwww.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/hopeful [Internet]. 15 February 1997 [cited 11 January 1998].24. See the Ibiza website at www.the-tribe.com/main.html[Internet]. [cited 7 November 1997].25. Ann, “The New Moon Altar,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/newmoon/altar [Internet]. August 1997 [cited 22 October 1997].

26. Jason Parsons, “Vibe.Tribe.html,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/hopeful [Internet]. 23 August 1996 [cited4 January 1997].27. Niehls Mayer, “Burning Man 95-Nevada.html,” inwww.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/testimonials [Internet].27 September 1995 [cited 17 November 1997].28. Sean Casey, “Techno_and_raving.htm,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet].28 December 1994 [cited 10 December 1997].



www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/testimonials


www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/testimonials


www.the-tribe.com/main.html

www.hyperreal.org/raves/newmoon/altar

www.hyperreal.org/raves/newmoon/altar





other.29 There is little doubt that raves are joyful, evenhyperjoyful. Raves are timeless in the sense that theyare long and that they occur in the interstices—the“carnivalesque inversion” (Reynolds 1998a: 66)—ofnormal time, in that dark void where most of the pop-ulation is asleep. Ravers describe how time stops.30

Perhaps the most important element of the raver’sparadise is non-differentiation. Non-differentiation,unity, solidarity, and similar themes figure promi-nently in raver discourse. Explaining Unity, the thirdpillar of the rave motto PLUR (Peace Love UnityRespect), the mission statement of Cloudfactory, aSan Francisco rave collective, states that

we all share a lot in common, regardless of age,gender, race, [sexual] orientation, whatevah. We allneed other people. Though we may have differences,we all arise from the same source.31

According to raver Mike Brown, you could havedance music and laser lighting, but it is not a raveunless it is unified.32 In short, “We rave becauseboundaries must be broken.”33

What matters is the inclusive gestures thatrecognize the groove across cultures, whethertechnologically literate or aboriginal.34

Further statements about inclusiveness at ravesindicate that transcendence of individual identity

brings ravers to a therapeutic, non-differentiatedstate of being, in unity with the gods and the world.

Once purified, you can join in the dance of thecelestial beings within the kingdom of the ultimateand enjoy the freedom of existing anywhere.35

According to raver Charlene Ma, if a rave is success-ful, it all “melds into one cosmic soup and every-thing is one and you can’t separate the music or themoves or which came first.”36 Drawing on quantumphysics, an anonymous raver states that “the danc-ing gives a sense of oneness as we all become part ofthe same uncertainty wave equation.”37 Raver AliceBraley claims that

The effect is to align the physical, mental, andemotional bodies with the oneness of All That Is.This results in a downflow of force from above . . .[which] causes vivification and definiteillumination.38

Rushkoff (1994: 120) writes enthusiastically thatravers are “phase locked”: by being on the samedrugs, on the same nocturnal schedule, and underthe same music, they have reached complete syn-chronicity. Organic and familial metaphors are alsoused to express the sense of unity and reunification.The group of friends one makes at a rave is often re-ferred to as a family.39 To quote raver Jason Page,

Throw yourself in the winds of transformation andsow the seeds for a new world—one where thefamily is together again, when people respect andcare for each other as a community—an organism.

The sense of unity that ravers claim to attain re-sembles communitas (Turner 1967: 96): Raves blend

29. The rave might even compare to the primordial state ofbeing in the womb, where maturity, individuation, andseparation have not yet occurred. The rave also matchesthe sensory experience of being in the womb. Raves aredark, humid (due to mist makers), and warm (due tosweating dancers), while the dance beat replicates themother’s heartbeat.30. Jason Parsons, “Vibe.Tribe.html,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/hopeful [Internet]. 23 August 1996 [cited4 January 1997].31. Brad Finley. 1995. “We are all connected,” in www.cloudfactory.org [Internet]. 12 December 1995 [cited 2 December 1997].32. Mike Brown. “Techno Music and Raves FAQ,” inhttp://www.hyperreal.com/~mike/pub/altraveFAQ.html[Internet]. 1 December 1995 [cited 7 November 1996].33. Salami and Komotion International, “Why you arehere,” in www.couldfactory.org [Internet]. 12 December1995 [cited 2 December 1997].34. A. Lopez. 1994. “Techno_Subculture.html, in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet]. 27 December 1994 [cited 22 October 1997].

35. [email protected]. 1993. “Goa trance,” inwww.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet]. 16 May 1993 [cited 22 November 1997].36. Charlene Ma, “Telepathic message,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet]. 19 September 1996 [cited 3 November 1997].37. Lee, “Physics_and_raving.html,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet]. 12 May 1995[cited 10 December 1997].38. Alice Braley, “House Music and Planetary Healing,” inwww.cloudfactory.org [Internet]. 12 December 1995 [cited2 December 1997].39. Jason Page, Untitled, in DCRaves listserv [Listserv]. 17 November 1997 [cited 13 November 1997]. Available [email protected].

http://www.hyperreal.com/~mike/pub/altraveFAQ.html








www.cloudfactory.org

www.couldfactory.org








homogeneity and comradeship in a moment in andout of time. Just as Turner wrote that communitasfeeds the spirit, one raver claimed that raves nurturethe soul.40 The feeding of the spirit is what mightmake the rave so therapeutic. By crossing over into acommunitas state, rave culture dissipates the tensionof entering a world of wage slavery, underemploy-ment, and shrinking opportunity. Thus, by manipu-lating symbols of tribalism, ravers enter communitaswhere they reaffirm what they say the world oughtto be—liberation, freedom, union, communion, har-mony, warmth, peace, love, family, euphoria, bliss,happiness, godliness, and health. They confront withrenewed vigor what they say the world actually is—violence, fear, hatred, racism, poverty, injustice,hunger, greed, performance, achievement, competi-tion, enterprise, judgment, division, comparison,differentiation, distinction, distraction, isolation,impotence, and alienation.41 In other words, therave, like most “authentic” rituals, successfully uni-fies the “ought” and the “is” through symbols andexperience.

Communitas cannot be a permanent state, how-ever, because structure and social differentiation arenecessary to maintain the physical body. Without theallocation of roles and resources, the division of labor,the organized, restrained, rational considerationsnecessary to meet daily needs would not be met.(Turner 1967, cited by Myerhoff 1974: 246). This mayexplain why few permanent raver communities exist,despite the abundant chatter about forming a newworld (see below). One raver/DJ even recognizes theinevitability of the return to structure: “raves aregood because they don’t happen all the time.”42

To complete the description and explanation ofrave transformation, I would like to contrast theexperiences described above with the very similarphenomenon of group consciousness induced atGrateful Dead concerts. Citing Victor Turner, RobertSardiello (1994: 129–131) states that Grateful Deadconcerts are secular rituals which “symbolically sep-arate individuals in both space and time from their

ordinary social lives.” Both Deadheads (loyal fans ofthe Grateful Dead) and ravers refer to their events asescapes from reality. According to Anthony Pearson(1987: 419),

large numbers of Deadheads report a psychicconnection with the band, often reportingJungianlike synchronicities and other esotericphenomena in the concert setting.

The altered states of consciousness recounted byDeadheads, referred to alternatively as hypnosis andcatharsis, seem quite similar to transformations de-scribed by ravers. Grateful Dead drummer MickeyHart acknowledges these ecstatic states induced atconcerts, stating “we’ve got transformation going onhere” (quoted in Pearson 1987: 419).

Pearson notes that drug use is high at GratefulDead concerts, but, as I argue with regard to similardrugs at raves, Pearson (p. 426) argues that drug usecannot be simply viewed as the cause of the cognitiveexperiences reported by Deadheads. Rather, he be-lieves that the Grateful Dead concert experience istriggered by feelings of psychic connection betweenband and audience (see also Sardiello 1994: 128).Audience members often feel that the band played aparticular song because of the way it relates to a spe-cific problem or situation in their lives. Or, a poignantGrateful Dead lyric may simultaneously coincidewith a fan’s own, unrelated thought, causing the fanto assume a causal connection between the two. Theconnection between Deadhead and band recalls theshamanic connection between raver and DJ. Sardiello(pp. 124–126) adds a symbolic interpretation toPearson’s psychic explanation. Omnipresent sym-bols such as tie-dyed T-shirts and colorful icons ofskeletons, roses, and dancing bears work to unify theaudience and create a shared text with mythical andphilosophical meaning. Though neither Sardiello norPearson discusses the physiological mechanisms Ipropose for altered states of consciousness amongravers, the symbolic aspects and ritual nature ofGrateful Dead concerts closely resemble raves andproduce a similar ethos of communality.

Subcultural Capital

It is difficult to accept ravers’ statements aboutnon-differentiation, unity, and oneness because acertain “political economy” underlies the rave scene.


40. [email protected]. “Goa trance,” in www.hyperrreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet]. 16 May 1993 [cited 22 November 1997].41. All of these terms appear in raver characterizations ofthe two worlds.42. Interview conducted November 1997.







Thornton (1995) points out in her ethnography ofclub cultures that, despite the mantras of unity andcollectivity, there is noticeable selectivity and exclu-sivity in the rave scene, based on a scale of hipness.Unable to compete with adults for occupational sta-tus, but in many cases still supported by parents,young ravers derive self esteem by competing forwhat Thornton calls subcultural capital, a conceptfounded in Bourdieu’s notions of cultural and sym-bolic capital (Bourdieu 1977, 1984). Hierarchies ofprestige and standards of authenticity develop basedon familiarity with the latest music, the latest slang,the latest fashions (Appadurai 1986: 44–45). Thosewho make a living from subcultures—connoisseursof rave authenticity such as club owners, promoters,and professional DJs—must uphold such hierarchiesof subcultural capital in order to be successful. Forexample, to attract the best crowd, a club ownermust be selective about which DJs can perform andwho can enter the club (Thornton 1995: 102–105).The resulting exclusivity conflicts with the languageof unity. Even London’s first raves, held at the clubShoom, were restricted to a small clique (includingsome celebrities), despite an ethos of love, peace, andunity (Reynolds 1998a: 61). Though Thornton’s re-search might not apply to the many raves organizedoutside the club scene and its selective door policies,it certainly demonstrates the presence of differenceand distinction within the rave.

This contradiction between the egalitarian unityclaimed by ravers and the hierarchical divisions doc-umented by Thornton can be reconciled by concep-tualizing the rave as a temporal process. I believethat the rave process can be understood as a sort ofjourney, a term which ravers also use to characterizetheir events. The distinctions of hipness that Thorn-ton observes best characterize the behavior behindthe organization of a rave—when decisions are madeas to which DJs are given the chance to spin, whogets on the guest list of a club, or who gets invited tosecretive events—and possibly at the beginning ofraves—when bouncers might be selective about whothey let into a club and when egos may interfere withthe proper vibe of Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect(PLUR). To repeat, many of these distinctions onlypertain to raves held in nightclubs. After these dis-tinctions have been made and the technoshamanisticjourney progresses, remaining differences are slowlyeliminated through dance, drugs, and other rituals

that transform structures of subcultural capital intoantistructure. Specifically, egos can be shed and inhi-bitions erased by MDMA, which is renowned as aharmony inducing drug (Saunders 1995; McRobbie1995; Redhead 1993). Also, ravers suggest that danc-ing to trance music can bind communities together.43

Similarly, Rietveld states that you can lose yourselfin “the anonymity of fellow ravers and in blindingmusic” (1993: 69). Dance, as a technique of ecstasy,becomes a portal to transformation.

Maintaining the hypothesis that the rave experi-ence is much like Eliade’s myth of the eternal return,I believe that the rave journey can be fruitfully com-pared with a classic journey in the anthropologicalliterature. The pilgrimage to Wirikuta made by theHuichol of Mexico is interpreted by Barbara Myerhoff(1974) as an enactment of Eliade’s myth. On theirjourneys the Huichol and the ravers become onewith the world. Barriers between young and old,male and female, and leader and follower are bro-ken. A specific Huichol ritual for achieving onenessin which pilgrims connect with each other by eachtying a knot on a string and then burning the stringhas a parallel in a ritual performed at raves spon-sored by the New Moon collective and Gateway col-lective. At these raves the organizers set up an altaron the dance floor and each raver contributes an itemto the altar. The altar becomes an objectification ofthe community and in contributing to the altar, theraver disconnects from the self and connects to thewhole. Also, Wirikuta is a primordial place of originsthat is very similar to the primitive tribal village de-scribed by ravers. Both destinations are viewed asplaces where ancestors dwell and places of originsfrom which human history has diverged. In the caseof the Huichol the distinction between human anddivine is erased. The rave scene also contains refer-ences to identity with gods: the DJ is referred to asgod44 and ravers can become gods, as in the Keokitrack “Caterpillar,”45 the name of which appropriately

43. Erich Schneider, “Technoshamanism_Definitions.html:Why don’t we start with a definition,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet]. 24 May 1995[cited 8 December 1997].44. See liner notes in Doc Martin. 1994. UrbMix Volume 1:Flammable Liquid. Planet Earth compact disk P50105-2.45. Superstar DJ Keoki. 1995. Caterpillar. Moonshine Musiccompact disk MM 88419.






signifies the possibility of metamorphosis. Also,ravers claim to see the gods at the end of their journeyand come closer to the gods than any other worldlyexperience could bring them. Finally, the journey tothe lost homeland is said to bring positive spiritualtransformations in both groups. Like those who re-turn from raves with positive spiritual transforma-tions, Huichol who endure the peyote hunt achieveunity and community, their highest religious goal,and are reassured through visions (Myerhoff 1974)that the world is a happy place. According to oneraver, the “project” of the rave journey is also to vi-sualize a world whose people are happy andhealthy.46 In sum, both ravers and the Huichol re-ceive hopeful visions47 of why life is good in themidst of disjointed times.

The Rave in Context

The rave subculture also resembles other NorthAmerican subcultures that emphasize spiritual heal-ing and alternative spirituality, such as followers ofNew Age Channels, the Rainbow People, and cultslike the Divine Light Mission. A major point of so-cial or academic commentary on therapeutic activ-ities like channeling and attending raves is the dynamic between individual healing and social im-provement. The consciousness movement, of whichchanneling is one of the most controversial off-shoots, is said to have arisen “out of a pervasive dis-satisfaction with the quality of personal relations”(Lasch 1979: 27). An individualist and privatistmovement emphasizing personal improvement, theconsciousness movement “advises people not tomake too large an investment in love and friendship,to avoid excessive dependence on others” (p. 27).Channels, who use altered states of consciousness tocontact spirits or to “experience spiritual energyfrom other times and dimensions” (Brown 1997: viii),are also intensely individualistic, sharing a deep mis-trust of churches and society as a whole (p. 123).Channels, like the ravers quoted above, feel that

their spirituality is more authentic than the spiritu-ality of organized religion. However, the channels’resistance to community organizations exists onlyon a local, pragmatic level. The concept of a globalcommunity, as abstract world universal enough totranscend race, class, and nationality, is a goal towardwhich many channels claim passionate commitment(p. 124). The Internet has become the primary locusfor such community building among channels, andthe sense of togetherness fostered by the net isdeeply felt (p. 125). However, Brown adds a patentcritique of this form of virtual community: channelsdo not “walk their talk.” They fail to address any ofthe practical, day-to-day concerns of an actual com-munity, such as who will supply water, run hospi-tals, capture criminals, and collect garbage.

Just like new age channels, many ravers appear tobe committed to a global village blind to age, race,sex, and class. One raver desires “that through therave ritual we can use technology to bring the peopleof the world together in peace by means of dance.”48

According to raver Robert Jesse, “during our sharedmoments of ecstatic joy, we explore who we are andwe advance visions of our harmonious planet.”49 De-spite the rhetoric of communal harmony, ravers, likechannels, do not work toward creating such a com-munity. Aside from

a few disparate groups . . . [demonstrating] for theright to carry on getting out of their heads anddancing to weird music on weekends (McKay 1996: 104),

there is almost no political activism in the rave scene.Ravers do little more than attend late night and earlymorning parties in out-of-the-way places;50 visions


46. Robert Jesse, “The Monk in Europe,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/testimonials/ [Internet]. 16 May 1993[cited 22 October 1997].47. Anonymous, “Hopeful visions,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/hopeful [Internet]. [cited 16 November 1997].

48. [email protected] “Technopagan_Raveprayer.html,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet]. 28 December 1994 [cited 3 November 3 1997].49. Robert Jesse, “The Monk in Europe,” in www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/testimonials/ [Internet]. 16 May 1993[cited 22 October 1997].50. Most collectives, such as the New Moon Collective, San Francisco (www.hyperreal.org/raves/newmoon), Daydream Collective, Eugene OR (www.hyperreal.org/raves/daydream), Friends and Family collective, SanFrancisco (www.bass-station.com/fnf), and Catalyst Effusion, Toronto (announced on an email message postedto the DCRaves listserv, 18 November 1997), in fact donothing more than organize parties.


www.hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/testimonials/


www.hyperreal.org/raves/newmoon

www.hyperreal.org/raves/daydream

www.hyperreal.org/raves/daydream

www.bass-station.com/fnf









of future unity and global communities remainvisions (Hesmondhalgh 1995). When ravers say that“We can only improve the society if we improve our-selves first,”51 or that “consciousness unfolds andexpands itself slowly from the individual to a groupawareness,”52 they sound very much like the chan-nel who said

We have to have inner communication to figure outwho we are first, then those communities that wewant can really happen (Brown 1997: 124).

The Rainbow Family is also dedicated to the cre-ation of a cooperative, egalitarian, and utopian com-munity (Niman 1997). However, whereas rave andnew age utopias remain virtual, the Rainbow Familycreates real, though temporary, utopias at their variousnational and regional Gatherings. Usually over thecourse of a month the Rainbow Family works to trans-form park land into actual communities with fullyfunctional infrastructures (kitchens, latrines, infir-maries, childcare). In such a “Temporary AutonomousZone,” everybody is welcome, from yuppies to thehomeless, and no money is required. The Rainbowfamily enacts a working model of multiculturalism,a society whose differences are celebrated and unityachieved (Niman 1997: 99).

Perhaps at the far end of the spectrum of commu-nity building we find cults such as the Divine LightMission, whose members completely renounce pre-vious beliefs, communities (friends, family), and jobsand devote their lives to the preservation and out-reach of their cult (Galanter 1989). Though thesecommunities are often totalizing, raves and cultshave some things in common. Cults involve spiritualhighs and altered states of consciousness, and arehighly popular among youths reacting against theuncertainties of the transition to adult society(Hexham and Poewe 1986). As in the rave, the expe-rience of community is a cornerstone of the cult ex-perience. In his study of the Divine Light MissionGalanter (1989: 10) noticed that the more people

affiliated themselves with the cult, the more relief theyreceived. Relief reinforces the members’ involve-ment in the group and attachment to the group’sprinciples. However, Galanter (pp. 5–7) argues thatpsychological processes cause the cult members toaffiliate with the cult community, whereas I havemade an explicitly cultural case for the positivetransformations ravers say they undergo. Further-more, the process of group attachment in cults is cir-cular and self-reinforcing, so that involvement in thecult grows to dominate the cult members’ lives. Incontrast, ravers detach from their “group” when therave event comes to an end in the early morning.Though such regular detachment from raves mightbe expected to produce frustrated feelings of inter-ruption, testimonies of ravers instead reveal satisfac-tion and excitement about reuniting under the sameprinciples of PLUR the next weekend. Perhaps per-manent utopias are not viable, as Turner and otherssuggest, and that the superficiality of rave “commu-nity” reflects that condition.

Niman’s ethnography of the Rainbow Familyhighlights a second commentary. Like ravers, theRainbow Family has conscious roots in the revivalof primitivism, paganism, and tribalism (1997: 37).Those who attend Rainbow Gatherings often mimicand alter Native American culture and religious rit-uals, believing that what they contrive is the realthing. Teepees, sweat lodges, pipe ceremonies, med-icine bags, and feathers are central features of thegathering. Rather than dismissing such “fakelore”as inauthentic Indian culture, it might be better, tocall it simply Rainbow culture (Niman 1997). Such amove puts us in line with Bruner (1994), who argueswith Baudrillard that scholars should not criticizeauthenticity in the sense of fidelity to an originalmodel because all cultures are caught in a process ofcopying and reinventing themselves. Instead, schol-ars should attend to authenticity as it is constructedby informants, particularly when competing seg-ments of society call it into question in the contextof uneven power relations (p. 408). With regard topower relations, the Rainbow practice of borrowingNative American customs might reflect a form ofcultural imperialism that has powerfully negativeconsequences, and it is on this basis that a critiqueof authenticity should be considered. As Nimancogently argues, Rainbow impersonations of Indi-ans trivialize Native American practices such that

51. Salami and Komotion International, “Why you arehere,” in www.cloudfactory.org [Internet]. 12 December1995 [cited 2 December 1997].52. [email protected]. “Goa trance,” in www.hyperrreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism [Internet].16 May 1993 [cited 22 November 1997].







these practices lose their force. The impersonationsconsequently undermine attempts by Native Amer-icans to affirm their own identities and thwart legalbattles to preserve religious freedom. Though raversalso use Native American symbols, I argue that theyare not as complicit in the unintentional cannibal-ization and trivialization of Native American cul-ture because fakelore is comparatively limitedwithin rave culture and located in highly frag-mented contexts. The spiritual aspect of raves doesnot include conscious mimicry of Native Americanceremonies. Unlike some New Age healing proce-dures, for example, rave rituals do not imitate NativeAmerican ceremonies, dress, orations, or props. I amaware of no raves that use Native paraphernalia likesweat lodges or medicine bags. I know of no DJswho, like new age shamans, take Native Americannames. Fakelore is most often limited to the use ofNative American-inspired icons in two-dimensional,decorative contexts, sometimes tongue-in-cheek,and often heavily diluted by other motifs, futuristicand otherwise.

Conclusion

The critique of fakelore foregrounds a key questionof this article: whether or not the technoshaman is areal shaman or just a plastic medicine man. Somecommentators see the rave as a meaningless simu-lacrum. For some young people, raves are a form ofentertainment not taken as seriously as a religiousexperience. Nevertheless, this does not eliminate the

fact that for many people, the rave is spiritual andhighly meaningful (Reynolds 1998a: 9). Based on thetestimonials presented here, raves increase self es-teem, release fears and anxieties, bring inner peace,and improve consciousness, among other things.When an informant claims that “Last night a DJsaved my life,” it is reasonable to accept that this is“spiritual healing.” I have elucidated the ritualframework for this therapeutic effect by attendingto physiological factors as well as symbols andmetaphors that dominate rave discourse. With thehelp of the DJ, ravers embark on an overnight jour-ney to a primitive paradise where individuality isleft behind and communitas is achieved. At theirdestination ravers claim to find a world of harmony,equality, and communality; a place similar to hu-manity in its early tribal stage, according to ravers,but diametrically opposed to the modern world.Reynolds (1998b: 86) points out that the myth ofunity is just a myth; indeed, as seen in the previoussection, ravers can be criticized for not followingthrough on their goals of community building. Butas the Huichol example makes clear, myths are pow-erful. The enactment of the myth of eternal return––asymbolic return to the primordial place where life isas it should be––invigorates the ravers, allowingthem to face the sobriety and tedium of daily life, atleast until the next rave. The rave experience mightbe highly symbolic, but these symbols are fashionedand imbued with such meaning that they far surpassthe empty, touristic simulacra that some academiccommentators consider them to be.


Suggested Readings

Furst, Peter T.1976 Hallucinogens and Culture. Novato, CA: Chandler and Sharp.

Journal of Psychoactive Drugs1989 “Shamanism and Altered States of Consciousness.” Special theme issue.

Lambek, Michael1981 Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Myerhoff, Barbara G.1974 The Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.





Schultes, Richard Evans, and Albert Hofmann1979 Plants of the Gods: Origins of Hallucinogenic Use. NY: Alfred van der Marck Editions.

Tart, Charles T., ed.1969 Altered States of Consciousness: A Book of Readings. NY: John Wiley.

Winkelman, Michael1997 “Altered States of Consciousness and Religious Behavior” in Stephen Glazier, ed. Anthropology

of Religion: A Handbook of Method and Theory. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, pp. 393–428.

Zinberg, Norman E., ed.1977 Alternate States of Consciousness. NY: Free Press.


6. Ethnomedicine: Religion and Healing


236

CHAPTER SIX

Ethnomedicine:Religion andHealing

If a single pervasive thought were to be singled out in this chapter, it would be the impor-tance of culture in determining the etiology and treatment of disease and mental disorders.Just as humans have always suffered from disease, so, too, have we always responded to it,seeking ways to reduce its debilitating nature or, we hope, to banish it completely. Allhuman societies have belief systems and practices that people turn to in order to identifydisease and effect a cure. The integration of the study of these systems of beliefs and prac-tices into the study of non-Western societies has created medical anthropology, the most re-cent addition to the discipline of anthropology (see Hahn 1995; Lindenbaum and Lock 1993;Mascie-Taylor 1993; Nichter 1992).

Explanations and cures of illnesses may be either natural or supernatural (a naturalisticresponse would not involve supernatural aid). As P. Stanley Yoder has clearly pointed out,one of the medical anthropologist’s most important tasks is to distinguish between differenttypes of causation and to understand the relationship between them, especially because“different types of causal explanations may be involved at different points during theprocess of diagnosis and treatment, or may characteristically demand differing treatments”(1982: 15). Moreover, because the range and variability of medical beliefs and practicesamong the peoples of the world are immense, there will be no easy explanation or simplegeneralization regarding causation and treatment of diseases. But always it will be possibleto see the close relationship between medicine and religion, a cultural bonding that occursin nonliterate, nonindustrialized cultures as well as in modern, technological cultures.

The importance of our understanding of ethnomedical systems is made clear by thefact that a great percentage of the non-Western world’s population reside in areas that arelittle exposed to Western medical treatment. Primary among the concerns of such inter-national groups as the World Health Organization is the role that improved health care canplay in the socioeconomic development of Third World countries. The lack of implementa-tion of modern medical care in these areas of the world is caused by a lack of both availablefunds and information. Partly in response to the dearth of funding, some health plannershave proposed that the most effective way to expand modern primary care would be for

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Western-trained practitioners to collaborate with traditional practitioners (Bichmann 1979:175); however, lack of information is the greatest barrier to assessing the feasibility of suchproposals in relation to national health goals and planning (Good 1977: 705). Because littlesubstantive information concerning indigenous health care systems is available for non-Western countries, the identification and use of agents of change, such as local curers, toimprove the quality of life in rural areas is extremely difficult.

It is noteworthy to point out also that intercultural contact seems to have caused anincrease in both physical and psychological Western-based diseases among non-Westernpopulations; the frustrations of not being able to cure these modern illnesses are liable toincrease the use of traditional methods of healing. Other problems of contact also exist.Western-trained medical practitioners find little in traditional systems of health care theyconsider effective in either the physical or the mental realm. On the other hand, modernmedical treatment is often rejected by those in the culture. For example, in rural contem-porary Kenya, modern medical technology is not changing the pervasive “ancestor spirit-sorcery theory” of disease causation that has traditionally been used to account for all majormisfortunes (Kramer and Thomas 1982: 169): As late as 1969 there was still no indicationamong the rural Kamba of Kenya that modern medicine had made prominent inroads at thelevel of prevention, either in effecting behavioral change or in modifying etiological beliefs,despite their long exposure to Western techniques.

Determining why the ill choose to accept or reject a system of treatment not only woulddefine whom the people in the culture perceive as the proper healer but also would delin-eate their etiology of disease and their perception of appropriate treatment. What appliedanthropologists are attempting to determine are the advantages and disadvantages of eachof the health care systems—traditional and modern—in the eyes of the patients, as well asthe nature of the knowledge healers and their clients draw upon in the process of selectingtreatment. Unfortunately, previous research in traditional medical systems has essentiallyignored the studied people’s own explanations of these criteria, criteria that ordinarilyinclude both natural and supernatural explanations.

Knowledge of the naturalistic treatments and ethnopharmacological systems of non-Western societies is also important, for much of the pharmacopoeia administered by tra-ditional healers does work. (Societies everywhere possess naturalistic explanations andtreatments. Cures derived from hundreds of wild plants were used by the North AmericanIndians, for example, and techniques for the treatment of headaches and stomachaches, thesetting of broken bones, bloodletting, lancing, cauterization, and other naturalistic skills arewell known to the nonliterate world.) However, as the effectiveness of the traditional healeris dependent upon more than the use of proper chemical treatment, diagnosis is made notonly at the empirical level but at the psychological and social levels as well. In speaking ofAfrica, for example, Wolfgang Bichmann notes that illness does not mean so much an indi-vidual event but a disturbance of social relations (1979: 177), and M. F. Lofchie points outthat “African medical research has much to contribute to Western medicine: its wholism,emphasis on treatment of the entire family as well as the ‘ill’ person, and its encyclopediclore of information about the curative properties of items available in nature—all of theseprinciples are now working their way into Western medical vocabulary” (1982: vii).

For years it was widely believed that only “civilized” people were subject to mental ill-ness, whereas the preliterates of the world led a blissful life free of neuroses and psychoses.It did not take anthropology long to prove that Rousseau’s Noble Savage was just assusceptible to the major disorders of the mind as was the individual coping with life in theso-called civilized societies of the world. Anthropologists have sought answers to suchimportant questions as whether mental illness rates differ cross-culturally; whether styles

INTRODUCTION | 237




and types of illnesses vary; and whether it is more difficult to adjust to life in industrializedsocieties than in others. Anthropologists and others have shown, moreover, that traditionalhealers are particularly effective in the treatment of mental illness, and that their approachesto curing are beneficial to physical diseases as well. Not only are traditional healers’ servicesreadily available to the ill, for example, but their system of care is also nondisruptive tothose in the culture, and the patient has the support of family members who are nearby orin actual attendance during the treatment. Beyond these advantages, and in contrast withthe Western world, Third World countries frequently are much more accepting of those hav-ing mental illnesses. Sufferers of these disorders are often stigmatized in the West, andmany attempt to hide their medical history.

A seven-year multicultural pilot study of severe mental illness by the World HealthOrganization reported in the magazine Science ’80 showed that relatively fast and completerecoveries from major psychoses are achieved in developing countries, such as Nigeriaand India. In the United States and other Western countries, however, almost one-half ofthose who suffer psychotic breakdowns never recover. For example, whereas 58 percentof the Nigerians and 51 percent of the Indians studied had a single psychotic episode andwere judged cured after treatment, the cure rate in the industrialized countries ranged fromonly 6 percent in Denmark to a high of 27 percent in China (“World Psychosis” 1980: 7). Cer-tainly non-Western healing techniques are effective in the treatment of the mentally ill;however, the treatment of physiological diseases cannot match that of the West. The factthat many non-Western pharmaceuticals may be effective in one society and not in anotherdemonstrates the important relationship of beliefs and cures—in particular, the interactionof the healer and the supernatural.

Throughout the world it is possible to place supernaturally caused illnesses into fivecategories: (1) sorcery, (2) breach of taboo, (3) intrusion of a disease object, (4) intrusion of adisease-causing spirit, and (5) loss of soul (Clements 1932: 252). It is important to notethat these categories may not be recognized by certain societies. Indeed, it is a difficult taskto determine the frequency and incidence of illnesses, especially mental illnesses, in non-Western, nonindustrialized countries. Native peoples may avoid seeking medical help froma modern health facility, for example, or, if they do seek treatment, there may be a questionof accurate recordkeeping.

Anthropologists have correctly noted that the types of cures sought are based not onlyon the cause but also on the severity of the illness in terms of level of pain and difficulty ofcuring. Treatment based on cause and severity varies greatly; some non-Western groupsmaintain that most diseases are of natural origin, whereas others blame the supernaturalrealm for the misfortunes.

It is apparent that anthropologists must understand the integration of ethnomedical sys-tems with the other areas of culture if they are successfully to conduct comparative studies.Ethnomedical systems are deeply ingrained in the structure of societies, functioning inways that create a positive atmosphere for health care. No longer can we view non-biomedical medical methods as inferior; indeed, Western society owes much to traditionalmedicine, not the least of which is the support given to the patient by the family and thecommunity.

The readings in this chapter, for the most part, deal with supernaturally caused diseasesand mental illnesses and their etiology and treatment. Arthur C. Lehmann opens the chap-ter with an analysis of ethnomedicine among the Aka hunters and Ngando farmers. Hestresses disease categories, disease etiology, treatment, and the role traditional healers(ngangas) play in interethnic contacts.

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In the second article, L. A. Rebhum discusses anger and illness in northeast Brazil, wherewomen use the term swallowing frogs to mean suppressing anger, hatred, or irritation andwithstanding unfair treatment silently.

In the next article, William Wedenoja focuses on the role of women as curers in the Balmyards of Jamaica; he keys especially on the relationship between the Balm healers and theirpatients.

The final selection is an excerpt from the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down byAnne Fadiman. Fadiman compassionately describes a Hmong family living in California,whose young daughter is diagnosed with epilepsy.

References

Bichmann, Wolfgang1979 “Primary Health Care and Traditional Medicine—Considering the Background of

Changing Health Care Concepts in Africa.” Social Science and Medicine 13B: 175–82.

Clements, Forrest E. 1932 “Primitive Concepts of Disease.” University of California Publications in American

Archaeology and Ethnology 32 (2): 252.

Good, Charles M.1977 “Traditional Medicine: An Agenda for Medical Geography.” Social Science and Medicine

11: 705–13.

Hahn, Robert A.1995 Sickness and Healing: An Anthropological Perspective. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University

Press.

Kramer, Joyce, and Anthony Thomas1982 “The Modes of Maintaining Health in Ukambani, Kenya.” In P. S. Yoder, ed., African

Health and Healing Systems: Proceedings of a Symposium, pp. 159–98. Los Angeles:Crossroads Press, University of California.

Lindenbaum, Shirley, and Margaret Lock, eds.1993 Knowledge, Power, and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Lofchie, M. F.1982 “Foreword.” In P. Stanley Yoder, ed., African Health and Healing Systems: Proceedings of a

Symposium, pp. vii–ix. Los Angeles: Crossroads Press, University of California.

Mascie-Taylor, C. G. N., ed.1993 The Anthropology of Disease. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nichter, Mark, ed.1992 Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Ethnomedicine. Philadelphia: Gordon and

Breach.

“World Psychosis.” Science ’80 1 (6): 7.

Yoder, P. Stanley1982 “Issues in the Study of Ethnomedical Systems in Africa.” In P. Stanley Yoder, ed.,

African Health and Healing Systems: Proceedings of a Symposium, pp. 1–20. Los Angeles:Crossroads Press, University of California.

INTRODUCTION | 239




240

Ethnomedicine (also referred to as folk, traditional, orpopular medicine) is the term used to describe the pri-mary health care system of indigenous people whosemedical expertise lies outside “biomedicine,” the“modern” medicine of Western societies. Biomedicinedoes exist in the Third World, but it is unavailable tothe masses of inhabitants for a number of reasons.Conversely, although popular medicine has largelybeen supplanted by biomedicine in the Westernworld, it still exists and is revived from time to time bywaves of dissatisfaction with modern medicine andwith the high cost of health care, by the health foodmovement, and by a variety of other reasons. Thepoint is, all countries have pluralistic systems ofhealth care, but for many members of society the

combat against the diseases that have plagued man-kind is restricted to the arena of popular medicine.

This is particularly true in the developing nations,such as those of the sub-Saharan regions of Africa,where over 80 percent of the population live in ruralareas with a dearth of modern medical help (Bichmann1979; Green 1980). Between 1984 and the present, Ihave made six field trips to one such rural area (themost recent in 1994) to study the primary health carepractices of Aka Pygmy hunter-gatherers and theirhorticultural neighbors, the Ngando of CentralAfrican Republic (C.A.R.).

The Aka and the Ngando

Several groups of the Pygmies live in a broad strip offorested territory stretching east and west across thecenter of Equatorial Africa. The two largest societies

29

Eyes of the Ngangas:Ethnomedicine and Power in Central African RepublicArthur C. Lehmann

People of the Third World have a variety of therapies available for combating diseases but, because ofcost, availability, and cultural bias, most rely on ethnomedical, or traditional, treatment rather than“biomedical,” or Western, therapies. Dr. Lehmann’s field research focuses on the importance ofngangas (traditional healers) as a source of primary health care for both the Aka Pygmy hunters andtheir horticultural neighbors, the Ngando of Central African Republic. Tracing the basis and locus ofthe ngangas’ mystical diagnostic and healing powers, he shows that they are particularly effectivewith treatments for mental illness and, to an unknown extent, with herbal treatment of physical ill-nesses. The powers of the Aka ngangas, however, are also used to reduce the tensions between them-selves and their patrons and to punish those Ngando who have caused the hunters harm. Lehmannpoints out the necessity of recognizing and treating the social as well as the biological aspects of ill-ness and appeals to health care planners to establish counterpart systems that mobilize popular andbiomedical specialists to improve primary health care in the Third World.

This selection was written especially for this volume.




are the Mbuti of the Inturi Forest of Zaire and theAka, who live in the Southern Rainforest that ex-tends from the Lobaye River in Central African Re-public into the People’s Republic of the Congo andinto Cameroun (Cavalli-Sforza 1971). Like the Mbuti,the Aka are long-time residents of their region. It ison the edge of the Southern Rainforest in and nearthe village of Bagandu that the Aka Pygmies andthe Ngando come into the most frequent contact. Theproximity, particularly during the dry season fromDecember to April, allows for comparisons of healthcare systems that would be difficult otherwise, forthe Aka move deep into the forest and are relativelyinaccessible for a good portion of the year.

Since Turnbull described the symbiotic relation-ship between Mbuti Pygmies and villagers in Zaire(1965), questions remain as to why Pygmy hunterscontinue their association with their sedentaryneighbors. Bahuchet’s work shows that the relation-ship between the Aka and the Ngando of C.A.R. isone of voluntary mutual dependence in which bothgroups benefit; indeed, the Aka consider the vil-lagers responsible for their well-being (1985: 549).Aka provide the Ngando with labor, meat, and forestmaterials while the Ngando pay the Aka with plan-tation foods, clothes, salt, cigarettes, axes and knives,alcohol, and infrequently, money.

This mutual dependence extends to the healthcare practices of both societies. Ngando patrons takeseriously ill Aka to the dispensary for treatment; Akaconsider this service a form of payment that may bewithheld by the villagers as a type of punishment.On the other hand, Aka ngangas (traditional healers)are called upon to diagnose and treat Ngando ill-nesses. The powers believed to be held by thengangas are impressive, and few, particularly ruralresidents question these powers or the roles theyplay in everyday life in Central African Republic.

Eyes of the Ngangas

The people believe that the ngangas intervene ontheir behalf with the supernatural world to combatmalevolent forces and also use herbal expertise toprotect them from the myriad of tropical diseases.Elisabeth Motte (1980) has recorded an extensive listof medicines extracted by the ngangas from the envi-ronment to counter both natural and supernaturalillnesses; 80 percent are derived from plants and theremaining 20 percent from animals and minerals.

Both Aka and Ngando ngangas acquire theirpower to diagnose and cure through an extensiveapprenticeship ordinarily served under the directionof their fathers, who are practicing healers them-selves. This system of inheritance is based on primo-geniture, although other than first sons may be chosento become ngangas. Although Ngando ngangas maybe either male or female, the vast majority are males;all Aka ngangas are males. In the absence of the fatheror if a younger son has the calling to become a healer,he may study under a nganga outside the immedi-ate family.

During my six trips to the field, ngangas permittedme to question them on their training and initiationinto the craft; it became apparent that important con-sistencies existed. First, almost all male ngangas arefirst sons. Second, fathers expect first sons to becomengangas; as they said, “It is natural.” Third, the ap-prenticeship continues from boyhood until the son ishimself a nganga, at which time he trains his ownson. Fourth, every nganga expresses firm belief in thepowers of his teacher to cure and, it follows, in hisown as well. As is the case with healers around theworld, despite the trickery sometimes deemed nec-essary to convince clients of the effectiveness of thecure, the ngangas are convinced that their healingtechniques will work unless interrupted by strongerpowers. Fifth, every nganga interviewed maintainedstrongly that other ngangas who were either enviousor have a destructive spirit can destroy or weakenthe power of a healer, causing him to fail. Sixth, andlast, the origin and locus of the ngangas’ power isbelieved to be in their eyes.

Over and over I was told that during the finalstages of initiation the master nganga had vaccinatedthe initiate’s eyes and placed “medicine” in thewound, thus giving the new nganga power to divineand effectively treat illnesses. At first I interpretedthe term vaccination to mean simply the placement of“medicine” in the eyes, but I was wrong. Using adouble-edged razor blade and sometimes a needle,the master nganga may cut his apprentice’s lowereyelids, the exterior corners of the eyes, or below theeyes (although making marks below the eyes is nowconsidered “antique,” I was told); he concludes theceremony by placing magical medicine in the cuts. Atthis moment, the student is no longer an apprentice;he has achieved the status of an nganga and the abilityto diagnose illnesses with the newly acquired powerof his eyes.

LEHMANN • EYES OF THE NGANGAS: ETHNOMEDICINE AND POWER IN CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC | 241




Not until my last field trip in 1994 did I witness amaster nganga actually cut the whites of his appren-tice’s eyes. At the end of an hour-long interview withan nganga, which focused on my eliciting his conceptof disease etiology in treatment of illness, I casuallyposed the question I had asked other ngangas manytimes before: “Do you vaccinate your apprentice’seyes?” The nganga beckoned his apprentice seatednearby, and, to my amazement, the apprentice im-mediately placed his head on the master’s lap. Iquickly retrieved my camcorder which I had just putaway! The master removed a razor blade from amatch box, spread the student’s eyelids apart, deftlymade five cuts on the whites of each eye, andsqueezed the juice of a leaf (the “medicine”) into thewounds. This astounding procedure performed onperhaps the most sensitive of all human parts tookless than a total of three minutes and did not appearto cause the apprentice any degree of pain, albeit hiseyes were red and his tears profuse.

During the career of an nganga, his eyes will bevaccinated many times, thus, it is believed, rejuve-nating the power of the eyes to correctly diagnose ill-ness and ensure proper therapy. It is clear that themultiple powers of ngangas to cure and to protectmembers of their band from both physical and men-tal illnesses as well as from a variety of types ofsupernatural attacks reside in their eyes.

It follows that the actual divinatory act involves avariety of techniques, particular to each nganga, thatallows him to use his powers to “see” the cause ofthe illness and determine its treatment. Some burn aclear, rocklike amber resin called paka found deep inthe rain forest, staring into the flames to learn themystery of illness and the appropriate therapy. Somestare into the rays of the sun during diagnosis orgaze into small mirrors to unlock the secret powersof the ancestors in curing. Others concentrate onplates filled with water or large, brilliant chunks ofglass. The most common but certainly the most in-congruous method of acquiring a vision by both Akaand Ngando ngangas today is staring into a lightbulb. These are simply stuck into the ground in frontof the nganga or, as is the case among many villagehealers, the light bulb is floated in a glass of waterduring consultation. The appearance of a light bulbsurfacing from an Aka nganga’s healing parapherna-lia in the middle of a rain forest is, to say the least,unique. Western methods of divining—of knowing

the unknown—were not, and to some degree arenot now, significantly different from the techniquesof the ngangas. Our ways of “seeing,” involving gaz-ing at and “reading” tea leaves, crystal balls, cards,palms, and stars, are still considered appropriatetechniques by many.

Therapy Choicesand Therapy Managers

A wide variety of therapies coexist in contemporaryAfrica, and the situation in the village of Baganduis no exception. The major sources of treatment areAka ngangas, Ngando ngangas, kinship therapy(family councils called to resolve illness-causing con-flicts between kin), home remedies, Islamic healers(marabouts), and the local nurse at the governmentdispensary, who is called “doctor” by villagers andhunters alike. In addition, faith healers, herbalists,and local specialists (referred to as “fetishers”) all at-tempt, in varying degrees, to treat mental or physicalillness in Bagundu. Intermittently Westerners, suchas missionaries, personnel from the U.S. Agency forInternational Development, and anthropologistsalso treat physical ailments. Bagandu is a large vil-lage of approximately 3,400 inhabitants; however,most communities are much smaller and have littleaccess to modern treatment. And, as Cavalli-Sforzahas noted,

If the chances of receiving Western medicalhelp for Africans living in remote villages arevery limited, those of Pygmies are practicallynonexistent. They are even further removed fromhospitals. African health agents usually do nottreat Pygmies. Medical help comes exceptionallyand almost always from rare visiting foreigners.(Cavalli-Sforza 1986: 421)

Residents of Bagandu are fortunate in havingboth a government dispensary and a pharmacy runby the Catholic church, but prescriptions are ex-tremely costly relative to income, and ready cash isscarce. A more pressing problem is the availability ofdrugs. Frequently the “doctor” has only enough totreat the simplest ailments such as headaches andsmall cuts; he must refer thirty to forty patients dailyto the Catholic pharmacy, which has more drugsthan the dispensary but still is often unable to fillprescriptions for the most frequently prescribed





drugs such as penicillin, medicine to counteractparasites, and antibiotic salves. Although the doctordoes the best he can under these conditions, patientsmust often resort only to popular medical treatment—in spite of the fact that family members, the therapymanagers, have assessed the illness as one best treatedby biomedicine. In spite, too, of the regular unavail-ability of medicine, the doctor’s diagnosis and ad-vice is still sought out—“although many people willconsent to go to the dispensary only after havingexhausted the resources of traditional medicine”(Motte 1980: 311).

Popular, ethnomedical treatment is administeredby kin, ngangas (among both the Aka and Ngandovillagers), other specialists noted for treatment ofspecific maladies, and Islamic marabouts, who arerecent immigrants from Chad. According to bothAka and Ngando informants, the heaviest burdenfor health care falls to these ethnomedical systems.Ngando commonly utilize home, kin remedies forminor illnesses, but almost 100 percent indicatedthat for more serious illnesses they consulted eitherthe doctor or ngangas (Aka, Ngando, or both); to alesser extent they visited specialists. The choice oftreatment, made by the family therapy managers,rests not only on the cause and severity of the ill-ness, but also on the availability of therapists expertin the disease or problem, their cost, and their prox-imity to the patient. Rarely do the residents ofBagandu seek the aid of the marabouts, for exam-ple, in part because of the relatively high cost ofconsultation. Clearly, both popular and biomedicalexplanations for illness play important roles in themaintenance of health among Bagandu villagers,although popular medicine is the most importanttherapy resource available. Popular medicine is es-pecially vital for the Aka hunters, whose relativeisolation and inferior status (in the eyes of theNgando) have resulted in less opportunity for bio-medical treatment. Yet even they seek out modernmedicine for illnesses.

Whatever the system of treatment chosen, it isimportant to understand that “the management ofillness and therapy by a set of close kin is a centralaspect of the medical scene in central Africa. . . . Thetherapy managing group . . . exercises a brokeragefunction between the sufferer and the specialist”(Janzen 1978: 4). It is the kingroup that determineswhich therapy is to be used.

Explanations of Illness

The choice of therapy in Bagandu is determined byetiology and severity, as in the West. Unlike Westernmedicine, however, African ethnomedicine is not re-stricted to an etiology of only natural causation. Boththe Aka and the Ngando spend a great deal of time,energy, and money (or other forms of payments)treating illnesses perceived as being the result ofsocial and cultural imbalances, often described insupernatural terms. Aka and Ngando nosology hasaccommodated biomedicine without difficulty, buttraditional etiology has not become less important tothe members of these societies. Frequent supernat-ural explanations of illness by Aka and Ngandoinformants inevitably led me to the investigationof witchcraft, curses, spells, or the intervention ofancestors and nameless spirits, all of which wereviewed as being responsible for poor health and mis-fortune. The Aka maintain, for example, that thefourth leading cause of death in Bagandu is witch-craft (diarrhea is the principal cause; measles, second,and convulsions, third [Hewlett 1986: 56]). Duringmy research, it became apparent that a dual modelof disease explanation exists among the Aka andNgando: first, a naturalistic model that fits its Westernbiomedical counterpart well, and second, a super-naturalistic explanation.

Interviews with village and Pygmy ngangas indi-cated that their medical systems are not significantlydifferent. Indeed, both groups agree that their re-spective categories of illness etiology are identical.Further, the categories are not mutually exclusive: anillness may be viewed as being natural, but it may beexacerbated by supernatural forces such as witch-craft and spells. Likewise, this phenomenon can bereversed: an illness episode may be caused by super-natural agents but progress into a form that is treat-able through biomedical techniques. For example,my relatively educated and ambitious young fieldassistant, a villager, was cut on the lower leg by apiece of stone while working on a new addition tohis house. The wound, eventually becoming infected,caused swelling throughout the leg and groin. Aswas the case in some of his children’s illnesses, theexplanation for the wound was witchcraft. It wasclear to him that the witch was a neighbor whoenvied his possessions and his employment by aforeigner. Although the original cut was caused by a





supernatural agent, the resulting infection fitted thebiomedical model. Treatment by a single injection ofpenicillin quickly brought the infection under con-trol, although my assistant believed that had thewitch been stronger the medicine would not haveworked. Here is a case in which, “in addition tothe patient’s physical signs and social relationships,”the passage of time is also crucial to “the unfoldingof therapeutic action” (Feierman 1985: 77). As thecharacter of an illness changes with time as the ill-ness runs its course, the therapy manager’s decisionsmay change, because the perceived etiology canshift as a result of a variety of signs, such as a slow-healing wound or open conflict in the patient’s socialgroup (Janzen 1978: 9).

Studies on disease etiologies among select Africansocieties (Bibeau 1979; Janzen 1978; Warren 1974) re-ported that most illnesses had natural causes, andthis finding holds for the Ngando villagers as well.At first glance, these data would seem to reducethe importance of ngangas and of popular medicinegenerally, but it is necessary to recognize thatngangas treat both natural and supernatural illnessesutilizing both medical and mystical techniques. Thequestion posed by Feierman, “Is popular medicineeffective?” (1985: 5), is vital to the evaluation ofngangas as healers. Surely some traditional medi-cines used by these cures must in many cases work,and work regularly enough to earn the sustainedsupport of the general public.

Illnesses of God and Illnesses of Man

Both the Ngando and Aka explanations for naturalillnesses lack clarity. Some ngangas refer to them as“illnesses of God”; others simply identify them as“natural”; and still others frequently use both classi-fications, regularly assigning each label to specificailments. Hewlett maintains that the Aka sometimeslabeled unknown maladies as illnesses of God (1986:personal communication). On the other hand, theBakongo of neighboring Zaire defined illnesses ofGod as those “generally, mild conditions which re-spond readily to therapy when no particular distur-bance exists in the immediate social relationships ofthe sufferer. . . . The notion of ‘god’ does not implydivine intervention or retribution but simply that thecause is an affliction in the order of things unrelatedto human intentions” (Janzen 1978: 9).

Both Janzen’s and Hewlett’s data are accurate,but my field data show as well that the explanationsof natural illnesses among the Ngando and Aka notonly refer to normal mild diseases and sometimesunknown ones but also to specific illnesses namedby the ngangas and the residents of Bagandu. Theconfusion surrounding these mixed explanations ofdisease causation is an important topic for futureethnosemantic or other techniques of emic inquiryby ethnographers.

Residents of Bagandu and both Aka and Ngandongangas categorized sickness caused by witchcraft,magic, curses, spells, and spirits as “illnesses ofman.” This is the second major disease category.Witchcraft, for example, while not the main cause ofdeath, is the most frequently named cause of illnessin Bagandu. Informants in Bagandu cite the fre-quency of witchcraft accusations as proof of theirviewpoint. Antisocial or troublesome neighbors arefrequently accused of being witches and are jailed ifthe charge is proven. Maladies of all sorts, such assterility among females, are also commonly attrib-uted to the innate and malevolent power of witches.These types of explanations are not unusual in ruralAfrica. What is surprising are reports of new ill-nesses in the village caused by witches.

All Ngando informants claimed, furthermore, thatthe problem of witchcraft has not diminished overtime; on the contrary, it has increased. The thinking islogical: because witchcraft is believed to be inherited,any increase in population is seen also as an in-evitable increase in the number of witches in the vil-lage. Population figures in the region of the SouthernRainforest have increased somewhat in the past fewdecades despite epidemics such as measles; accord-ingly, the incidence of maladies attributed to witcheshas increased. One informant from Bagandu stronglyinsisted that witches are not only more numerous butalso much more powerful today than before. Offiong(1983) reported a marked increase of witchcraft inNigeria and adjacent states in West Africa, caused notby inflation of population but by the social strainprecipitated by the frustration accompanying lack ofachievement after the departure of colonial powers.

Insanity is not a major problem among theNgando. When it does occur, it is believed to becaused by witchcraft, clan or social problems, evilspirits, and breaking taboos. Faith healers, marabouts,and ngangas are seen as effective in the treatment of





mental illness due to witchcraft or other causes. Therole of faith healers is particularly important in thelives of members of the Prophetical Christian Churchin Bagandu. They have strong faith in the healingsessions and maintain that the therapy successfullytreats the victims of spirits’ attacks. Informants alsoclaim the therapy lasts a long time.

The curse is a common method of venting angerin Bagandu, used by both male and female witches.Informants stated that women use curses more thanmen and that the subjects of their attacks are oftenmales. The curses of witches are counted as beingextremely dangerous in the intended victim. Onevillager accused the elderly of using the curse as aweapon most frequently. Spell-casting is also com-mon in the area, and males often use spells as amethod of seduction.

Most, if not all, residents of Bagandu use charms,portable “fetishes,” and various types of magical ob-jects placed in and around their houses for protec-tion. Some of these objects are counter-magical: theysimultaneously protect the intended victim and turnthe danger away from the victim to the attackers.Counter-magic is not always immediate; results maytake years to appear. Charms, fetishes, and otherforms of protection are purchased from ngangas,marabouts, and other specialists such as herbalists.For example, the Aka and Ngando alike believe thatwearing a mole’s tooth on a bracelet is the mostpowerful protection from attacks by witches.

To a lesser extent, spirits are also believed to causeillness. It is problematic whether or not this source ofillness deserves a separate category of disease causa-tion. Bahuchet thinks not; rather, he holds that spirit-caused illnesses should be labeled illnesses of God(1986: personal communication). It is interesting tonote that in addition to charms and other items putto use in Bagandu, residents supplicate ancestors foraid in times of difficulty. If the ancestors do not re-spond, and if the victim of the misfortune practicesChristianity, he or she will seek the aid of God. Non-Christians and Christians alike commonly ask divin-ers the cause of their problem, after which they seekthe aid of the proper specialist. Revenge for real orimagined attacks on oneself or on loved ones is com-mon. One method is to point a claw of a mole at thewrongdoer. Ngando informants maintain the victimdies soon after. Simple possession of a claw, if dis-covered, means jail for the owner.

My initial survey of Aka and Ngando ngangasin 1984 brought out other origins of illness. Twongangas in Bagandu specifically cited the devil,rather than unnamed evil spirits, as a cause for dis-ease. The higher exposure of villagers to Christianitymay account for this attribution: seven denomina-tions are currently represented in the churches ofBagandu. Urban ngangas questioned in Bangui, thecapital, stressed the use of poison as a cause of illnessand death. Although poisonings do not figureprominently as a cause of death among the Aka andNgando, it is common belief that ngangas and othersdo use poison.

Finally, while not a cause for illness, informantsmaintained that envious ngangas have the power toretard or halt the progress of a cure administered byanother. All ngangas interviewed in 1984 and 1985confirmed not only that they have the power to in-terrupt the healing process of a patient but also thatthey frequently invoke it. Interestingly, ngangas sharethis awesome power with witches, who are also be-lieved by members of both societies to be able tospoil the “medicine” of healers. This kind of percep-tion of the ngangas’ power accounts, in part, for theirdual character: primarily beneficial to the public,they can also be dangerous.

While the numerical differences in the frequencyof physiologically and psychologically rooted ill-nesses in Bagandu are unknown, Ngando respon-dents in a small sample were able to list a number ofsupernaturally caused illnesses that are treatable byngangas, but only a few naturally caused ones. Amongthe naturalistic illnesses were illnesses of the spleen;katungba, deformation of the back; and Kongo, “ill-ness of the rainbow.” According to Hewlett (1986: 53),Kongo causes paralysis of the legs (and sometimes ofthe arms) and death after the victim steps on a dan-gerous mushroom growing on a damp spot in theforest where a rainbow-colored snake has rested.Had the Ngando sample been more exhaustive, it isprobable that the list of natural diseases would havebeen greater, although perhaps not as high as thetwenty natural illnesses the ngangas said they couldtreat successfully. That impressive list includesmalaria, hernia, diarrhea, stomach illness, pregnancyproblems, dysentery, influenza, abscesses, generalfatigue, traumas (snake bite, miscellaneous wounds,and poisoning), and general and specific bodily pain(spleen, liver, ribs, head, and uterus).





Powers of the Ngangas

The powers of the ngangas are not limited to control-ling and defeating supernatural or natural diseasesalone. In the village of Bagandu and in the adjacentSouthern Rainforest where the Ngando and Akahunters come into frequent contact, tensions existdue to the patron-client relationship, which by itsvery economic nature is negative. These tensions aremagnified by ethnic animosity. Without the Akas’mystical power, their economic and social inferioritywould result in an even more difficult relationshipwith the Ngando. Here the powers of the Pygmyngangas play an important part in leveling, to bear-able limits, the overshadowing dominance of theNgando, and it is here that the ngangas demonstratetheir leadership outside the realm of health care.Each Aka has some form of supernatural protectionprovided by the nganga of his camp to use while inthe village. Still, the need exists for the extraordinarypowers of the nganga himself for those moments ofhigh tension when Aka are confronted by what theyconsider the most menacing segments of the villagepopulation: the police, the mayor, and adolescentmales, all of whom, as perceived by the Aka, are dan-gerous to their personal safety while in the village.

In the summer of 1986, I began to study the atti-tudes of village patrons toward their Aka clients and,conversely, the attitudes of the so-called waywardservants (Turnbull’s term for the Mbuti Pygmy ofZaire, 1965) toward the villagers. Participant obser-vation and selective interviews of patrons, on theone hand, and of hunters, on the other, disclosedother important tangents of power of the Aka in gen-eral and of their ngangas in particular. First, the Akaoften have visible sources of power such as scarifica-tion, cords worn on the wrist and neck, and braceletsstrung with powerful charms for protection againstvillage witches. These protective devices are pro-vided the Aka by their ngangas. Second, and morepowerful still, are the hidden powers of the Aka ingeneral, bolstered by the specific powers of thengangas. Although the villagers believe the hunters’power is strongest in the forest, and thereforeweaker in the village setting, Aka power commandsthe respect of the farmers. Third, the villagers ac-knowledge the Aka expertise in the art of producinga variety of deadly poisons, such as sepi, which maybe used to punish farmers capable of the most

serious crimes against the Pygmies. The obviousfunctions of these means of protection and retribu-tion, taken from the standpoint of the Aka, are posi-tive. Clearly these powers reduce the tension of theAka while in the village, but they also control behav-ior of villagers toward the hunters to some undefin-able degree.

Villagers interpret the variety of punishmentswhich the Aka are capable of meting out to wrong-doers as originating in their control of mystical ormagical powers. Interestingly, even poisonings areviewed in this way by villagers because of the diffi-culty of proving that poison rather than mysticalpower caused illness or death. Although the use ofpoison is rare, it is used and the threat remains.Georges Guille-Escuret, a French ethnohistorianworking in Bagandu in 1985, reported to me thatprior to my arrival in the field that year three mem-bers of the same household had died on the sameday. The head of the family had been accused of re-peated thefts of game from the traps and from thecamp of an Aka hunter. When confronted with theevidence—a shirt the villager had left at the scene ofthe thefts—the family rejected the demands of thehunter for compensation for the stolen meat. Soonthereafter, the thief, his wife, and his mother died onthe same day. Villagers, who knew of the accusationsof theft, interpreted the deaths as the result of poi-soning or the mystical powers of the hunter.

Stories of Aka revenge are not uncommon, nor arethe Akas’ accusations of wrongdoing leveled againstthe villagers. To the Ngando farmers, the powersof the Aka ngangas include the ability to cause deaththrough the use of fetishes, to cause illness to the cul-prit’s eyes, and to direct lightning to strike the perpe-trator. These and other impressive powers to punishare seen as real threats to villagers—but the power ofthe ngangas to cure is even more impressive.

Attempts in my research to delineate the strengthsand weaknesses of the ngangas and other healthcare specialists discovered a number of qualities/characteristics widely held to be associated with each.First, each specialist is known for specific medicalabilities; that is, Aka and Ngando ngangas recognizethe therapeutic expertise of others in a variety ofcures. A nganga from Bangui maintained that Akangangas were generally superior to the village heal-ers in curing. This view is shared by a number ofvillagers interviewed, who maintained that the





power of Aka ngangas is greater than that of theirown specialists.

The Aka strongly agree with this view, and in asense the Aka are more propertied in the realm ofcuring than are the villagers. There is no question thatthe Aka are better hunters. Despite the Ngandos’greater political and economic power in the area andthe social superiority inherent in their patron status,the Ngando need the Aka. All these elements helpbalance the relationship between the two societies,although the supernatural and curative powers ofAka ngangas have not previously been considered tobe ingredients in the so-called symbiotic relationshipbetween Pygmy hunters and their horticulturalneighbors.

Second, ngangas noted for their ability to cure par-ticular illnesses are often called upon for treatmentby other ngangas who have contracted the disease.Third, with one exception, all the ngangas inter-viewed agree that European drugs, particularlythose contained in hypodermic syringes and in pills,are effective in the treatment of natural diseases. Onedissenting informant from the capital disdained bio-medicine altogether because, as he said, “White mendon’t believe in us.” Fourth, of the fourteen Aka andNgando ngangas interviewed in 1985, only five feltthat it was possible for a nganga to work successfullywith the local doctor (male nurse) who directed thedispensary in Bagandu. All five of these ngangas saidthat if such cooperation did come about, their specialcontribution would be the treatment of patients hav-ing illnesses of man, including mental illness result-ing from witchcraft, from magical and spiritual at-tacks, and from breaking taboos. None of the ngangasinterviewed had been summoned to work in concertwith the doctor. Fifth, as a group, the ngangas heldthat biomedical practitioners are unable to success-fully treat mental illnesses and other illnesses result-ing from attacks of supernatural agents. In this thegeneral population of the village agree. This is a vi-tally important reason for the sustained confidencein popular therapy in the region—a confidence thatis further strengthened by the belief that the ngangascan treat natural illnesses as well. Sixth, the villagedoctor recognized that the ngangas and maraboutsdo have more success in the treatment of mental ill-nesses than he does. Although the doctor confidedthat he has called in a village nganga for consultationin a case of witchcraft, he also disclosed that on

frequent occasions he had to remedy the treatmentadministered by popular specialists for natural dis-eases. It is important to recognize that unlike bio-medical specialists in the capital, the local doctordoes appreciate the talents of traditional therapistswho successfully practice ethnopsychiatry.

All respondents to this survey recognized thevalue of biomedicine in the community, and littlevariation in the types of cures the doctor could effectwas brought out. No doubts were raised regardingthe necessity of both biomedicine and popular ther-apy to the proper maintenance of public health. Thespheres of influence and expertise of both types ofpractitioners, while generally agreed on by partici-pants of the Ngando survey, did show some varia-tion, but these were no more serious than our ownestimates of the abilities of our physicians in theWest. In short, all informants utilized both systemsof therapy when necessary and if possible.

The continuation of supernatural explanations ofillness by both the Ngando and the Aka results inpart from tradition, in combination with their lack ofknowledge of scientific disease etiology, and in partbecause of the hidden positive functions of such ex-planations. Accusations of witchcraft and the use ofcurses and malevolent magic function to express theanxiety, frustrations, and social disruptions in thesesocieties. These are traditional explanations of dis-ease, with more than a single focus, for they focusupon both the physical illness and its sociologicalcause. “Witchcraft (and by extension other supernat-ural explanations for illness and disaster) providesan indispensable component in many philosophiesof misfortune. It is the friend rather than the foe ofmortality” (Lewis 1986: 16). Beyond this rationale,reliance upon practitioners of popular medicine as-sures the patient that medicine is available for treat-ment in the absence of Western drugs.

The Role of Ethnomedicine

Among the Aka and Ngando and elsewhere, systemsof popular medicine have sustained African societiesfor centuries. The evolution of popular medicine hasguaranteed its good fit to the cultures that have pro-duced it; even as disruptive an element of the systemas witchcraft can claim manifest and latent functionsthat contribute to social control and the promotion ofproper behavior.





remain apart. The task is to make both more effectiveby incorporating the best of each into a counterpartsystem that focuses on a basic training of healers inbiomedicine. This combination must certainly be amore logical and economic choice than attempting tosupply biomedical specialists to every community inCentral African Republic, a task too formidable forany country north or south of the Sahara. The signif-icance of this proposal is magnified by the massivenumbers for whom biomedicine is unavailable,those who must rely only upon ethnomedicine.

Even if available to all, biomedicine alone is not thefinal answer to disease control in the Third World.Hepburn succinctly presents strong arguments againsttotal reliance upon the biomedical approach:

Biomedicine is widely believed to be effective in thecure of sickness. A corollary of this is the belief thatif adequate facilities could be provided in the ThirdWorld and “native” irrationalities and culturalobstacles could be overcome, the health problemsof the people would largely be eliminated.However, this belief is not true, because theeffectiveness of biomedicine is limited in threeways. First, many conditions within the accepteddefining properties of biomedicine (i.e., physicaldiseases) cannot be treated effectively. Second, byconcentrating on the purely physical, biomedicinesimply cannot treat the social aspects of sickness(i.e., illness). Third, cures can only be achievedunder favorable environmental and politicalconditions: if these are not present, biomedicinewill be ineffective (1988: 68).

The problems facing societies in Africa are notnew. These same issues faced Westerners in the past,and our partial solutions, under unbelievably betterconditions, took immense time and effort to achieve.If primary health care in the non-Western world is toimprove, the evolutionary process must be quick-ened by the utilization of existing popular medicalsystems as a counterpart of biomedicine, by the ex-pansion of biomedical systems, and by the coopera-tion of international funding agencies with Africanpolicymakers, who themselves must erase their an-tagonism toward ethnomedicine.


Unlike Western drug therapies, no quantifiablemeasure exists for the effectiveness of popular medi-cine. Good evidence from World Health Organiza-tion studies can be brought forth, however, to illus-trate the relatively high percentage of success ofpsychotherapeutic treatment through ethnomedi-cine in the Third World compared to that achieved inthe West. The results of my research in Bagandu alsodemonstrate the strong preference of villagers forpopular medicine in cases involving mental illnessand supernaturally caused mental problems. At thesame time, the doctor is the preferred source of ther-apy for the many types of natural disease, whilengangas and other specialists still have the confi-dence of the public in treating other maladies, re-ferred to as illnesses of man and some illnesses ofGod. Whatever the perceived etiology by kingrouptherapy managers, both popular and biomedicaltherapists treat natural illnesses. It is in this realm oftreatment that it is most important to ask, “Whatparts of popular medicine work?” rather than, “Doespopular medicine work?” Because evidence hasshown that psychotherapy is more successful in thehands of traditional curers, it is therefore most im-portant to question the effectiveness of popular ther-apy in handling natural illnesses. Currently, the ef-fectiveness of traditional drugs used for naturaldiseases is unknown; however, the continued sup-port of popular therapists by both rural and urbanAfricans indicates a strength in the system. The ef-fectiveness of the ngangas may be both psychologicaland pharmaceutical, and if the ecological niche doesprovide drugs that do cure natural illnesses, it is vitalthat these be determined and manufactured com-mercially in their countries of origin. If we can as-sume that some traditional drugs are effective, gov-ernments must utilize the expertise of healers inidentifying these.

It is unrealistic to attempt to train popular thera-pists in all aspects of biomedicine, just as it is unreal-istic to train biomedical specialists in the supernat-ural treatments applied by popular practitioners.However, neither type of therapist, nor the public,will benefit from the expertise of the other if they




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Swallowing Frogs: Angerand Illness in Northeast BrazilL. A. Rebhun

In northeast Brazil, women use the term swallowing frogs to mean suppressing anger, hatred, orirritation, and withstanding unfair treatment silently. In connection with “swallowing frogs,”women in L. A. Rebhun’s field research also complained of such folk illnesses as nervos (“nerves”),susto (shock sickness), blood-boiling bruises, mao olhado (evil eye), and peito aberto (open chest).All of these illnesses are discussed by Rebhun in this selection, each of which she argues is as muchan emotional syndrome as a folk medical syndrome and should be seen as an embodiment of distressin which physical symptoms and psychological experiences are identical. Thus, physical, social, andpersonal aspects of a situation all serve as evidence about whose bad behavior is making the individ-ual sick. Rebhun also suggests that, through the women’s use of emotional folk medical vocabulary,combined with culturally recognized behavioral symptoms, these folk medical syndromes can serve aspowerful tactics for controlling and manipulating others.

“Swallowing Frogs: Anger and Illness in Northeast Brazil”by L. A. Rebhun from MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGYQUARTERLY, December 1, 1994. Copyright © 1994, AmericanAnthropological Association. Reprinted by permission. [Endnotesand some references have been omitted for the present volume.]

Coração do pobre não bate, apanha.The hearts of the poor do not beat, they arebeaten.

—Brazilian proverb

In Latin American folk medicine, emotion is recog-nized as a powerful force that can cause sickness. Inaddition, certain emotions, especially strong or un-pleasant ones, can become sicknesses in themselves.In Northeast Brazil, both men and women sufferfrom emotion syndromes and the effects of suppress-ing strong sentiment, but the spectrum of allowedemotion is different for men and for women, as arethe moral connotations of particular emotions; menand women also have different permitted means ofexpressing particular sentiments. While conducting

fieldwork in Northeast Brazil, I often heard womensay that they had to “swallow frogs” (engolir sapos) inparticular situations. They used the term to meanboth suppressing anger, hatred, or irritation, andputting up with unfair treatment silently.

In connection with “swallowing frogs,” womenalso frequently complained of folk illnesses likenervos (“nerves”), susto (shock sickness), blood-boilingbruises, mal olhado (evil eye), and peito aberto (openchest). These syndromes constitute an interrelatedgroup of emotion-based ailments, generally typicalof women, which form part of sociomoral discourseon the proprieties of social interaction.

They may also be seen as symptoms of the pain ofbridging gaps between cultural expectation and per-sonal experience in emotion, a process neither easynor simple. Often, several similar folk medical com-plaints are interrelated, as in the Northeast Brazilianversions of “nerves,” susto, evil eye (cf. Scheper-Hughes 1992: 173) and peito aberto. A patient may bediagnosed with any or all of these, and the diagnosisreflects more opinion about the patient’s personality




and personal situation than the details of her symp-toms. All of these complaints have in commonstrong sentiments such as anxiety, shock, envy, ha-tred, and anger, which are both common and dis-turbing in women who are generally expected to beself-sacrificing, loving, and generous. Diagnosis ofone or more of these ailments reflects opinions on theappropriateness of a woman’s experience of nega-tive emotions.

These ailments are as much emotional as folkmedical. As Finkler has shown, the idea that thesekinds of syndromes are body metaphors for psycho-logical distress is too Cartesian; they are better seenas embodiments of distress in which body symptomand psychological experience are one and the same(1989: 82). The physical and psychological also com-bine in social aspects of folk medical diagnosis. Tosay that one is suffering from “nerves,” for example,is to describe both a set of symptoms and a psy-chosocial situation.

Individuals use emotional folk medical vocabu-lary as one aspect of self-presentation. Speakers com-bine behavioral symptoms (trembling, limping, andso forth), gossip about social situations, and suchemotional indicators as facial expression, other bodylanguage, and voice inflection with folk medical vo-cabulary to create evidence for moral interpretationsof their situations. Physical, social, and personal ex-periential aspects of their situation all combine as ev-idence for the truths of their moral assertions aboutwhose bad behavior is making them sick. Because ofembedded moral discourses, emotional folk medicalsyndromes can become powerful tactics in the strug-gle to control and manipulate friends, neighbors,and family members.

Emotion and Folk Illness

Over the last two decades, cross-cultural researchhas revealed how deeply culture and emotion are in-terwoven, how sentiments are shaped by the verydisparate vocabularies of different languages, howcultural expectations shape emotional expression inparticular circumstances, how intellect and emotionare indistinguishable in many cultural settings, andhow medical and emotional concepts are inter-twined in the folk medicine of many cultures.

Some folk medical vocabularies incorporate folktheories of emotion, as in the Andean pena in which

suffering, seen as inevitable, is believed to slowlyturn the heart into stone, causing chest pains, sad-ness, erratic thinking, and, in extreme cases, rage attacks (Toussignant 1984: 387). Others express sociomoral concepts as when evil eye is attributed tothe emotions of envy, jealousy, and anger, thought tobe wicked and therefore destructive. Emotional folkmedical complaints may also reflect ethnicity orgroup membership, constitute tactics in attempts atsocial manipulation, or embody distress not other-wise expressable. Such complaints may constitutewhat happens when people are not able to live up tothe emotional expectations of their cultures, or whenemotional expectations are contradictory, convo-luted, or in flux.

“Nerves,” susto, evil-eye sickness, and analoguesof open chest have been described in other LatinAmerican settings, often as separate syndromes,each with its own etiology and symptoms. Theyhave been called culture-bound or culturally medi-ated syndromes and seen either as embodied expres-sions of psychosocial distress or as local variations ofuniversal human psychiatric diseases.

Variations of such syndromes as evil eye and“nerves” can be found throughout the Mediter-ranean, North Africa, Latin America, and parts ofGreat Britain, as well as in some areas of NorthAmerica. The great variety in diverse forms of suchsyndromes as evil eye, for example, has led some toposit that it is not one but rather several differentsyndromes while others insist that it constitutes a re-lated cluster of variations on the same themes. In ei-ther case, both evil eye and “nerves” are complex,multivocal, multimeaning syndromes, so that differ-ent interpretations and significances may attach tothem in dissimilar cultural settings or even in dis-tinct circumstances within one cultural setting.

Field Site and Methods

From December 1988 to December 1990, I conductedresearch on emotion, family relations, and folk ail-ments in the context of Brazil’s shifting economy. Iworked in the Northeast Brazilian city of Caruaru,Pernambuco (population 200,000), and neighboringvillages, using a combination of methods in my re-search, including both direct and participant obser-vation, survey of archival sources and prior researchon the region, interviews with local politicians and





other officials about the legal framework of mar-riage, domestic violence, and child custody, and 120interviews with local residents.

Because I was interested in extended networks ofkin, friends, and neighbors, I used a snowball sam-pling method that has been shown to be effective instudies of small populations (Bernard 1994: 97–98).Interviews addressed demographic issues (age, mar-ital status, birthplace, and so forth) and the meaningsof words comprising emotional vocabulary, includ-ing what is called sentimento (sentiment) in local par-lance as well as words used to describe body statesconsidered part of sentimento. In addition, I askedinformants to tell me their life stories and to com-ment on things that had happened to them and thosethey knew, for thematic analysis. I also interviewedreligious healers and their patients about emotion-related folk medical complaints.

Brazil’s Northeast is its most impoverished re-gion, characterized by monetary instability, ex-tremes of social inequality, low life expectancy, andvery high infant mortality (IGBE/UNICEF 1986;Nations and Amaral 1991: 208). The past 30 yearshave seen the largest rural-to-urban migration inBrazil’s history: one in five Brazilians migrated tocities between 1960 and 1970 (Perlman 1976: 5), andby 1980 55 percent of the Northeast’s populationwas urban (de Araujo 1987: 167). Caruaru is the firsturban stop for many former rural residents. Eco-nomic disarray has intensified reliance on socialnetworks of friends and relatives. The region’s pop-ulation, struggling with new economic patterns inthe midst of abject poverty, endemic disease, and anunstable economy, is deeply dependent on relativesand friends for the goods, services, and connectionsthey need to survive. However, unable to trust oldsolidarities in the face of new, urban opportunities,they are frequently wracked by anger, resentment,and envy, all of which find expression in folk med-ical complaints.

Despite its relatively large population, Caruaru isorganized like a series of villages pushed together.Residents know their immediate neighbors verywell, and city blocks are often inhabited by single ex-tended families. But few people have friends livingmore than a few blocks away, and many neighbor-hoods are inhabited by members of no more thantwo or three large extended families. Often, thesefamilies also have members in any of several small

towns within about an hour’s commute by bus ofCaruaru. Economic and social ties to these out-of-town relatives are often stronger than ties to fellowCaruaruenses from different neighborhoods.

The Northeast is a semiarid region, subject to pe-riodic droughts but lacking the reservoirs, irrigation,and piping technologies that would make it fullyhabitable. To the poor, life is a luta or struggle inwhich people survive through a combination of as-tute manipulation of opportunity and the capacity toendure suffering.

In Caruaru, economic opportunities include workin its famous markets, blue jeans factories, and theburgeoning tourist trade, centered on the sale of littleclay figurines. My informants were drawn largelyfrom the lower working class, including housewives,market vendors, blue jeans pieceworkers, factoryworkers, bakers, seamstresses, maids, baby-sitters,and laundresses as well as their auto mechanic, arti-san, and factory-worker male companions. In addi-tion, I interviewed a number of local school teachersand some farmers and field workers from the ruralzone. They ranged in age from 14 to 78, with most intheir 30s and 40s. Most were at least nominallyCatholic, although about a third were Seventh-DayAdventist or other Protestant.

Power, Interpretation,and Vocabulary in EmotionalFolk Ailments

Both the study of folk medical systems and that ofemotion cross-culturally have been influenced byFoucault’s emancipation of the concept of powerfrom strict confinement in the political sphere tosomething immanent in all social bonds, ascendingfrom the micropolitics of interpersonal relations,through local institutions, to national and interna-tional establishments (Foucault 1986: 229–235). Asthe interpretive nature of both medical diagnosesand emotional labeling has become clearer, so hasthe power struggle underlying interpretation. Lutz’spoint that emotion is a “cultural and interpersonalprocess of naming, justifying, and persuading bypeople in relationship to each other” (1988: 5) isequally valid for folk medical diagnoses.

Especially with emotion-related folk syndromes,the questions of whether, when, and how to be sickare important elements of social stratagems. As

REBHUN • SWALLOWING FROGS: ANGER AND ILLNESS IN NORTHEAST BRAZIL | 251




Crandon asserts in a study of susto in Bolivia, thefolk-illness label constitutes a social judgment aboutthe situation of the sufferer. Crandon suggests thatresearchers ask not “what is susto,” but rather “whyis susto diagnosed in any particular case,” since thesame constellation of symptoms can also be diag-nosed as indicating any of several other folk syn-dromes (Crandon 1983: 154). The same question canbe asked of “nerves,” peito aberto, and evil eye.What do these diagnoses mean, how are they inter-related, and how do they fit into the micropolitics ofpower in families and local communities?

One of the ways these diagnoses fit the micropol-itics of family power is in their gendered nature.Men and women become angry at different things,and express their anger differently. In addition, themoral connotations of angry behavior are differentfor men and for women. A man, for example, maydrink himself to unconsciousness or beat his wifeand children regularly with little serious social con-sequence from his point of view, while women aremore likely to express despair through folk medicalsyndromes. While both men and women see poorpeople as suffering strugglers, the religious venera-tion of suffering as a key social value is greater forwomen than for men. Women’s suffering is both aconsequence of their powerlessness vis-à-vis menand an image used to manipulate men through guilt(Rebhun 1993). While both men and women seethemselves as oppressed by the opposite sex, there isalso general agreement that women suffer more be-cause of men than men do because of women.

Swallowing Frogs: The CulturalContext of Anger

The folk syndromes of “nerves,” evil eye, peitoaberto, and susto are interrelated through their rela-tion to strong emotions, especially anger. Despite aninfectious public joyousness and open sensuality,Northeast Brazilians tend to display a profound dis-trust of particular strong emotions, especially envy,anger, and certain forms of grief, which are seen associally disruptive because of their very intensity(Nations and Rebhun 1988; Scheper-Hughes 1992).At the same time, people encounter many reasons tofeel these, from the anguish of frequent bereave-ment, to the frustrating humiliations of trying to getbasic services from an uncaring government bu-

reaucracy, to the injustices of poverty, to the manybetrayals perpetrated by those who are supposed tolove one another.

My informants spoke of evil eye, “nerves,” peitoaberto, and susto as the result of their own and oth-ers’ anger (raiva, cólera), hatred (ódio), fear (medo),envy (inveja), and worry (preocupação). Sadness(tristeza), grief (pena), and depression (depressa–o, aba-timento) also figured into the experience of these ail-ments. Commonly, it was not the expression butrather the suppression of these emotions that wasseen as causing sickness.

The word my informants most frequently used torefer to anger was raiva, from the Latin rabia, mean-ing madness. Raiva also refers to the disease rabies.Brazilian dictionaries tend to define raiva by usingthe word ódio (from the Latin odi, “I hate”), althoughbilingual dictionaries give “raiva” as “anger,” and“ódio” as “hatred.” The Brazilian Dicionário Auréliolists as its second definition of raiva (after the disease)“the violent sentiment of hatred [sentimento violentode ódio].” Unlike the English, where anger, anxiety,and strangulation are etymologically associated, inBrazilian Portuguese, anger, hatred, violence, andthe disease of mad dogs are associated.

Emotions have associated scenarios; that is, anygiven sentiment is bounded by beliefs about whatsituations properly inspire it, how it ought to beexpressed or not expressed, and what the conse-quences of its experience should be, both for the in-dividual and for the group. In Brazilian Portuguese,anger is violent, powerful, and associated with adangerous disease. Its associated scenarios includefurious action, attacks, fighting, and the possibilityof death. It is no wonder that so many NortheastBrazilian women find it a particularly frightening,dangerous emotion to experience and to inspire inothers.

Emotion also constitutes a moral idiom, it is amoral reaction to a particular perception of events.The moral statements implied through emotions arecomplex for several reasons. For one, they dependon shared understandings of the presumptions un-derlying them, and these understandings may not beas similar as people assume.

In Northeast Brazil, disagreements about who haswronged whom are common. Through gossip andargument, the legitimacy of the participants’ emotionsand their response to those emotions as well as the





facts of any given case are analyzed and reanalyzedby the social group (cf. Crandon 1983, who describesa similar process in Bolivia). By communicating sen-timent either in words or symptoms, people makemoral arguments for their point of view on each oth-ers’ behavior. Emotion-related folk ailments becomestatements in the ongoing struggle to control one an-other’s behavior through moral suasion. Because thefacts of any given case may be ambiguous and be-cause the implications of any given emotion are alsoambiguous, multiple interpretations may attach toany given case (cf. White 1990: 51). Emotional life be-comes a series of battles over interpretation and con-sequences of moral behavior.

This process is particularly acute in the cases ofanger, hatred, and envy in Northeast Brazil. Averill(1982), in a discussion of emotion in the UnitedStates, posits that the emotions of anger, envy, andjealousy vary neither in their experience nor in theirexpression but rather in the nature of the perceivedmoral wrong that inspires them: anger is a reactionto a perceived injustice to oneself or one’s group,jealousy regards one’s loss to another as unjust, andenvy sees the good fortune of another as an unac-ceptable threat to one’s own situation. All threeinvolve resentment of the power or the primacy ofanother over self (1982: 11). This analysis can also beapplied to Northeast Brazil, where anger, jealousy,and envy are incompatible with the female obliga-tion to be compassionate and selfless.

The Heat of Anger:Blood-Boiling Bruises

My informants did not see emotions as concepts butrather as a kind of energy that is physically present,taking up space inside their bodies, leaping the dividebetween bodies, and acting according to the samephysical properties as water (cf. Solomon 1984).Anger was described as being like steam, rising fromthe boiling of its heat and hurting with its pressureunless expressed. Women described their unex-pressed anger as suffocating, unrelieved pressure.

Women often showed me small bruises on theirthighs and arms, which they attributed to the force oftheir blood boiling in their veins with anger. Preto(black) is used as a synonym for rage as in the phrasefiquei preto (“I was furious [black]”). Bruises mayoccur in conjunction with sick headaches, in which

pounding, shooting pains in the forehead and neckcombine with nausea and dizziness.

It feels like someone tied a rope around my headand stayed twisting it and tightening it, and I govomiting and dying of anger, and I have to go liedown or I’ll faint.

Despite the presence of hot, suffocating rage, womenoften described themselves as unable to express theirstrong emotions openly.

Once my husband said to me, “Tonight I’m goingto take you out.” So I went, got my nails done, myhair done, new dress, put makeup on, and I waited,waited, waited. He did not come home that night.I was so angry, my stomach hurt with anger [raiva],I had bruises on my thighs, you know, my bloodboiling, vomiting with hatred [ódio]. But I neversaid anything to him, undressed, went to bed. Thenext day, it was like it never happened. I nevermentioned it, he never mentioned it. . . . I don’tknow why. I never forgot it, my stomach hurt fordays. But I never said anything.

One reason for silence is fear of open conflict, espe-cially given anger’s violent associations.

I want to say everything that I feel, you know, thatI suffer, but I don’t say in order to not causeproblems. Understand, I’m like this, my daughter,I suffer in my nerves because I keep things insideof me. I can’t express, I don’t want to botheranyone, and I can’t say what I want to say.

The unexpressed emotion does not go away; instead,it stays as a suffocating, sickening presence insidethe body.

When I am angry at a person, I stay with asuffocation imprisoned inside of me. . . . I stay shutup. I continue vibrating.

There are a number of reasons for this inability toexpress anger. In some cases, the woman is afraidthat her emotion will overpower her self-control,leading her to actions she will later regret.

I am a very aggressive person, when I amangry, I really lose control. I’m afraid of myselfsometimes.

In other cases, the anger is diverted onto easier tar-gets, especially children. The woman feels such anaccumulation of outrage that small irritations likechildish pranks become too much to tolerate and sheexplodes in violence.





Ave Maria! Too nervous! Ave Maria! I swear a lot,fight too much with my kids, I want to beat them, tokill them in that moment, but then afterwards I cry,I repent, I see in myself that it isn’t a normal thing,you know? That I am very nervous. Whatever littlething, it’s enough if I tidy the house and then mylittle girl drops something on the floor, Ave Maria!I’m ready to die. The children have a damned fearof me because I’m, My Virgin Mary! Explosive. It’sanger.

Women may also be constrained by economic de-pendence and fear, especially women in physicallyand emotionally abusive relationships. For example,one informant I shall call Rejanne was unable to es-cape an abusive boyfriend for ten years. Married atage 12, at 13 she had been kicked out by her husbandbecause of rumors of infidelity, and none of hersmall-town neighbors would take her in or give herwork. Desperate to avoid being forced into taking upresidence as a prostitute at a local bordello, she wentto live with a man who offered her a home in returnfor sex and housework. He brought her far away toSão Paulo and kept her locked in their apartment,beating her if he suspected her of talking to anyoneother than himself. Socially isolated, economicallydependent, physically and emotionally battered,young and alone in her desperation, she was terri-fied to leave him and unable to assert herself withintheir relationship.

I always had to swallow frogs, you know, becauseI was totally dependent on him. . . . Even when Iknew I was right and he was unjust, I had toswallow it, I had to obey. I had to apologize, I hadto humble myself and submit, and even thank himfor mistreating me, in fear of my life.

Only when he brought her back to her hometownafter ten years away was she able to escape him withthe help of her parents, who had forgiven her youth-ful escapades in the intervening years.

Rejanne’s story, while dramatic, was not unusual.Domestic violence is common, and legal penaltiesare few for abusive husbands. While some womenleave men who beat them, resist, or fight back, manyfeel trapped by fear, family pressure, economic de-pendence, and/or fear of scandal.

Despite attempts to diminish the importance ofanger, women feel strongly. Like bereaved mothersof infants who consciously suppress their grief

(Nations and Rebhun 1988: 162), angry women usespecific techniques to calm themselves when theyare angry, like slow breathing, clenching their teethto avoid speech, drinking herbal teas, taking tran-quilizers, lying down, praying, or leaving the areauntil they feel composed.

When I have a problem with anger, I only getbetter if I leave and walk because if I stay in thehouse I will get even angrier . . . if not we willcome to blows, so I prefer to leave a little bit. Iget a cigarette and go into the world,disappearing.

For others, “swallowing frogs” is so habitual thatthey do it without thinking. Infuriating events sim-ply leave them speechless.

My neighbor arrived saying [my husband] wasbetraying me with another woman. I was all shutup, I shut up, my daughter, I didn’t have any voice,I said nothing, I don’t like to fight, I don’t like toquarrel, to exchange words, I only like peace, I likeunity in my house, understand. . . . I do everythingto have peace inside my house, but it is a tormentfor a mother to rule over [dominar] all these people,to have lots of kids and not to have problems witharguments. . . . We get angry at something and ournerves get tired, isn’t it just like that?

Anger is seen as a force or energy that can enter peo-ple’s bodies, causing harm. It is especially dangerousto the weakest.

Did you see Dona Maria passing by here with thatcrippled daughter of hers? Because when she wasseven months’ pregnant, her mother-in-law madeher so angry, she fainted with anger boiling insideher, and it burst the baby’s head so she was bornlike that, can’t walk, can’t talk, all stiff. A pregnantwoman can’t get angry, shouldn’t even be in a placewhere other people are angry.

Infants are often seen as suffering the effects of otherpeople’s anger, either directly in the form of blowsstruck in anger, or because some adult quarrelspilled over and hit them with the force of adultemotion. A fetus is vulnerable to any shock, anger, orstress its mother may feel while pregnant, and infantsand small children are vulnerable to an atmosphereof resentment, or anger, envy, or hatred directed attheir adult relatives. Depending on the strength ofthe emotion, it can kill or physically harm a baby, or,





as it does with adults, it can leave the baby with anervous temperament.

The Rezadeira

Although folk diagnoses are not specifically part ofCatholic doctrine, they are most likely to be diag-nosed by folk Catholic faith healers, called rezadeirasif female and rezadores if male. Folk Catholic faithhealers use prayers, rituals, advice, herbs, and phar-maceuticals in their treatments of common ailments.The folk medical systems used by popular and reli-gious practitioners do not make Western biomedi-cine’s sharp distinction between diseases of the bodyor mind and other types of misfortunes. These heal-ers are as likely to be consulted for a run of bad luckas for a physical complaint.

Of rural origin, rezadeiras now flourish in citieswhere crowding and poor sanitation increase sick-ness. Whereas rural Catholic healers are as likelyto be men as women, in cities, most are women andthe majority of their patients are also women.Rezadeiras treat patients with prayers mixed withrhymes specific to particular ailments.

Some ailments, such as fallen fontanelle, areunique to infants, whereas others, such as peitoaberto, are typical of adults. Even when adults andinfants are diagnosed as having the same syndrome,the symptoms are different. Such labels as evil eye orsusto refer to irritability, frequent crying, or physicalsymptoms like diarrhea in infants; in adults they de-scribe embodied emotional distress (see also Cran-don 1983: 159–60).

“Nerves”: Daily Anxiety

Illnesses called “nerves” have been describedthroughout Europe and the Americas (Low 1989).Like many other aspects of European and NewWorld folk medicine, they can be traced back to an-cient Greek medicine. Both Hippocrates and Galenposited the existence of physical structures in thebody that translated the desires of the mind into theactions of the body. They called these “nerves”(Davis and Whitten 1988). In Northeast Brazilianfolk medicine, the nerves are seen as little stringsthat control the muscles and transmit tension. They

can get worn out by too much use in the form ofworry and tension or by the accumulation of shocks.When that happens, the person becomes nervoso, ornervous, a permanent state.

The nervoso person frequently experiencesheadaches, trembling, dizziness, fatigue, belly aches,and sometimes partial paralysis, tingling of the ex-tremities, and appetite disturbances. But the hall-mark of the condition of nervoso is the inability totolerate or control stressful emotions. Through con-stant exposure to the shocks of painful emotion, the“nerves” sufferer has become too sensitive to life’semotional hardships. Nervosa women describedthemselves as “uncontrolled” (descontrolada), proneto attacks of rage or bouts of crying (Rebhun 1993:138–40).

Nervos is perhaps more an idiom of daily lifethan a medical complaint per se.

It gets me in the nerves, this difficult life, that I bearit, bear it, bear it, bear it, but also I don’t havepatience, it gives me that hatred [ódio] inside of me,it stays that, that [thing] locked inside. I stay withtoo much anger.

Both men and women can be nervoso (Duarte1986), but the symptoms of the condition have dif-ferent connotations. To the extent that nervosismo(nervousness) is a state of victimization, a constantvulnerability in which the person has lost her abilityto withstand emotional shocks, it is feminine. How-ever, some of the behaviors associated with a ner-voso individual, irritability, bouts of rage, and violentoutbursts, are considered normal in men but unac-ceptable in women (cf. Dunk 1989: 38), whereas fitsof uncontrollable crying or moments of intense, par-alyzing terror are more acceptable as feminine symp-toms. Nervosismo is not only more typical ofwomen, but because women’s emotional repertoireis less constrained than men’s, they can adapt it to awider range of situations and plumb it for a greaternumber of meanings than can men.

Nervosismo is a chronic state, often described as ei-ther an innate or an acquired personality trait. It is re-lated to evil eye and susto because either of those cancause it and because, along with them, it forms part ofa discourse on anger. The presence of too much angerinside the body frazzles the nerves, leaving them un-able to stand even mild negative emotions.





Open Chest: Sicknessand Emotional Vulnerability

Anger can either be the person’s own suppressedrage, or it can be other people’s anger that enters abody not properly closed. This state of dangerousemotional openness is called peito aberto (openchest). It is said to be caused by carrying too muchweight, which makes the heart expand, openingthe chest, and allowing evil influences to enter.Rezadeiras diagnose open chest by measuring astring twice against the patient’s forearm and thenlooping it around the chest. If the measured lengthdoes not close securely around the chest (and itnever does), a diagnosis of open chest is made. Itis treated by tying the string around the chest, pray-ing while making the sign of the cross over thechest, and pushing inward on the chest and breasts.Then the string is measured again and again loopedover the chest. This time, it fits, and the rezadeiradeclares the chest properly closed.

I have argued elsewhere (Rebhun 1994) that the“weight” (peso) in open chest is a metaphor: the emo-tional weight of unshed tears, unspoken fury, unex-pressed hatred. Women speak of these sentiments astaking up space inside their bodies, pressing againstthe inside of the face, the chest, or the belly, and hav-ing to be restrained with a physical effort. When theemotional weight becomes too heavy to carry, itbursts out, leaving openings where it left the body.Other people’s anger and envy can enter these open-ings in the form of evil eye.

The expansion of the chest in peito aberto is re-lated to the idea that a woman’s heart is large andgrows each time she comes to care about anotherperson. When the “weight” of caring for and worry-ing about others becomes too great, the woman’sheart expands too much and pushes her chest open.The condition of being open is generally seen as as-sociated with women, because their genitals are seenas physically open in form and because their heartsare thought emotionally open. Openness has aspecifically sexual connotation; the word fechada(closed) can be used to mean “virgin.” Defloration,pregnancy, childbirth, and the accumulated weightof emotional troubles open women’s bodies evenmore, while men remain with closed bodies andemotionally closed hearts that evil influences cannotenter as easily (cf. Robben 1988: 115).

Peito aberto is tied to evil eye because it isthrough evil eye that anger and envy enter theopened body. Rezadeiras’ treatments for evil eyeusually start with peito aberto, in an effort to closethe body, and then proceed to remove any existingevil eye. Relief is thought to be immediate but tem-porary because the situations that give rise to peitoaberto and evil eye are recurrent.

Evil Eye: The Sicknessof Others’ Anger

References to evil eye and attempts to deflect it areubiquitous in Northeast Brazil. People often followcompliments with “but I don’t give evil eye” or writethe phrase “o seu olho gordo é cego p’ra mim [your evileye is blind to me]” on truck bumpers or the walls ofstores, restaurants, and booths in the marketplace. Inaddition, people ward off evil eye with amulets suchas figas and tiny glass eyes (often blue), as well assmall figures of Buddha, placed in corners or on win-dowsills with their backs to any potential watchersand with a small plate of coins or water nearby.

Evil eye is designated by a number of words inBrazilian Portuguese including olhado (gaze), olhogordo (fat eye), and olho grande (big eye). Mau olhado(bad gaze) is the most common of these terms. TheNortheastern Brazilian evil-eye belief is similar tothe belief that some people can cause harm by gazingwhile experiencing envy or anger found in northernAfrica, the Mediterranean, and nonindigenous LatinAmerica (Dundes 1980; Roberts 1976). In NortheastBrazil, as in these areas, the belief occurs in twoforms that are not clearly distinguished; in one, evileye is deliberately used by the evil hearted to causeharm; in the other it is inadvertent. Evil-eye beliefshave been explained as a consequence of the notionthat one person’s gain is another’s loss (Dundes1980; Foster 1965, 1972), part of the psychodynamicsof patronage (Garrison and Arensberg 1976), andfear of loss of vital fluids (Dundes 1980).

Many Northeast Brazilian customs forestall anypossible envy and therefore prevent evil eye. For ex-ample, guests are typically offered water, coffee, andfood upon entering homes, at least in part so thattheir hunger will not lead to envy of the household’sfood. Evil eye beliefs also show up in responses tocompliments and in any other situations that mayinvolve envy or anger. The standard response to a





compliment is to offer the object of admiration to theadmirer, who is honor bound to refuse it. Infants arebelieved especially vulnerable to evil eye, partly be-cause they are weak, and partly because they are sohighly desired, inviting envy by the childless (cf.Dundes 1980). Babies are kept indoors as much aspossible, and when carried outside, they are care-fully hidden from view with elaborate clothing. Thewhole baby bundle is then shaded from the glare ofthe sun and the view of passersby under a shawl fortransport outside the home.

Mothers also pin amulets to babies’ clothing as aprotection against evil eye (cf. Cosminsky 1967: 167).Anyone who admires the baby will be jokingly im-portuned to adopt it. In addition, childless womenwho enter homes may be told to take one or more ofthe children. This forces them to explicitly deny anydesire for or envy of the children, deflecting any evileye they might have cast.

Rezadeiras treat evil eye with Catholic prayersmixed with charms specific to the ailment. As onehealer explained, to treat evil eye:

I pray the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed, theHail Mary, the Hail Holy Queen, then for olhado Ipray like this: “with two you were put on,” it’s thetwo eyes, isn’t it? “With three I take you off,” [thatis] with the powers of the three people of the HolyTrinity. Pray three times and the olhado heals.

Evil eye can cause infertility and bad luck, make cat-tle stop giving milk, or cause dishes to break, cropsto fail, plants to die, and house walls to crack. It isalso said to cause a number of physical complaints.

Like other folk illnesses, evil-eye sickness affectsinfants differently from adults (cf. Crandon 1983). Ininfants, evil eye is said to cause recurrent problemssuch as frequent ear infection, fever, or naggingcough, and also diarrhea and symptoms of dehydra-tion. It can lead to death. In older children and adults,evil eye can cause any wound to delay healing, any re-current or persistent symptom, diarrhea, or fever. Itcan also cause dry, frizzy hair, split ends, and hairloss. Evil eye also describes illness related to familytensions, as in the case of Nezinha, described below.

Nezinha: A Case of Evil Eye

One thirty-five-year-old woman from Caruaru Ishall call Nezinha sought treatment from rezadeiraDona Maria for insomnia, headache, body aches,

and general distress. After praying a general blessingin her front room where five or six other women gos-siped about their symptoms while awaiting treat-ment, Dona Maria invited Nezinha and me to share aCoca-Cola in the kitchen. This provided the opportu-nity for a more private consultation during whichthe healer questioned her patient at length about herpersonal situation while providing me with explana-tory asides. Nezinha said that she had run away witha boyfriend at a young age. During the eight yearsshe lived with him, she had three children. When hermarriage broke up, she moved to her parents’ house.Because of difficulties in the early years of her par-ents’ marriage, Nezinha (the firstborn) had beenraised by her grandmother. This was the first timeshe had lived for any length of time at her parents’house. At the time she moved back, her brother hadbeen planning to marry his longtime fiancée and tolive with her in the second story of the house, but theaddition of Nezinha, her three children, her maid,and the maid’s children to the household destroyedthat plan. The wedding was put off indefinitely, andthe household reluctantly set about absorbing thenew members.

The maid and her young daughter earned theirkeep with household labor, but Nezinha was unableto find work until her brother’s fiancée got her a jobat the fiancée’s place of work. The job was enor-mously important to Nezinha’s self-esteem and herdesire for independence. She longed to earn enoughto establish her own household. The fiancée wantedto help Nezinha because she could marry only ifNezinha were out of the household.

Old resentments caused tension between Nezinhaand her mother: her parents had never gotten alongwell; her brother resented her presence; and she sus-pected that the maid was having an affair with her fa-ther as she had years earlier with Nezinha’s husband.Nezinha stated that all of these tensions had frazzledher nerves, leaving her permanently nervosa, withtrembling and heart palpitations. Then somethingelse happened that drove her over the edge.

It happens that my brother had an affair with afriend of mine. So my mother liked it a lot, becauseshe doesn’t like his fiancée and she hoped he wouldleave her. So she told the fiancée about the affair inhopes they would break up. But he left my friend.So then my mother was angry at me aboutsomething and said to the fiancée that I was the one





who arranged everything for the affair, whointroduced them, you know, but I didn’t, it’s a lie.So the fiancée had a fight with my brother. So nowmy brother is angry at me, thinking that I told hisfiancée, but I didn’t tell her; my mother did. Thefiancée hates me because she believes my mother’suntrue story. My friend is angry with me becauseshe’s angry with my brother and the whole family,and she also thinks I told, but I didn’t. My mother ismad at me because, because, well because she’salways mad at me! I didn’t do anything! Everybodyis mad at me. Whenever there’s tension in the housethe kids start fussing and hanging on me and I hatethat and then I yell at them and I feel bad. And I amhere without being able to sleep, with a headache,constantly sick.

The rezadeira diagnosed evil eye and open chest.She performed the requisite blessings and sold Nez-inha a candle, telling her to place her anger at hermother in the candle, scratch her mother’s name onits side, and burn it in the cathedral. In addition, sheprescribed an herbal tea to be taken before bedtimeand told Nezinha to invite the fiancée to go to a movieand ask her advice on how to treat headaches. She fur-ther advised that Nezinha should take the children toplay on a ferris wheel set up for a forthcoming townfestival to distract them from the family tension andwork on trying to stay out of her mother’s way. DonaMaria explained to us that Nezinha’s friends and rel-atives do not mean to make her sick, and she had tohelp them help her get better. With the protection ofthe prayer to “close” her body to evil influences andthe removal of her own anger to be burned up by thecandle, they could not hurt her.

The herbal tea (chamomile) was to help her feelcalm enough to sleep. By asking the fiancée’s advice,Nezinha would communicate her friendship andalso let the fiancée know that she was suffering fromthe situation. The fiancée would be obligated to helpNezinha in order to avoid feeling guilty, and helpingher would restore the two women’s friendship onwhich Nezinha’s job depended. Dona Maria contin-ued her interpretation of Nezinha’s situation:

Some people think that evil eye is a supernaturalthing, but it isn’t. It’s that no one likes it whenothers are angry or jealous. And we always sensethe feelings of others in the same way that we cansee and hear. So we stay nervous, thinking of whatcould happen. Everyone is afraid to be abandonedor attacked. So the fear, the anger, and the anxiety

combine, and the person stays sick. So you have toprotect with the powers of God, calm, and alsoimprove the situation for the person to get better.

Dona Maria’s explanation of evil eye was not un-usual. Although a few rezadeiras described evil eyeas a supernatural force, most described it in natural-istic terms, as a kind of “energy” or, like Dona Maria,as a consequence of emotional interactions. Severalrezadeiras described evil eye as a “superstition of thepeople,” explaining that it is really a kind of tensioncaused by the awareness of other people’s anger andenvy. In choosing to diagnose evil eye, Dona Mariawas making a statement about Nezinha’s personalsituation.

Susto: Fear and Violence

Variants of folk ailments called susto (fright sick-ness) or espanto (the sickness of fright from seeing aghost) have been widely described in Latin Americaand among U.S. Latinos (Clark 1978; Crandon 1983;Foster and Anderson 1978; Gillen 1948; Madsen1964; Rubel 1964; Toussignant 1979). There are fourmajor theoretical explanations for susto beliefs. Theyhave been interpreted as forms of depression, anxi-ety, or hysteria. Alternatively, they have been seen associally defined sick roles, which afflicted individu-als use to deal with stress by eliciting community at-tention, moral support, and temporary respite fromobligations.

Susto has been described as a cultural label forphysiological syndromes such as hypoglycemia(Bolton 1981) and certain kinds of diarrhea in infants(Crandon 1983; Nations 1982). Crandon, in a studyof Bolivian villagers, posits that when the label sustois applied to adults, it constitutes a communal state-ment about the situation of the patient. She sees thediagnosis of susto as a claim of vulnerability, depri-vation, and disenfranchisement (1983: 161–64). Asimilar interpretation can be made in NortheastBrazil, where susto can cause the sufferer to becomenervoso, losing the ability to withstand emotional orphysical strain calmly.

Susto also carries implications of mistreatment inNortheast Brazil. Although descriptions of sustofrom other areas have emphasized the role of ghostencounters and soul loss, my informants used it torefer primarily to three kinds of shock: the trauma ofa sudden death; the anguish of discovering sexual





betrayal; and the impact of violent blows. In somecases, two or more of these types of shock are viewedas causing susto.

When my mother died, I was in the 22nd day ofconfinement after the birth of a child. I fainted . . .because I can’t under any circumstances have afright. And after that I kept on getting nervos . . .and then I suffered a terrible grief with my husbandbecause he was with another woman. I was oneday away from giving birth, wanting to give him ason, and he was with this woman. So I was verydisgusted with this. So the two sustos together gaveme this problem with my nerves. Sometimes I havea great anger that I can’t avenge, it’s like I’m cryingwith anger, it’s locked inside of me. I get revolted,disgusted, any little thing happens and I can’t standit any more, I get hurt. It’s nervos, is what it is.

The term susto also came up frequently in inter-views when I asked about the cause of the death of achild. Saying a child died of susto was often a refer-ence either to the child having been killed violentlyor to a miscarriage attributed to a strong blow to thebelly of a pregnant woman.

My mother had six children, three died and threestayed [with us]. They died because of susto,because my father, he beat my mother, so the causeof the deaths of my siblings was my father and thesusto he gave. . . . I remember that my mother waspregnant with a baby that her name was going to beTaxa. My mother was preparing the bottle for mylittle sister Paxa, so Papa came up behind her andkicked her in the back so that her belly hit the stove,and the hot gruel fell on top of her belly. Later thatday she started to hemorrhage and lost the baby,because of the susto.

Some women described their own nervosismoas due to the susto from beatings that also killedtheir unborn children. For example, one 34-year-oldwoman had lost 6 of her 13 pregnancies after beat-ings by her husband. Paula described each of thesemiscarriages as having been due to susto.

They died of susto. It was like, I lost my secondchild because of susto. Oxente! Because my husbandreally passed the limits with me, grabbed me by myfeet and swung me upside down, he hit my headover there on the chairs, and I was all—I hit myhead there on the corner of the wardrobe, and Iwas dizzy. . . . I was in agony, he was drunk youknow. . . . And I was pregnant, and then heknocked me down and he gave me a punch in the

belly, so I started to lose the baby, so I picked up mydaughter, you know she was 8 months old, and Iwent running to Papa’s house.

But like Rejanne, Paula was not on good termswith her family. Her father was furious about whathe considered to be her husband’s disgraceful be-havior. Her husband had convinced Paula’s father tolet her marry him despite his reputation as a drunk,by declaring himself cured and proving it by remain-ing sober over the course of a year of engagement.But the night before the wedding he went out drink-ing with his friends.

So when it was getting to be about 5 o’clock, thesteer was arriving [a reference to the marriage cart],I received notice that he was sick at his mother’shouse. So we went to find him with my father, andso when we arrived he didn’t know anybody, evenhis bride he didn’t recognize, and the stink of rumon him! . . . He seemed to be possessed by a demon[endemoniado]. . . . I was afraid to approach him.And because of this my father was disgusted withhim, that his eldest daughter was getting marriedand the groom would behave this way on the dayof the wedding! He said it was an insult to hishonor, a disgrace to his daughter. But I married himanyway, because I loved him.

Her father’s rage was so great that he disownedPaula, saying that if she wanted to marry a disgrace-ful man like that, she would have to bear the con-sequences. While fleeing the beating in panic, sheremembered her father’s words and fearful of beingturned away, doubled over in pain, she stoppedalong the way.

And then in the middle of the road, I was squattingand hemorrhaging, I met my mother-in-law . . . andshe said, “A fight between husband and wife youresolve at home” and she brought me crying andmiscarrying back. So I lost that baby because of thesusto, and the other ones later, and it got me in mynerves, that I just lived trembling all the time.

Paula did not think it was possible to leave her hus-band because she had nowhere to go and no one tohelp her raise her seven children. She also stated thatalthough she did not love her husband anymore, shehad pity (pena) for him, and she hoped that somedayhe would stop drinking. Believing that he was basi-cally a good man, she regarded his drinking as akind of demonic possession rather than an aspect ofhis character, as her father did.





She had suffered from nervos for many yearsuntil she had a profound religious experience whilespeaking with a Jehovah’s Witness missionary whocame to her door. She stated that the personal rela-tionship she now felt with Jesus had enabled her toreplace anger with loving compassion and thereby tobear her burdens without sickness. During the yearand a half that I knew her, she did not report anysymptoms of “nerves.”

Folk Ailments and the Suppressionof Anger

Emotion is a supremely social phenomenon. It is theidiom in which social bonds are negotiated andmaintained, the substance of which social tactics aremade. As a personal experience, emotion is rooted inthe body and suffuses the psyche; as a social expe-rience, emotion responds to interpretations of theactions of others and moral connotations of socialsituations. As a moral statement, it has a uniquelyevocative potency, making it ideal for social manipu-lation. It frequently finds expression in the form offolk medical syndromes.

In Northeast Brazil, nervos, peito aberto, evil eye,and susto together form a discourse on the sickening

power of anger. Although each of these syndromeshas similar symptoms, they connote different thingsabout the sufferer. Susto is a state of emotional vul-nerability caused by one or more shocking events. Itcan lead to nervos, or the frazzling of a person’s abil-ity to remain calm through repeated worry, grief,anger, and sadness. Peito aberto occurs when awoman’s heart expands to encompass all those forwhom she feels compassion and, combined with theseething of her own suppressed anger, pushes openher chest, allowing negative influences to enter. Evileye is caused by the envy and anger of others, vic-timizing the sufferer.

The folk models of these syndromes allow indi-viduals to use them as claims about themselves andthe actions and motives of those they blame for theircondition (cf. Migliore 1983: 8). Susto and nervos arestatements about the impossibility of withstandingstress, shocks, and violence. Peito aberto is a com-ment on the challenges of opening one’s heart to lovewhile protecting oneself from hurt. Evil eye is a con-demnation of those who are supposed to love but in-stead envy. Through these folk illnesses, NortheastBrazilian women and men discuss their traumas,weaknesses, and victimization, and negotiate socialrelations.





261

Jamaican peasants show great concern for illness. Itis a very common topic of discussion and a source ofconstant anxiety. There is, however, little under-standing of the scientific theory of disease. Illnessesare blamed on drafts and exposure to cold tempera-ture or imbalances of blood or bile in the body (M. F.Mitchell 1980: 28). They are also, perhaps more often,attributed to spiritual causes.

According to one Balm healer, the majority ofillnesses are “chastisements” from God for “disobe-dience” to His ways. However, another said that“most sickness coming from nigromancy,” whichrefers to Obeah (sorcery), and this is the most com-mon belief. In the behavioral or perceived environ-ment of Jamaican peasants, there are four typesof malevolent spirits that can cause suffering:duppies (ghosts), fallen angels, demons, and thedevil. In addition, ancestor spirits may punish theirdescendants. Jamaican peasants also worry thatneighbors and relatives will turn, in envy or spite,to an obeahman (sorcerer), who has the supernatural

31

Mothering and the Practiceof “Balm” in JamaicaWilliam Wedenoja

William Wedenoja has conducted field research in Jamaica since 1972, specializing in, among otherinterests, Afro-Jamaican religious cultism and folk healing. In this article, he centers on the gender ofhealers, a subject rarely treated in anthropological literature. In particular, Wedenoja aims his re-search at women who practice Balm, an Afro-American folk healing tradition in Jamaica that, hemaintains, brings about maternal transference, encourages patients’ dependency and regression, andappears to be a ritualized extension of mothering. Traditional therapy in Jamaica can be complex atfirst glance, but the author makes a clear distinction among Balm healers, obeah men (sorcerers), andscientists (who provide their clients good luck charms) and demonstrates the relationship of these spe-cialists to Myalist healing cults, Revivalism, and Pentecostalism.

Wedenoja explains the incompatibility of so-called biomedical (modern) practitioners with themajority of Jamaicans whose disease etiology is not restricted to Western explanations of illness butincludes ghosts (duppies), attacks by obeah men, fallen angels, demons, ancestor spirits, and thedevil himself. The charismatic Mother Jones typifies Balm healers in Jamaica, and Wedenoja’s de-scription of her shows the importance of her strength and powers in primarily combating spiritualafflictions. The characterization of Mother Jones and others who practice Balm goes far in explainingwhy the author feels the feminine powers of women are vital to successful curing. Wedenoja’s discus-sion of diagnostic divination (“concentration”) is reminiscent of Lehmann’s article, “Eyes of theNgangas,” in this chapter and suggests that healing, in all its forms, represents the strongest rem-nants of African culture in Jamaica.

Reprinted from Carol Shepherd McClain, ed., WOMEN ASHEALERS, CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES (NewBrunswick and London, 1989), pp. 76–97, by permission.




power to manipulate spirits and use them to doharm.

The first resort in cases of illness is, of course, self-medication. Though Jamaica has a lengthy and exten-sive tradition of folk cures, it is dying out and rapidlybeing replaced by over-the-counter drugs. If an ill-ness persists for several days, help may be soughtfrom a private doctor or a government medical clinic,but there is widespread dissatisfaction with them. Asophisticated comparison of ninety-seven patients ofhealers and doctors in Jamaica by Long (1973: 217–32)showed that Balm healers are better liked, spend sig-nificantly more time with patients, and give more sat-isfying diagnoses than doctors.

The expense of a doctor’s examination and pre-scription drugs is a serious drain on the financial re-sources of the average Jamaican, and seeing a doctoroften involves significant travel and a long wait atthe office. The greatest problem with the doctor-patient relationship, however, is communication,which is inhibited by cultural and class differences.

Doctors and patients normally come from sepa-rate subcultures of Jamaican society; they use differ-ent terms to describe symptoms and label diseasesand they hold different beliefs about etiology andtreatment. Consequently, a doctor may find it diffi-cult to elicit diagnostically meaningful symptomsfrom a patient, and a patient may not understand adoctor’s diagnosis or the purpose of prescribed med-ication. In addition, a patient may regard diagnosticinquiry as a sign of incompetence, because it is thecustom of Balm healers to divine an illness beforespeaking with a patient. These factors undermine apatient’s faith in a doctor and his expectation of suc-cessful treatment.

In general, rural Jamaicans are dissatisfied withthe treatment they receive from doctors and have lit-tle faith in their effectiveness. Moreover, they believedoctors are incapable of dealing with illnesses of a“spiritual” nature. Therefore, many turn to religionand folk healers for relief.

A patient may consult an obeahman or a “scien-tist,” but these magical practitioners are not gener-ally viewed as healers. Obeahmen are widely fearedfor their power to curse others and control ghosts.People turn to scientists principally for good-luckcharms like rings and bracelets, which are used toavoid accidents or to bring success.

Balm, which has been practiced for over one hun-dred years in Jamaica, is closely associated with an

indigenous religious cult called Revival. AlthoughJamaicans regard Revivalism as a Christian faith, it isactually a syncretic, Afro-Christian religion that re-lies heavily on the intervention of spirits, oftenthrough dreams and “trance” states. Revival cultsare descended from Myalist healing cults, whichemerged in the late eighteenth century to counterObeah (Wedenoja 1988). Many Revivalist cere-monies and practices are concerned with the preven-tion or alleviation of illness and misfortune, andabout half of all Revival cults offer treatment for out-siders as well as members. Some Revivalists operatebalmyards devoted entirely to the practice of healing.These healing centers employ Revivalist beliefs andpractices but are not Revival cult centers.

Healing in Balmyardsand Revival Cults

Jamaican peasant culture makes a distinction be-tween the sacred and the profane, referred to indige-nously as the “spiritual” and the “temporal.” Re-vivalism is commonly called “the spiritual work”and Balm is often called “spiritual science,” becausethey deal with spirits, treat spiritual afflictions, andrely on trance states. Although God is held to be thesource of their healing power, the power is deliveredto them through angels by means of the Holy Spirit.In contrast, Obeah is called “temporal science” be-cause it can be learned and is not a gift. Moreover,Revivalists and balmists routinely rely on visions,dreams, precognition, glossolalia, and ceremonialpossession trance, whereas the obeahman dependson magic and does not use altered states of con-sciousness.

The Balm healer is essentially a shaman, a personwho has received—generally during a severe illness—a spiritual “calling to heal the nation” and the “spir-itual gifts” of divination and healing. The balmist’spower to heal is based on spirit mediumship; sheworks with angel familiars who advise her in diag-nosis and treatment.

Patients are called out of a healing service, one ata time, to a shed where they are bathed in water thatherbs have been boiled in. This bath is normallyaccompanied by the recitation of psalms. After beingbathed, the patient is led to a private room for a con-sultation with the healer.

In order to diagnose an affliction, a Balm healerwill perform a spiritual divination or “reading,”





which psychologically is an institutionalized form ofempathy. There are several ways to read a patient,but in all cases symptoms are never elicited from thepatient prior to a reading. The balmist must demon-strate her gift of healing by telling the patient whathis or her problems are. One of the more commonmethods of divination is called “concentration”: typ-ically, the healer will gaze intently at a silver coin ora plant leaf in a glass of water until a “message” froman angel is received in her mind. Other forms ofreading include interpreting the movement of theflame of a candle, reading a patient’s tongue, cardcutting, passing hands over the body of a patient, in-terpretation of dreams, and palm reading. Very pow-erful healers may be able to read patients simply bylooking at them.

Balm healers deal with every conceivable form ofhuman suffering except serious wounds and brokenbones, but the most common complaint is pain inany part of the body. Another frequent problem is avague syndrome called “bad feeling,” which is gen-erally characterized by sudden onset, “feeling out ofself,” losing self-control, feeling weak and fearful,profuse sweating, and fainting. Other popular prob-lems include weakness, indigestion, headaches, anda feeling of “heaviness” or “beating” in the head.Every healer sees some cases of paralysis, blindness,crippled limbs, deafness, and dumbness. Mental dis-orders are almost always blamed on spirits, and theyare frequently treated by healers. Patients also com-plain of problems in living such as excessive worryor “fretting,” difficulties in raising children, and con-flicts with family members, boyfriends, girlfriends,or spouses. Many patients believe that neighbors orrelatives are trying to “kill” them—that is, using sor-cery on them. Some are filled with hate and want toharm others supernaturally.

Balm healers specialize in spiritual afflictions. Al-though they usually provide or prescribe herbalremedies and common drugs, they also use ritualsand magical items to counteract spiritual forces.Balmists routinely tell their patients to burn candlesor frankincense and myrrh, recite prayers, and readpsalms. They often anoint patients with lavender oiland perfumes or tell them to fast to “build up thespirit.” Sometimes they will open and close a pair ofscissors over the head of a patient to “cut”—that is, toexorcise—a spirit or use a padlock to “lock” a spirit.

A belief that conversion to Christianity and theliving of a Christian life will protect one from Obeah

and ghosts has been prevalent in Jamaica since theeighteenth century. Revivalism had its origin in anti-sorcery movements, and many of its ceremonies in-volve ritual combat with ghosts. . . .

Portrait of a Balm Healer

Ethnographic fieldwork is a fortuitous enterprise. Bychance rather than by design, the hamlet I chose tolive in had a very successful Revival cult led by apopular healer, who made me her “godson” on myfirst visit with her. During the following year and ahalf we spent a great deal of time together, and Icame to know her as well as I have ever knownanyone.

The Reverend Martha Jones, generally called“Mother” Jones (these are pseudonyms), is a stockysixty-four-year-old black woman who stands aboutfive feet five inches tall and weighs about 140pounds. She lives with about thirty followers andchildren in a large house next to her church, whichshe founded in 1950.

Mother Jones was born in the community whereshe now lives, and spent her first twelve years there.Her father, who died in 1953, made his living as apainter and was also a leader in the local MissionaryAlliance church, where she was baptized. She de-scribes him as a quiet, strict, stern, sober, and hard-working man, who was close to her. Her mother,who died in 1937, was a housewife who gave birth toten children, four of whom are still living. She toowas quiet, strict, and home-loving.

Mother Jones was sickly throughout childhoodand worried constantly about getting ill or hurt. Shecontracted malaria and typhoid fever, and lost herhair. Because she was their youngest child and sosickly, her parents were very protective, even keep-ing her from school, and gave her a great deal ofattention.

At the age of twelve Mother Jones went toKingston to live with an older sister, and she workedthere as a maid for eighteen years. She married ablack American sailor when she was twenty-two butnever had any children. In her late twenties she hada number of “spiritual experiences”—epileptiformstates and visions—and went to a Balm woman whotold her she had a “spiritual gift.”

Mother Jones moved to Washington, D.C., whenshe was thirty to work as a parlormaid for the Britishambassador, but she became “crippled” during her

WEDENOJA • MOTHERING AND THE PRACTICE OF “BALM” IN JAMAICA | 263




first year there and received a vision telling her to re-turn to Jamaica and start a healing ministry. After an-other year in Kingston, she and her husband movedto her home town and started a “work.” Her hus-band, however, left in the following year, and she hasnot seen or heard from him since.

Mother Jones was ordained in the NationalBaptist church in 1960 and appointed “overseer” forfour or five churches in the area. They eventuallybroke away, and she changed her membership to an-other American sect. Over the past twenty-fiveyears, every moment of her life has been devoted toher church and healing. She once remarked to me,“my task is not an easy one, my time is not my own.I couldn’t tell the day when I am able to rest my headon the pillow.” Every Monday she holds a healingservice and sees from ten to thirty patients. Through-out the week other patients come individually to her.And her church holds a variety of services andclasses almost every day or night of the week.

The people in her community have great respectfor Mother Jones, and she has many devoted fol-lowers throughout the island and among Jamaicancommunities in England, Canada, and the UnitedStates. No one doubts her integrity and devotion.Everyone refers to her as “Mother” and relates toher as a mother. She shows concern not only for herpatients and followers but for the entire commu-nity and society as well. She likes children and theyare attracted to her. About twenty children livewith her: some are ill or handicapped and othershave been left with her for discipline or becausetheir mothers are unable to care adequately forthem.

Mother Jones says that people come to her forhealing when a doctor fails to find anything wrongwith them and they think it must be a spiritual, not aphysical, problem. She sends her patients to a doctorif she thinks they need one and, for her protection,usually insists that they see a doctor before comingunder her care; otherwise she could be liable forprosecution. She does not normally treat someonewho is on medication, because “you can’t mix thespiritual and the temporal.”

Mother Jones tells her patients that “the Lord willhelp them and they will be healed just through faith,if they believe.” But, she laments, “Some peoplewant more. . . . They want something to take waywith them. . . . They seem to think it is someone’s bad

intents. . . . They don’t believe prayer and God willbe able to keep them. . . . They feel they have to paya lot of money . . . and get some superstitious some-thing, or they are unsatisfied.” Unlike some Jamaicanhealers, who blame many problems on Obeah andduppies and provide “guards” (protective amulets),Mother Jones often rebukes these patients by tellingthem “their thoughts are not right.”

Mother Jones told me she wanted to be a preacherrather than a healer, but healing was the gift she re-ceived through the Holy Spirit. Although she saysthat spiritual healing is not a gift one can learn orteach, she does have pamphlets on gospel healingand an ancient book on anatomy, and she listens toradio talk shows on health problems.

One of Mother Jones’s “spiritual gifts” is an abil-ity to feel a patient’s pain while she is “in the spirit.”She also uses “concentration” to “read” a patient bystaring at a glass of water with a leaf in it and askingthe patient to drop a silver coin in “as a love offer-ing” to an angel. Like most Balm healers, she doesnot ask patients to describe their symptoms, becauseshe is supposed to be able to “read” them. But aftergiving a rather general diagnosis, she will questionthe patient and discuss the problem in detail beforeprescribing treatment.

All of the patients at a Monday healing service re-ceive a glass of consecrated water and an herbal bathbefore seeing Mother Jones. In her private consulta-tions with patients she often assigns them specificchapters of Scripture to read and gives them a “heal-ing prayer” to wear next to the place of their illness.The latter is a sheet of “spirit writing,” a propitiationto God written in cabalistic script while in a state oftrance. She gives her patients “bush medicine” orherbs, prescriptions for vitamins and over-the-counter drugs, and offers advice on living. But sheattributes her healing ability largely to her gift forspiritually absorbing a patient’s suffering into herown body: “If you take their condition, you draw itoff, the people goes free.” She constantly complainsabout the suffering she bears for others, and says hergift might kill her if she entered a hospital.

A Healer’s Personality

Mother Jones’s roles as religious leader and healerappear to meet most of her personality needs well.They give her autonomy and dominance over others





and gain her love, affection, and admiration. As asurrogate mother for many people, she can identifywith her own mother, which gives her a strong senseof identity and relieves her of guilt. Healing providesher with a defense mechanism, undoing, which dis-guises her hostility toward others. It offers opportu-nities to criticize others and impose her strong senseof morality on those she dislikes. It is also, by meansof projection, a way to satisfy her own need for nur-turance. Mother Jones’s ritual roles provide frequentand sanctioned outlets for her dissociative tenden-cies in the form of visions, trance, and ceremonialpossession states. And her entire life is governed bysuch a narrow range of role expectations that she isseldom threatened and finds predictability and secu-rity in them. This restrictiveness is, however, some-thing of a problem too: Mother Jones is always, in asense, “on stage” and performing roles, which limitsher personality and makes her lonely.

In order to have a successful balmyard or Revivalcult, healing or leadership roles must be gratifying topatients and followers as well as to the healer orleader. I found several individuals who had a strongdesire to become healers or leaders and had triedmany times to establish a Balm practice or Revivalcult, but had always failed to attract a clientele ordevotees. They were not lacking in spiritual knowl-edge, but they did not meet the psychological needsof others. Given the renown and large following ofMother Jones, it is apparent that she not only meetsher own needs but satisfies those of her patients andfollowers as well.

Mother Jones’s characteristic optimism is encour-aging to patients and raises their expectations forrelief. Her sensitivity to the affective needs of oth-ers—that is, her warmth and concern—evokes feel-ings of love and security in her patients and allowsher to establish rapport with a patient quickly. Thepsychological tests also show her to be a very cre-ative and intuitive person, someone who thinks in aholistic manner and can easily make convincing in-terpretations of a case on the basis of a few clues.

Scheff (1975, 1979) has emphasized both the needfor emotional arousal in therapy and the importanceof group support if therapeutic change is to persist,and these elements are amply present in MotherJones’s practice. Her healing services employ drumsand tambourines, singing and dancing, histrionicpreaching, and ecstatic behavior, all of which is emo-

tionally rousing. She holds periodic “Patient Tables,”which are lengthy and ecstatic ceremonies, to honorformer patients. And her patients often become in-volved in the regular cycle of ceremonies of herchurch, at which members are expected to “testify”often to their salvation or personal rebirth; normally,this involves declarations of the important influenceof Mother Jones on their lives. The changes she insti-gates in her patients are then reinforced by her pres-ence and by the support of other followers.

Women and Balm

This association of women with healing is notrestricted to Balm and Revivalism. The medical sys-tem relies heavily on nurses and midwives, too. Inrural areas, babies are delivered by government mid-wives, traditional nanas, or resident nurses at com-munity clinics. The day-to-day operation of a ruralhospital is managed almost entirely by the Matronand her nurses, with doctors serving mainly as sur-geons and consultants. Obeahmen and scientists are,however, to my knowledge always men.

This sexual division of labor may be due, in part,to considerations of wealth and prestige. The prac-tice of Obeah or Science is reputedly very remunera-tive and a source of great influence. But the practiceof Balm, though it may bring one honor and respect,usually offers little in the way of income or formalprestige and power. As in most societies, menmonopolize public positions of wealth and powerand leave the less lucrative positions to women.

The association of men with sorcery and womenwith healing may also be based on cultural stereotypesabout the sexes. In interviews and TAT responses,men are generally depicted as violent, troublesome,unreliable, untrustworthy, sexually aggressive, de-ceitful, and exploitative. Obeahmen are feared be-cause they work in secret, with malicious ghosts(duppies), and cause harm or misfortune. Women, incontrast, are portrayed as peaceful, benevolent, nur-turing, caring, responsible, and trustworthy. Corre-spondingly, Balm and Revivalism are benign institu-tions; their purpose is to counteract Obeah andmalicious ghosts or provide protection from them.Thus we have a simple semiotic equation of Obeahwith men, aggression, harm, and evil, on the onehand, and Balm and Revivalism with women, pro-tection, helping, and good, on the other.





leave home and mother when they reach adulthood,and the most traumatic event in the life cycle is thedeath of one’s mother. Mothers have almost total re-sponsibility for their children; the role of fathers islargely limited to punishment for severe offenses. Inaddition, mothers delegate many domestic tasks andchild-care responsibilities to their daughters, whilesons are free to roam and play. The needs of ruralchildren are therefore met largely by women.

The cultural patterning of the healer-patient rela-tionship on the mother-child bond encourages mater-nal transference, regression, and the development of adependency relationship. This can give the Balmhealer a great deal of influence over her patients, be-cause it makes them more receptive and suggestible.Moreover, the mother-child bond probably has someeffect on all other relationships, because it is usually thefirst and most influential relationship in life. Maternaltransference can thus provide the healer with an op-portunity to make some rather fundamental changesin the personality and behavior of her patients.

Maternal dependency can be very supportive forpatients. The healer, as a surrogate mother, consolesthem, looks after them, and takes control when thingsgo wrong. She gives them attention, affection, nurtu-rance, encouragement, and offers them direction andpurpose. Through attachment to her, they can regaina childlike sense of protection and security.

Western therapists would regard the dependencyaspect of the healer-patient relationship in Balm as aproblem, but it is not seen as one in Jamaica. Jamaicansare very sociable and they do not place much valueon independence and self-reliance. Dependency isnot condemned or discouraged.

Illness and Emotional Needs

Jamaican Balm exemplifies what I believe to be abasic principle of psychological anthropology, thatevery culture produces a unique set of personalityneeds and conflicts and develops institutionalizedmeans for their satisfaction or resolution. Balm is notsimply a traditional medical system but also, andperhaps more importantly, a source of psychologicalsupport. The psychological processes involved inBalm are not just techniques that facilitate healingbut ends in themselves. Patients come to healers notonly to be cured of illnesses but to gratify affectiveneeds as well.


Mothering and Balm

The relationship between Balm healers and patientsis a ritualized version of the mother-child relation-ship, and this is openly recognized in Jamaican cul-ture. Healers are referred to as “mothers” and theyare expected to play a maternal role. They are ideal-ized as supermothers and adopted as surrogatemothers. Moreover, healers often refer to patients astheir “children.”

Familial idioms are used extensively in Revival-ism, and they are not merely metaphors. Cultists be-have according to the familial roles associated withtheir positions. The social organization of Revivalcults strongly reflects the mother-centered pattern ofthe family in Jamaica, and one of the attractionsof Revival cults is that they are fictive family groups.

The “Mother” is usually the central figure in acult, and everything revolves around her. The“Armor Bearer,” Mother Jones’s “right hand,” is incharge of the day-to-day activities of the cult, a roleresembling that of the eldest daughter in a large fam-ily. Other women are referred to as “sisters.” Some ofthe younger sisters, who are known as the “workers,”serve the Armor Bearer much as younger daughterswork under the eldest daughter in a family.

In general, women have instrumental roles thatinvolve a great deal of work but little recognition,whereas men are given expressive roles that haveprestige but little responsibility. The “Father” or“Daddy” is sometimes the dominant but more oftena removed but respected figure. Many of the men aredeacons, and they seem to play the role of uncles.The pastor of Mother Jones’s church, who was raisedby Mother Jones, is a handsome and charmingyoung public health inspector. His official duties areto preach sermons and perform weddings and fu-nerals, but he also fills the familial role, common inJamaican families, of a favorite son who is admiredby all. Other men are referred to as “brothers.”Mother Jones always called me “my son,” and herfollowers referred to me as “Brother Bill.”

Mother Jones is a mother not just to her patientsand followers but to the entire community. She is itsmoral standard and conscience and, more generally,a symbol of the love, affection, and devotion ofmothers. There is a great respect for mothers inJamaica, and the mother-child tie is the strongestbond in the society. Children are often reluctant to




One of the dominant concerns of Jamaicans is“love.” Many older people remarked to me thatJamaicans were once very “loving,” but they are too“selfish” today. The plague of violence that Kingstonhas experienced over the past two decades is gener-ally blamed on lack of love. Church sermons oftendwell on social disorder, and Christian love is putforward as the salvation of society. “Peace and love”and the need for brotherly love and unity are centralthemes in popular music and in the ideology of themessianic cult of Rastafarianism. Mother Jones is ofthe opinion that most illnesses are due to “stress” ingeneral and “lack of love” in particular. She saysJamaicans are not close, they fear each other, andthey cannot give love to others. So she offers themher love, and tries to teach them to love others, to“make them whole.”

What Jamaicans mean by “love” is closeness, car-ing, and concern for others—unity, sharing, and co-operation. Family ties are strong, and they wantcommunity relations to be close and friendly as well.Although there has probably been some erosion ofgemeinschaft and a weakening of kin ties over thepast few decades, I cannot agree with Mother Jonesthat Jamaicans are unloving. They are at least as“loving” as Americans, but they have a muchstronger need for affiliation and place a higher valueon interpersonal relations (Jones and Zoppel 1979;Phillips 1973). “Love” is a cultural focus, part of theJamaican ethos, and one of the principal functions ofBalm and Revivalism is to gratify that need.

Women and Healing

As Spiro (1978: xvi–xvii) has noted, “The practi-tioner of anthropology as ‘science,’ placing the localsetting in a theoretical context, is concerned with thelocal as a variant of—and therefore a means for un-derstanding—the universal.” According to my analy-sis, the relationship between healers and patients inBalm is modeled on the mother-child relationship, avery strong bond in Jamaican society, and the moth-ering behavior of maternal figures such as MotherJones provides emotional support for distressed anddemoralized individuals. To what extent can this in-terpretation be generalized to other cultures?

A pioneering article by Carl Rogers (1957) iden-tified congruence (genuineness and personalityintegration), unconditional positive regard (warm

acceptance and nonpossessive caring), and accurateempathy as personal qualities that a healer must com-municate to a patient if psychotherapeutic change isto take place. Additional research has indicated thateffective healers are also intelligent, responsible, cre-ative, sincere, energetic, warm, tolerant, respectful,supportive, self-confident, keenly attentive, benign,concerned, reassuring, firm, persuasive, encourag-ing, credible, sensitive, gentle, and trustworthy (J. D.Frank 1974; Lambert, Shapiro, and Bergin 1986). Itshould be noted, however, that these conclusions arebased on research on American psychotherapists andthus the characteristics may not be universal.

Many of the personal qualities noted above seemto apply to women more than men. Women are saidto be more empathic and have more positive feelingsabout being close to others, to be more cooperativeand altruistic, to share more, to be more accommoda-tive and interested in social relationships, to be morevocal, personal, and superior at nonverbal com-munication (G. Mitchell 1981), “more sensitive to so-cial cues and to the needs of others” (Draper, quotedin Quinn 1977: 198), and more nurturant or kind andsupportive to others (Martin and Voorhies 1975). Ina study of kibbutz children, Spiro (1979: 93) foundthat girls showed more “integrative behavior”—aid,assistance, sharing and cooperation—than boys, andregularly consoled victims of aggression.

These claims about universal differences inadult male and female “styles” of behavior haveapparently not been put to the test of a systematiccross-cultural study. However, there are excellentdata on children aged three through eleven from theSix Cultures Study (Whiting and Whiting 1975),which found that girls are more intimate-dependent(touch and seek help) and nurturant (offer help andsupport) and that boys are more aggressive (assault,insult, horseplay) and dominant-dependent (seekdominance and attention).

Characteristics associated with women seem tobe closely related to their role as mothers. Althoughthis may reflect an innate predisposition to bondwith and nurture infants (Rossi 1977), it can also beadequately explained by socialization practices.Women have the main responsibility for child care inevery society, and they are prepared for that role inchildhood. A well-known cross-cultural survey onsex differences in socialization concluded that thereis “a widespread pattern of greater pressure toward





nurturance, obedience, and responsibility in girls,and toward self-reliance and achievement striving inboys” (Barry, Bacon, and Child 1957: 332).

There is a close correspondence between the per-sonal qualities of effective healers and women, and itseems to be due to strong similarities between theroles of healing and mothering. According to Kakar(1982: 59), many psychotherapists claim that “the‘feminine’ powers of nurturance, warmth, concern,intuitive understanding, and relatedness . . . are es-sential in every healing encounter and for the suc-cess of the healing process.”

If “feminine powers” are essential for healing,then women should, on average, be more effective atit than men. In fact, a review of research on the sex ofpsychotherapists concluded that “there appear to besome demonstrable trends, under certain circum-stances, toward greater patient satisfaction or benefitfrom psychotherapy with female therapists and nostudies showing such trends with male therapists”(Mogul 1982: 1–3).

It might also be reasonable to expect that themajority of healers in the world are, as in Jamaica,women. However, a cross-cultural survey of seventy-three societies by Whyte (1978) found that maleshamans were more numerous or powerful in54 percent; female shamans were more numerous orpowerful in only 10 percent. This finding does notnecessarily disprove the hypothesis that womengenerally make better healers. Personal qualities areonly one factor in recruitment to a healing role andsocial, political, and economic factors can be impor-tant too. Given what we know about sexual inequal-ity, it would not be surprising to find that womenoccupy healing roles when these roles are low inprestige or income, while men come to monopolizethem when healing is high in prestige or income. Itwould be worthwhile to conduct a more extensivecross-cultural survey on the sex of healers in a studythat would broaden the subject from shamans toinclude other types of healers and would attemptto identify social conditions associated with a pre-ponderance of male or female healers.

Although “feminine powers” such as nurturance,warmth, and concern may, as Kakar suggests, benecessary for effective healing, they are probably notsufficient. Healers also seem to be firm and often

domineering. For example, Raymond Prince (per-sonal communication) notes that Nigerian healers,who are almost all male, are “abrupt, authoritarian,and sometimes punitive in their relations with pa-tients, particularly psychotic ones.”

It is probably more accurate to say that the per-sonal qualities of effective healers are androgynous.Mother Jones is not only warm, empathic, caring,sensitive, and supportive with her patients but alsofirm, assertive, and domineering. Male shamansoften dress in female clothing and assume femaleroles (Halifax 1979:24). I noticed that the husky voiceof a Jamaican male healer changed to a high pitchwhen he entered a trance to treat his patients, and hebecame warmer and more empathic as well. Torrey(1972:103) described a male healer in Ethiopia ashaving a fatherly relationship with his patients andan “underlying warmth . . . partly masked by an au-thoritarian manner.”

The personal qualities of an effective healer mayvary with the degree of involvement of men andwomen in child care in a society. However, the ma-ternal element of healing is probably more con-stant than the paternal element, because women arealways heavily involved in child care and there ismuch greater variation in the involvement of men.The emphasis on mothering in Balm is a reflectionof the strong degree of maternal dependency inJamaican society, which is encouraged by a high rateof father-absence and a general lack of involvementof men in child rearing. In addition, the androgy-nous character of Jamaican healers seems to be due tothe fact that Jamaican mothers often have to play ma-ternal and paternal roles in child care and family life.

Healing relationship may also vary with, and re-flect, the style of parenting in a society. Jamaicanmothers tend to be very domineering, restrictive,nagging, scolding, punitive, directive, and evendictatorial with their children. I observed a popularBalm healer who matched this description when Iwas asked to drive two patients to a balmyard. Shewas very abrasive and publicly scolded her pa-tients, and I was quite surprised to hear my com-panions extolling her on our journey home. When Iasked them if they would like her for a mother,they enthusiastically replied that she would besplendid.





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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall DownAnne F. Fadiman

Divergent understandings of illness—what causes it and how to respond to it—are described in thisaccount of a Hmong refugee family who came to the United States from Laos in 1980. When the Leefamily sought help at the local hospital for their infant daughter’s seizures, she was diagnosed withepilepsy. The Hmong understood her symptoms as evidence of soul-flight or “the spirit catches youand you fall down,” and a sign of a special individual called to be a shaman. Author Anne Fadimanconsiders the Lees’ experiences in the context of Hmong approaches to child rearing, Hmong experi-ences with Western medicine, and attitudes toward epilepsy among the Hmong as well as historicallyin the West. She also describes the economic and structural factors shaping health care delivery inMerced, California, where 12,000 Hmong-Americans settled between the late 1970s and late 1990s.

Anne Fadiman is a journalist whose investigation relied on techniques similar to those of ethnog-raphers: extensive recorded interviews, lengthy participant-observation, and thorough reading of re-lated scholarship. Since its publication in 1997, the award-winning book from which this material isexcerpted has received considerable attention from students of anthropology, medical and publichealth professionals, and the general reading public.

From: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A HmongChild, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of TwoCultures, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.Information on sources, including bibliography and interviews,appears on pages 296–97 of the original publication from whichthis excerpt is drawn.

When Lia was about three months old, her older sis-ter Yer slammed the front door of the Lees’ apart-ment. A few moments later, Lia’s eyes rolled up, herarms jerked over her head, and she fainted. The Leeshad little doubt what had happened. Despite thecareful installation of Lia’s soul during the hu pligceremony, the noise of the door had been so pro-foundly frightening that her soul had fled her bodyand become lost. They recognized the resultingsymptoms as qaug dab peg, which means “the spirit

catches you and you fall down.” The spirit referredto in this phrase is a soul-stealing dab; peg means tocatch or hit; and qaug means to fall over with one’sroots still in the ground, as grain might be beatendown by wind or rain.

In Hmong-English dictionaries, qaug dab peg isgenerally translated as epilepsy. It is an illness wellknown to the Hmong, who regard it with ambiva-lence. On the one hand, it is acknowledged to be aserious and potentially dangerous condition. TonyCoelho, who was Merced’s congressman from 1979to 1989, is an epileptic. Coelho is a popular figureamong the Hmong, and a few years ago, some localHmong men were sufficiently concerned when theylearned he suffered from qaug dab peg that they vol-unteered the services of a shaman, a txiv neeb, toperform a ceremony that would retrieve Coelho’s




errant soul. The Hmong leader to whom they madethis proposition politely discouraged them, suspect-ing that Coelho, who is a Catholic of Portuguese de-scent, might not appreciate having chickens, andmaybe a pig as well, sacrificed on his behalf.

On the other hand, the Hmong consider qaug dabpeg to be an illness of some distinction. This factmight have surprised Tony Coelho no less than thedead chickens would have. Before he entered poli-tics, Coelho planned to become a Jesuit priest, butwas barred by a canon forbidding the ordination ofepileptics. What was considered a disqualifying im-pairment by Coelho’s church might have been seenby the Hmong as a sign that he was particularly fitfor divine office. Hmong epileptics often becomeshamans. Their seizures are thought to be evidencethat they have the power to perceive things otherpeople cannot see, as well as facilitating their entryinto trances, a prerequisite for their journeys into therealm of the unseen. The fact that they have been illthemselves gives them an intuitive sympathy for thesuffering of others and lends them emotional credi-bility as healers. Becoming a txiv neeb is not a choice;it is a vocation. The calling is revealed when a personfalls sick, either with qaug dab peg or with some otherillness whose symptoms similarly include shiveringand pain. An established txiv neeb, summoned to di-agnose the problem, may conclude from these symp-toms that the person (who is usually but not alwaysmale) has been chosen to be the host of a healingspirit, a neeb. (Txiv neeb means “person with a healingspirit.”) It is an offer that the sick person cannotrefuse, since if he rejects his vocation, he will die. Inany case, few Hmong would choose to decline. Al-though shamanism is an arduous calling that re-quires years of training with a master in order tolearn the ritual techniques and chants, it confers anenormous amount of social status in the communityand publicly marks the txiv neeb as a person of highmoral character, since a healing spirit would neverchoose a no-account host. Even if an epileptic turnsout not to be elected to host a neeb, his illness, withits thrilling aura of the supramundane, singles himout as a person of consequence.

In their attitude toward Lia’s seizures, the Lees re-flected this mixture of concern and pride. TheHmong are known for the gentleness with whichthey treat their children. Hugo Adolf Bernatzik, aGerman ethnographer who lived with the Hmong of

Thailand for several years during the 1930s, wrotethat the Hmong he had studied regarded a child as“the most treasured possession a person can have.”In Laos, a baby was never apart from its mother,sleeping in her arms all night and riding on her backall day. Small children were rarely abused; it was be-lieved that a dab who witnessed mistreatment mighttake the child, assuming it was not wanted. TheHmong who live in the United States have contin-ued to be unusually attentive parents. A study con-ducted at the University of Minnesota found Hmonginfants in the first month of life to be less irritableand more securely attached to their mothers thanCaucasian infants, a difference the researcher attrib-uted to the fact that the Hmong mothers were, with-out exception, more sensitive, more accepting, andmore responsive, as well as “exquisitely attuned” totheir children’s signals. Another study, conducted inPortland, Oregon, found that Hmong mothers heldand touched their babies far more frequently thanCaucasian mothers. In a third study, conducted atthe Hennepin County Medical Center in Minnesota,a group of Hmong mothers of toddlers surpassed agroup of Caucasian mothers of similar socioeco-nomic status in every one of fourteen categories se-lected from the Egeland Mother-Child Rating Scale,ranging from “Speed of Responsiveness to Fussingand Crying” to “Delight.”

Foua and Nao Kao had nurtured Lia in typicalHmong fashion (on the Egeland Scale, they wouldhave scored especially high in Delight), and theywere naturally distressed to think that anythingmight compromise her health and happiness. Theytherefore hoped, at least most of the time, the qaugdab peg could be healed. Yet they also considered theillness an honor. Jeanine Hilt, a social worker whoknew the Lees well, told me, “They felt Lia was kindof an anointed one, like a member of royalty. She wasa very special person in their culture because she hadthese spirits in her and she might grow up to be ashaman, and so sometimes their thinking was thatthis was not so much a medical problem as it was a blessing.” (Of the forty or so American doctors,nurses, and Merced County agency employees Ispoke with who had dealt with Lia and her family,several had a vague idea that “spirits” were some-how involved, but Jeanine Hilt was the only one whohad actually asked the Lees what they thought wasthe cause of their daughter’s illness.)





Within the Lee family, in one of those unconsciousprocesses of selection that are as mysterious as anyother form of falling in love, it was obvious that Liawas her parents’s favorite, the child they consideredthe most beautiful, the one who was most extrava-gantly hugged and kissed, the one who was dressedin the most exquisite garments (embroidered byFoua, wearing dime-store glasses to work her almostmicroscopic stitches). Whether Lia occupied this po-sition from the moment of her birth, whether it was aresult of her spiritually distiguished illness, orwhether it came from the special tenderness any par-ent feels for a sick child, is not a matter Foua and NaoKao wish, or are able, to analyze. One thing that isclear is that for many years the cost of that extra lovewas partially borne by her sister Yer. “They blamedYer for slamming the door,” said Jeanine Hilt. “I triedmany times to explain that the door had nothing todo with it, but they didn’t believe me. Lia’s illnessmade them so sad that I think for a long time theytreated Yer differently from their other children.”

During the next few months of her life, Lia had atleast twenty more seizures. On two occasions, Fouaand Nao Kao were worried enough to carry her intheir arms to the emergency room at Merced Com-munity Medical Center, which was three bolcks fromtheir apartment. Like most Hmong refugees, theyhad their doubts about the efficacy of Western med-ical techniques. However, when they were living inthe Mae Jarim refugee camp in Thailand, their onlysurviving son, Cheng, and three of their six survivingdaughters, Ge, May, and True, had been seriously ill.Ge died. They took Cheng, May, and True to the camphospital; Cheng and May recovered rapidly, and Truewas sent to another, larger hospital, where she even-tually recovered as well. (The Lees also concurrentlyaddressed the possible spiritual origins of their chil-dren’s illnesses by moving to a new hut. A dead per-son had been buried beneath their old one, and hissoul might have wished to harm the new residents.)This experience did nothing to shake their faith in tra-ditional Hmong beliefs about the causes and cures ofillness, but it did convince them that on some occa-sions Western doctors could be of additional help,and that it would do no harm to hedge their bets.

County hospitals have a reputation for beingcrowded, dilapidated, and dingy. Merced’s countyhospital, with which the Lees would become all toofamiliar over the next few years, is none of these.

The MCMC complex includes a modern, 42,000-square-foot wing—it looks sort of like an art mod-erne ocean liner—that houses coronary care, inten-sive care, and transitional care units; 154 medicaland surgical beds; medical and radiology laborato-ries outfitted with state-of-the-art diagnostic equip-ment; and a blood bank. The waiting rooms in thehospital and its attached clinic have unshreddedmagazines, unsmelly bathrooms, and floors thathave been scrubbed to an aseptic gloss. MCMC is ateaching hospital, staffed in part by the faculty andresidents of the Family Practice Residency, which isaffiliated with the University of California atDavis. The residency program is nationally known,and receives at least 150 applications annually forits six first-year positions.

Like many other rural county hospitals, whichwere likely to feel the health care crunch before itreached urban hospitals, MCMC has been plaguedwith financial problems throughout the last twentyyears. It accepts all patients, whether or not they canpay; only twenty percent are privately insured, withmost of the rest receiving aid from California’sMedi-Cal, Medicare, or Medically Indigent Adultprograms, and a small (but to the hospital, costly)percentage neither insured nor covered by any fed-eral or state program. The hospital receives reim-bursements from the public programs, but many ofthose reimbursements have been lowered or re-stricted in recent years. Although the private pa-tients are far more profitable, MCMC’s efforts to at-tract what its administrator has called “an improvedpayer mix” have not been very successful.(Merced’s wealthier residents often choose either aprivate Catholic hospital three miles north ofMCMC or a larger hospital in a nearby city such asFresno.) MCMC went through a particularly roughperiod during the late eighties, hitting bottom in1988, when it had a $3.1 million deficit.

During this same period, MCMC also experi-enced an expensive change in its patient population.Starting in the late seventies, Southeast Asianrefugees began to move to Merced in large numbers.The city of Merced, which has a population of about61,000, now has just over 12,000 Hmong. That is tosay, one in five residents of Merced is Hmong. Be-cause many Hmong fear and shun the hospital,MCMC’s patient rolls reflect a somewhat lower ratio,but on any given day there are still Hmong patients

FADIMAN • THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU AND YOU FALL DOWN | 271




in almost every unit. Not only do the Hmong fail re-soundingly to improve the payer mix—more thaneighty percent are on Medi-Cal—but they haveproved even more costly than other indigent pa-tients, because they generally require more time andattention, and because there are so many of themthat MCMC has had to hire bilingual staff membersto mediate between patients and providers.

There are no funds in the hospital budget specifi-cally earmarked for interpreters, so the administra-tion has detoured around that technicality by hiringHmong lab assistants, nurse’s aides, and trans-porters, who are called upon to translate in the scarceinterstices between analyzing blood, emptying bed-pans, and rolling postoperative patients around ongurneys. In 1991, a short-term federal grant enabledMCMC to put skilled interpreters on call around theclock, but the program expired the following year. Ex-cept during that brief hiatus, there have often been noHmong-speaking employees of any kind present inthe hospital at night. Obstetricians have had to ob-tain consent for cesarean sections or episiotomiesusing embarrassed teenaged sons, who have learnedEnglish in school, as translators. Ten-year-old girlshave had to translate discussions of whether or not adying family member should be resuscitated. Some-times not even a child is available. Doctors on thelate shift in the emergency room have often had noway of taking a patient’s medical history, or of ask-ing such questions as Where do you hurt? How longhave you been hurting? What does it feel like? Haveyou had an accident? Have you vomitted? Have youhad a fever? Have you lost consciousness? Are youpregnant? Have you taken any medications? Areyou allergic to any medications? Have you recentlyeaten? (The last question is of great importance ifemergency surgery is being contemplated, sinceanesthetized patients with full stomachs can aspiratethe partially digested food into their lungs, and maydie if they choke or if their bronchial linings arebadly burned by stomach acid.) I asked one doctorwhat he did in such cases. He said, “Practice veteri-nary medicine.”

One October 24, 1982, the first time that Foua andNao Kao carried Lia to the emergency room, MCMChad not yet hired any interpreters, de jure or defacto, for any shift. At that time, the only hospitalemployee who sometimes translated for Hmong pa-tients was a janitor, a Laotian immigrant fluent in

his own language, Lao, which few Hmong under-stand; halting in Hmong; and even more halting inEnglish. On that day either the janitor was unavail-able or the emergency room staff didn’t think of call-ing him. The resident on duty practiced veterinarymedicine. Foua and Nao Kao had no way of explain-ing what had happened, since Lia’s seizures hadstopped by the time they reached the hospital. Heronly obvious symptoms were a cough and a con-gested chest. The resident ordered an X ray, whichled the radiologist to conclude that Lia had “earlybronchiopneumonia or tracheobronchitis.” As hehad no way of knowing that the bronchial conges-tion was probably caused by aspiration of saliva orvomit during her seizure (a common problem forepileptics), she was routinely dismissed with a pre-scription for ampicillin, an antibiotic. Her emer-gency room Registration Record lists her father’slast name as Yang, her mother’s maiden name asFoua, and her “primary spoken language” as“Mong.” When Lia was discharged, Nao Kao (whoknows the alphabet but does not speak or read En-glish) signed a piece of paper that said, “I hereby ac-knowledge receipt of the instructions indicatedabove,” to wit: “Take ampicillin as directed. Vapor-izer at cribside. Clinic reached as needed 383-7007ten days.“ The “ten days” meant that Nao Kao wassupposed to call the Family Practice Center in tendays for a follow-up appointment. Not surprisingly,since he had no idea what he had agreed to, he didn’t.But when Lia had another bad seizure on November11, he and Foua carried her to the emergency roomagain, where the same scene was repeated, and thesame misdiagnosis made.

On March 3, 1983, Foua and Nao Kao carried Liato the emergency room a third time. On this occa-sion, three circumstances were different: Lia was stillseizing when they arrived, they were accompaniedby a cousin who spoke some English, and one of thedoctors on duty was a family practice residentnamed Dan Murphy. Of all the doctors who haveworked at MCMC, Dan Murphy is generally ac-knowledged to be the one most interested in andknowledgeable about the Hmong. At that time, hehad been living in Merced for only seven months, sohis interest still exceeded his knowledge. When heand his wife, Cindy, moved to Merced, they hadnever heard the word “Hmong.” Several years later,Cindy was teaching English to Hmong adults and





Dan was inviting Hmong leaders to the hospital totell the residents about their experiences as refugees.Most important, the Murphys counted a Hmongfamily, the Xiongs, among their closest friends. Whenone of the Xiong daughters wanted to spend thesummer working in Yosemite National Park, ChalyXiong, her father, initially refused because he wasafraid she might get eaten by a lion. Dan person-ally escorted Chaly to Yosemite to verify the absenceof lions, and persuaded him the job would do hisdaughter good. Four months later, Chaly was killedin an automobile accident. Cindy Murphy arrangedthe funeral, calling around until she found a funeralparlor that was willing to accommodate three daysof incense burning, drum beating, and qeej playing.She also bought several live chickens, which weresacrificed in the parking lot of the funeral parlor, as well as a calf and a pig, which were sacrificedelsewhere. When Dan first saw the Lees, he instantlyregistered that they were Hmong, and he thought tohimself: “This won’t be boring.”

Many years later, Dan, who is a short, genial manwith an Amishstyle beard and an incandescent smile,recalled the encounter. “I have this memory of Lia’sparents standing just inside the door to the ER, hold-ing a chubby little round-faced baby. She was hav-ing a generalized seizure. Her eyes were rolled back,she was unconscious, her arms and legs were kindof jerking back and forth, and she didn’t breathemuch—every once in a while, there would be nomovement of the chest wall and you couldn’t hearany breath sounds. That was definitely anxiety-producing. She was the youngest patient I had everdealt with who was seizing. The parents seemedfrightened, not terribly frightened though, not asfrightened as I would have been if it was my kid. Ithought it might be meningitis, so Lia had to have aspinal tap, and the parents were real resistant tothat. I don’t remember how I convinced them. I re-member feeling very anxious because they had areal sick kid and I felt a big need to explain to thesepeople, through their relative who was a not-very-good translator, what was going on, but I felt like Ihad no time, because we had to put an IV in herscalp with Valium to stop the seizures, but then Liastarted seizing again and the IV went into the skininstead of the vein, and I had a hard time getting an-other one started. Later on, when I figured out whathad happened, or not happened, on the earlier visits

to the ER, I felt good. It’s kind of a thrill to findsomething someone else has missed, especiallywhen you’re a resident and you are looking for ex-cuses to make yourself feel smarter than the otherphysicians.”

Among Dan’s notes in Lia’s History and PhysicalExamination record were:

HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS: The patient isan 8 month, Hmong female, whose family broughther to the emergency room after they had noticedher shaking and not breathing very well for a 20-minute period of time. According to the family thepatient has had multiple like episodes in the past,but have never been able to communicate this toemergency room doctors on previous visits sec-ondary to a language barrier. An english speakingrelative available tonight, stated that the patienthad had intermittent fever and cough for 2–3 daysprior to being admitted.

FAMILY & SOCIAL HISTORY: Unobtainable sec-ondary to language difficulties.

NEUROLOGICAL: The child was unresponsive topain or sound. The head was held to the left withintermittent tonic-clonic [first rigid, then jerking]movements of the upper extremities. Respirationswere suppressed during these periods of clonicmovement. Grunting respirations persisted untilthe patient was given 3 mg. of Valium I.V.

Dan had no way of knowing that Foua and NaoKao had already diagnosed their daughter’s prob-lem as the illness where the spirit catches you andyou fall down. Foua and Nao Kao had no way ofknowing that Dan had diagnosed it as epilepsy, themost common of all neurological disorders. Eachhad accurately noted the same symptoms, but Danwould have been surprised to hear that they werecaused by soul loss, and Lia’s parents would havebeen surprised to hear that they were caused by anelectrochemical storm inside their daughter’s headthat had been stirred up by the misfiring of aberrantbrain cells.

Dan had learned in medical school that epilepsyis a sporadic malfunction of the brain, sometimesmild and sometimes severe, sometimes progressiveand sometimes self-limiting, which can be traced tooxygen deprivation during gestation, labor, or birth;a head injury; a tumor; an infection; a high fever; astroke; a metabolic disturbance; a drug allergy; atoxic reaction to a poison. Sometimes the source is





obvious—the patient had a brain tumor or swallowedstrychnine or crashed through a windshield—but inabout seven out of ten cases, the cause is never deter-mined. During an epileptic episode, instead of fol-lowing their usual orderly protocol, the damagedcells in the cerebral cortex transmit neural impulsessimultaneously and chaotically. When only a smallarea of the brain is involved—in a “focal” seizure—an epileptic may hallucinate or twitch or tingle butretain consciousness. When the electrical distur-bance extends to a wide area—in a “generalized”seizure—consciousness is lost, either for the briefepisodes called petit mal or “absence” seizures, orfor the full-blown attacks known as grand mal. Ex-cept through surgery, whose risks consign it to thecategory of last resort, epilepsy cannot be cured, butit can be completely or partially controlled in mostcases by anticonvulsant drugs.

The Hmong are not the only people who mighthave good reason to feel ambivalent about suppress-ing the symptoms. The Greeks called epilepsy “thesacred disease.” Dan Murphy’s diagnosis added LiaLee to a distinguished line of epileptics that hasincluded SØren Kierkegaard, Vincent van Gogh,Gustave Flaubert, Lewis Carroll, and Fyodor Dos-toyevsky, all of whom, like many Hmong shamans, ex-perienced powerful senses of grandeur and spiritualpassion during their seizures, and powerful creativeurges in their wake. As Dostoyevsky’s PrinceMyshkin asked, “What if it is a disease? What does itmatter that it is an abnormal tension, if the result, ifthe moment of sensation, remembered and analysedin a state of health, turns out to be harmony andbeauty brought to their highest point of perfection,and gives a feeling, undivined and undreamt of tillthen, of completeness, proportion, reconciliation,and an ecstatic and prayerful fusion in the highestsynthesis of life?”

Although the inklings Dan had gathered of thetranscendental Hmong worldview seemed to him topossess both power and beauty, his own view ofmedicine in general, and of epilepsy in particular,was, like that of his colleagues at MCMC, essentiallyrationalist. Hippocrates’ skeptical commentary onthe nature of epilepsy, made around 400 B.C., prettymuch sums up Dan’s own frame of reference: ”Itseems to me that the disease is no more divine thanany other. It has a natural cause just as other diseasehave. Men think it is divine merely because they

don’t understand it. But if they called everything di-vine which they do not understand, why, therewould be no end of divine things.”*

Lia’s seizure was a grand mal episode, and Danhad no desire to do anything but stop it. He admittedher to MCMC as an inpatient. Among the tests she hadduring the three days she spent there were a spinaltap, a CT scan, an EEG, a chest X ray, and extensiveblood work. Foua and Nao Kao signed “ Authoriza-tion for and Consent to Surgery or Special Diagnosticor Therapeutic Procedures” forms, each several hun-dred words long, for the first two of these. It is notknown whether anyone attempted to translate them,or, if so, how “Your physician has requested a brainscan utilizing computerized tomography” was ren-dered in Hmong. None of the tests revealed any ap-parent cause for the seizures. The doctors classifiedLia’s epilepsy as “idiopathic”: cause unknown. Liawas found to have consolidation in her right lung,which this time was correctly diagnosed as aspirationpneumonia resulting from the seizure. Foua and NaoKao alternated nights at the hospital, sleeping in a cotnext to Lia’s bed. Among the Nurse’s Notes for Lia’slast night at the hospital were: “0001. Skin cool and


*Despite this early attempt by Hippocrates (or perhaps byone of the anonymous physicians whose writings areattributed to Hippocrates) to remove the “divine” label,epilepsy continued, more than any other disease, to beascribed to supernatural causes. The medical historianOwsei Temkin has noted that epilepsy has held a keyposition historically in “the struggle between magic andthe scientific conception.” Many treatments for epilepsyhave had occult associations. Greek magicians forbadeepileptics to eat mint, garlic, and onion, as well as the fleshof goats, pigs, deer, dogs, cocks, turtledoves, bustards,mullets, and eels; to wear black garments and goatskins;and to cross their hands and feet: taboos that were allconnected, in various ways, with chthonic deities. Romanepileptics were advised to swallow morsels cut from thelivers of stabbed gladiators. During the Middle Ages,when epilepsy was attributed to demonic possession,treatment included prayer, fasting, wearing amulets,lighting candles, visiting the graves of saints, and writingthe names of the Three Wise Men with blood taken fromthe patient’s little finger. These spiritual remedies were farsafer than the “medical” therapies of the time—stillpracticed as late as the seventeenth century—whichincluded cauterizing the head with a hot iron and boring ahole in the skull to release peccant vapors.




dry to touch, color good & pink. Mom is with babe atthis time & is breastfeeding. Mom informed to keepbabe covered with a blanket for the babe is a littlecool.” “0400. Babe resting quietly with no acute dis-tress noted. Mom breast feeds off & on.” “0600. Sleep-ing.” “0730. Awake, color good. Mother fed.” “1200.Held by mother.”

Lia was discharged on March 11, 1983. Her par-ents were instructed, via an English-speaking rela-tive, to give her 250 milligrams of ampicillin twice aday, to clear up her aspiration pneumonia, andtwenty milligrams of Dilantin elixir, an anticonvul-sant, twice a day, to suppress any further grand malseizures.

Suggested Readings

Crapanzano, Vincent1973 The Hamadha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Csordas, Thomas J.1994 The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Danforth, Loring M.1989 Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anatenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking

Movement. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Nichter, Mark, ed.1992 Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Ethnomedicine. Yverdon, Switzerland and

Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers.

Roseman, Marina1991 Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest: Temiar Music and Medicine. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Sargent, Carolyn F., and Thomas M. Johnson, eds.1996 Medical Anthropology: Contemporary Theory and Method. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.



7. Witchcraft, Sorcery, Divination, and Magic


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CHAPTER SEVEN

Witchcraft,Sorcery,Divination,and Magic

All societies recognize the frailness of the human condition; wherever pain, illness, in-jury, and unjustness exist, so do culturally prescribed explanations. In many parts of theworld, where opportunities for formal education are limited to a small elite, althoughtheir economic and political power may be considerable, explanations of phenomenaare still rooted deeply in traditional interpretations passed from generation to generationby word of mouth. In rural Africa, for example, where 70 to 90 percent of the populationis not covered by public health services (Shehu 1975: 29), mental and physical illnessare often accounted for in terms of a formidable array of supernatural sources, includ-ing witchcraft, sorcery, magic, curses, spirits, or a combination of these. Whether expla-nations for illness are “scientific” or “mystical,” all societies must have explanationsfor crises. Mental and physical illness cannot be permitted to go unchecked. Witchcraft,sorcery, divination, and magic are ways of dealing with the supernatural, explainingthe unexplainable, attempting to control or manipulate what otherwise cannot becontrolled.

In many parts of the world, a vast number of daily crises are attributed to witchcraft, par-ticularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where the highest level of belief in witchcraft exists today.Here witchcraft explanations are logical—indeed, some say indispensable. In short, witch-craft is an integral part of traditional African belief systems, as are sorcery and magic, andit is considered by many anthropologists to be essential to African religions.

Lucy Mair, a British social anthropologist and a leading authority on African witchcraft,points out that the belief in witchcraft is universal. Around the world, greed and sexual mo-tifs are commonly associated with witches, as is the “nightmare” witch that prowls at nightand is distinguished from the everyday witch by nocturnal habits (1969: 36–37). Women aremore often labeled witches than men, and societies frequently associate particular types ofpersonalities with individuals who they feel have the highest probability of becomingwitches. According to Mair (1969: 43), many of the qualities associated with being a poorneighbor, such as unsociability, isolation, stinginess, unfriendliness, and moroseness, arethe same qualities ascribed to the everyday witch. Nothing compares in terms of sheer evil,

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however, to the nightmare witch, whose hatred of the most basic tenets of human decencyearns it a special place of infamy.

Witches, wherever they exist, are the antithesis of proper behavior. Their antisocial acts,moreover, are uncontrollable. A final commonality of witch beliefs is that their powers areinnate, unlike those of the sorcerer, whose powers are learned; the witch inherits the powerfor evil or is given the power by God.

To the beginning student in anthropology, witchcraft surely must appear to affect a soci-ety negatively; a careful analysis of belief systems demonstrates more positive than nega-tive functions, however. In his analysis of the functions of witchcraft among the Navaho,Clyde Kluckhohn evaluated the belief more positively than negatively in terms of economicand social control and the psychological states of a group (1967; Kluckhohn and Leighton1962). Beliefs in witchcraft level economic differences, for example. Among the Navaho,the rich are believed to have gained their wealth by secret supernatural techniques. Theonly way to quell this kind of rumor is through generosity, which may take the form ofredistribution of wealth among relatives and friends (Kluckhohn and Leighton 1962: 247).Kluckhohn demonstrated that witchcraft beliefs help reinforce social values. For example,the belief that uncared-for elderly will turn into witches demands that the Navaho treat theaged with proper care. The worry that the death of a close relative may cast suspicion ofwitchcraft on survivors also reinforces their social values regarding obligations to kin. Iron-ically, because leaders are thought to be witches, people were hesitant to be disobedient forfear of supernatural retribution (1967: 113).

Kluckhohn maintained that at the psychological level witchcraft was an outlet for hos-tility because frustrated individuals used witches as scapegoats. Anxiety and neglect couldalso be accommodated through commonly held witchcraft beliefs, for people showingsymptoms of witchcraft-caused illnesses would reaffirm their importance to kin and thegroup at the public curing ceremonies (1967: 83–84).

The terms witchcraft and sorcery are often used interchangeably to mean any kind of evilmagic; however, E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) analysis of Azande witchcraft and sorceryresulted in a distinction between the two terms that is accepted by most anthropologiststoday. Generally speaking, a sorcerer intentionally seeks to bring about harm. Sorcerershave learned how to cast spells and use certain formulas and objects to inflict evil. Thesorcerer’s methods are real, not psychic like those of the witch. Sorcery is conscious and anacquired skill, whereas witchcraft is unconscious and innate. Contrary to witchcraft, sor-cery is not always antisocial or illegitimate and occurs with a higher frequency than doeswitchcraft.

Interestingly, some scholars believe that witchcraft does not, in truth, exist despite thestrong beliefs of those in the culture. Witchcraft, they argue, exists only in the minds ofthe people, whereas sorcery is proven by the presence of paraphernalia, medicines, and theidentification of sorcerer specialists in the community. The point is, however, that witchcraftserves so many functions it is hard to believe its importance can be whittled away by thedifficulties involved in trying to prove its existence or in distinguishing it from sorcery.Everywhere there is social conflict: People become angry, get insulted, or perhaps becomejealous of someone’s success; it is during such uncomfortable times that witches may befound at fault and sorcerers may be called upon for help.

When someone in North American culture thinks of witches and witchcraft, theusual association is with early modern European witchcraft and the Salem trials in NewEngland in 1692. However, these European-based witch beliefs, including the Salemcase, were quite different from those of the preliterate societies in which witchcraft oc-curs, where it functions as an everyday, socially acceptable way of managing tension,




explaining the otherwise unexplainable, leveling disparities in wealth and status, andresolving social conflict. In contrast, early modern European witchcraft was a responseto the strains of a time of profound change, marked by immense political and religiousconflict. Although witch beliefs had been a feature of European culture since the DarkAges, the Church managed to keep the situation under control until the turmoil of thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the practice of labeling Church heretics aswitches became popular and the witchhunt craze occurred. Naturally, the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 is of the greatest interest to Americans, but Salem’s 200 arrests and 19 exe-cutions pale in comparison with the approximately 500,000 people who were executedin Europe during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries after having beenconvicted of witchcraft. At the end of this period, the witchcraze was coming to an end.“Cartesian and scientific thought had no room for witchcraft; ecclesiastical and civil au-thorities agreed that witch prosecutions had got out of hand; and European society wassettling down to two centuries (1700–1900) of relative peace and prosperity” (Russell1987: 196).

Ethnographic reports on witchcraft and sorcery dominate the literature, but otherforces of evil are also responsible for much unjust suffering. One such power, but certainlynot the only one, is the evil eye—widely known in the Middle East, parts of Europe, Cen-tral America, and Africa, areas characterized by Islamic and Judeo-Christian as well asso-called indigenous religious traditions. The evil eye was believed to be a voluntarypower brought about by the malicious nature of the possessor, on the one hand, or an in-voluntary but still dangerous, uncontrolled power on the other. Strangers, dwarfs, oldwomen, certain types of animals, menstruating women, and people with one eye havebeen often viewed as being particularly dangerous. Children and farm animals, the mostprecious of one’s possessions, were thought most vulnerable to the evil eye, which couldcause various disasters to occur immediately or in the future, particularly by assertingcontrol over the victim. A variety of protective measures have been prescribed to ward offthe evil eye. Glass evil eyes and variously shaped metal amulets, for example, are sold totourists and residents alike in modern Greece. Plants, certain avoidance actions, colors,and magical words and gestures have also at different times and places been felt to be ef-fective against the evil eye.

In addition to the evil eye, anguish can be created by malicious ghosts, spirit possession,attacks by enemy shamans, curses of the envious, and the spells of evil magicians and otherspecialists who have learned how to manipulate power to harm others. Each of these causesharms and creates fear in a community and as such is an index of social strain; however,each may also function positively by allowing individuals to blame supernatural agenciesrather than kin and neighbors for illness or misfortunes that befall them.

Demons, spirits, ancestors, and gods all exist as realities in the human mind and possessthe power to harm and harass the living. Good and evil are counterbalanced in every soci-ety through a variety of rituals and other forms of protection, yet this balance is inevitablybroken by human weaknesses and transgressions that invite the evil nature of supernaturalagents. The malicious acts of these agents inflict pain and anguish on the innocent as wellas on those deserving of punishment. Although all supernaturals can possess an individualand cause an unending variety of harm, the most commonly known agent of possession isthe demon. Demons may aid their human consorts from time to time, but generally they areseen as being responsible for diseases, injuries, or a myriad of major and minor personaland group disasters. More powerful than mere humans, they are also generally believed tobe less powerful than gods and ancestral spirits (Collins 1978: 195).

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Possession by demons is ordinarily considered dangerous, but this is not always thecase. For the Aymara Indians of Bolivia, for example, possession results in serious conse-quences for the victims and their community, whereas among the Haitians it is activelysought at voodoo ceremonies in order to obtain the supernatural knowledge of the spirits.The acceptance or the actual seeking out of beneficent spirits and situating them in amedium where they can be called on when needed is termed “adorcism” by L. DeHeusch(1971). I. M. Lewis distinguishes between “central possession cults” and “peripheral pos-session cults.” In the former, spirits, such as ancestors, most commonly possess men andsustain the moral order of society. In the latter, women and others having lesser status arepossessed by malevolent spirits; possession of this type is often considered an illness anddamages the social fabric of the group (1989). Haitians, however, conceive of both goodand evil spirits, and all fear possession by the latter. “Possession, then, is a broad term re-ferring to an integration of spirit and matter, force or power and corporeal reality, in a cos-mos where the boundaries between an individual and her environment are acknowledgedto be permeable, flexibly drawn, or at least negotiable” (Boddy 1994: 407).

The functions of possession commonly go unnoticed, overshadowed by the dramaticexpressive actions of the possessed and those in attendance. Stanley and Ruth Freed (1964:71) showed that spirit possession in a north Indian village functioned primarily to relievethe individual’s intropsychic tensions while giving the victim the attention and sympathyof relatives and friends. The possession itself and its overt demonstration were only a ve-hicle for these functions. Even rules designed to avoid demons, such as the jinns of Islamiccountries, can promote individual self-discipline and propriety in behavior, both asWilliam Howells has pointed out, desirable qualities (1962: 202). The prohibitions pro-moted to avoid jinns do direct behavior toward socially approved goals, but, despite thesepositive functions, demons cause suffering and pain to members of both Western and non-Western societies and every society is forced to cope with their devious nature.

Exorcism—the driving away of evil spirits, such as demons, by chanting, praying, com-manding, or other ritual means—occurs throughout the world and is invoked when an evilspirit has caused illness by entering a person’s body. (A belief in exorcism assumes a relatedbelief in the power of ritual to move an evil spirit from one place to another.) Although theidea that foreign objects can enter the body and cause illness has been widespread, it wasespecially prevalent among American Indians, where curers, shamans, and sometimes aspecialist known as a “sucking doctor” had the ability to remove these materials by suchtechniques as rubbing and kneading the patient’s body, gesturing over the diseased area,and directly sucking out the evil object. Shamans, because of the “trick” aspect of their ritu-als, are especially well versed in the intricacies of exorcism as a means of removal ofdisease-causing objects. Typically, a sleight-of-hand maneuver is used to show the patientthat the harmful substance has been removed.

Howells (1962: 92–94) has described several techniques used around the world for ex-orcising evil spirits and diseases: using sweat-baths, cathartics, or emetics to flush out theoffending spirits; trephining; manipulating and massaging the body; scraping or spong-ing the illness off the body; reciting magical spells, coaxing, or singing songs to lure thespirit away; tempting the spirit to evacuate the body by laying out a sumptuous meal forit; keeping the patient uncomfortable, sometimes by administering beatings, so the spiritwill be discontented with the body and want to depart; building a fire under the patientto make it uncomfortably warm for the spirit; placing foul-smelling, overripe fruit nearthe patient; and scandalizing the demon by having the patient’s naked wife jump overthe patient.




Until the recent popularity of movies, television shows, and novels about possession bydemons, the American public was largely unaware that exorcism has been practicedthroughout the history of Western religions. Somewhat alarming to many Americans wasthe realization that the Catholic Church continued to approve exorcisms in twentieth-century America. The following seventeenth-century conjuration was recited by priests inorder to exorcise evil spirits from troubled houses. The words may be different, as are thenames for the supernatural beings referred to, but the intent of the conjuration is identicalto incantations uttered by religious specialists in preliterate societies during exorcism ritesfor similar purposes:

I adjure thee, O serpent of old, by the Judge of the living and the dead; by the Creator of theworld who hath power to cast into hell, that thou depart forthwith from this house. He thatcommands thee, accursed demon, is He that commanded the winds and the sea and thestorm. He that commands thee, is He that ordered thee to be hurled down from the height ofheaven into the lower parts of the earth. He that commands thee is He that bade thee departfrom Him. Hearken, then, Satan, and fear. Get thee gone, vanquished and cowed, when thouart bidden in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ who will come to judge the living and thedead and all the world by fire. Amen. (Crehan 1970: 873)

William James saw religion as the belief in an unseen order. If one important aspect ofreligion is helping believers come to know that unknown, it follows that divination is im-portant to religion. Divination means learning about the future or about things that may behidden. Although the word itself may be traced to divinity, which indicates its relationshipto gods, the practice of divination belongs as much to magic as it does to religion proper.From the earliest times, human beings have wanted to know about such climatic changes asdrought and heavy rainfall. Without scientific information to help predict natural events,early humans looked for “signs” in the flight of birds, the entrails of small animals, orperhaps the positions of coals in a fire or pebbles in a stream. To this day, the methods ofdivination in the world’s cultures are far too varied and numerous to mention here.

Until recently, controversy has surrounded the definition of magic and religion by an-thropologists. Only in the last few years have they come close to agreement that the di-chotomy is a false one or that, if a dichotomy does exist, its ramifications are not significantto the study of the practitioners of each. Both magic and religion deal directly with thesupernatural, and our understanding of the cultural applications of each provides deeperinsights into the worldview of the people practicing them.

Magic is usually divided into types, depending on the techniques involved. For exam-ple, Sir James Frazer distinguished “imitative magic,” in which the magician believes thatthe desired result can be achieved by imitation, from “contagious magic,” in which materi-als or substances once in contact with the intended victim are used in the magical attack.Other scholars would include “sympathetic magic,” a form of magic in which items associ-ated with or symbolic of the intended victim are used to identify and carry out the spell. Ob-viously, sympathetic magic contains elements of both imitative and contagious magic.

These forms of magic, still in use today, have been important methods of reducing anxi-ety regarding problems that exceeded the ability of people to understand and control them,especially because of a lack of technological expertise. Divination, special formulas and in-cantations, spells and curses—all are considered magical, and all can be used for good orevil. Because these activities are learned, they should be differentiated from witchcraft,which is considered innate and, most believe, uncontrollable.

It is logical to assume that non-Western reliance on explanations of events in terms ofmagic, sorcery, and witchcraft is a natural outcome of a lack of scientific training. But it isequally important to note that Westerners also rely on religious beliefs, with faith playing a





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strong role in determining actions and behaviors in our daily lives. Our ethnocentrism stillblinds us to the similarities between ourselves and our fellow humans throughout theworld. The great questions concerning the human condition are asked by all peoples, anddespite the disparate levels of technology our sameness is demonstrated by the universal-ity of religion.

In the lead article of this chapter, James L. Brain employs a cross-cultural approach towitchcraft, emphasizing the near-universal image of woman as witch, and presents histheory that the mobility of nomadic societies, such as hunter-gatherers, accounts for theabsence of witchcraft among those groups and its presence among the hunter’s sedentaryhorticultural neighbors.

In the second article, Naomi M. McPherson investigates sorcery and concepts of de-viance among the Kabana of Papua New Guinea. She shows the Kabana to be quite unusualin that, unlike most other groups, they do not always consider the practice of sorcery tobe evil, and they believe that under certain conditions it can function positively in theirsociety.

The third article is by T. M. Luhrmann; it describes typical contemporary witches andtheir rituals. Luhrmann’s work is based on research with middle-class, urban witches inEngland in the 1980s.

In the fourth selection, E. E. Evans-Pritchard describes the Azande poison oracle bengeand the beliefs surrounding its usage.

The Bronislaw Malinowski article is a classic work identifying circumstances in whichmagic is used, and it is based on the author’s research in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia.Rejecting the once-popular idea that primitive peoples are incapable of rational thought,Malinowski argues that Melanesians make use of an experience-based understandingof the world in a manner much like science, and they rely on magic only in situations ofuncertainty.

In the last article, George Gmelch cleverly applies Malinowski’s ideas on magic to base-ball.

References

Boddy, Janice1994 “Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality.” Annual Reviews in Anthropology

23: 407–34.

Collins, John J.1978 Primitive Religion. Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams.

Crehan, J. H.1970 “Exorcism.” In Richard Cavendish, ed., Man, Myth and Magic, vol. 7, pp. 869–73.

London: BPCC/Phoebus.

DeHeusch, L.1971 Why Marry Her? Society and Symbolic Structures. Translated by J. Lloyd. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E.1937 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Freed, Stanley A., and Ruth S. Freed1964 “Spirit Possession as Illness in a North Indian Village.” Ethnology 3: 152–71.

Howells, William1962 The Heathens. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.




Kluckhohn, Clyde1967 Navaho Witchcraft. Boston: Beacon Press (first published, 1944).

Kluckhohn, Clyde, and Dorothea Leighton1962 The Navaho. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (first published 1946).

Lewis, I. M.1989 Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. 2nd ed. London:

Routledge.

Mair, Lucy1969 Witchcraft. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Russell, Jeffrey Burton1987 “Witchcraft.” In Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion, pp. 415–23. New York:

Macmillan.

Shehu, U.1975 Health Care in Rural Areas. AFRO Technical Papers, no. 10.





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Our understanding of historical attitudes towardgender may be illuminated by a comparative cross-cultural approach to witchcraft. Two issues are espe-cially important: the reason for the near universalityof the image of woman as witch, and the idea that ge-ographic and spatial mobility may be an importantand overlooked factor in the absence of witchcraftaccusations and in the decline of their frequency.

The Image of the Witch

Anthropological and historical evidence shows thatthe specific details of beliefs about witches and theirbehavior will vary according to the concerns of aparticular society. There are, however, two universalconstants about witch beliefs that cut across cultures:witches represent people’s deepest fears about them-selves and society, and they represent a reversal of allthat is considered normal behavior in a particularsociety. This has been documented for small-scalesocieties (Wilson 1951; Mair 1969), but the situationin Europe needs to be examined. Norman Cohndiscusses the European witchcraze in terms of“collective fantasies,” “obsessive fears,” and “unac-knowledged desires” in the minds of sixteenth- and

33

An Anthropological Perspectiveon the WitchcrazeJames L. Brain

At first glance, it would appear impossible that an anthropological investigation of the Europeanwitchcraze, so far removed from contemporary America, could shed light on current attitudes towardgender. In this article, however, James L. Brain demonstrates that the idea of the witch is closely re-lated to the subversion of male authority, a reversal of patriarchal authority that Saint Paul assertedwas divinely ordered. The denigration of women in European thought can, in part, be traced toAristotle, who saw women’s souls and bodies as being inferior. Weaknesses such as these, it wasthought, predisposed women to be witches. Close on the heels of this came the idea of ritual pollutionof men by women, female emissions being further evidence of women’s inferiority.

The image of women as witches is widespread, but it was not until witchcraft was linked to thedevil that it was considered heresy, a crime punishable by death. It is not difficult to link these his-torical attitudes toward women with the present. In fact, Brain maintains that “the witchcrazeended, but misogyny and gynophobia are still alive and well at the end of the twentieth century.”

In addition to the issue of gender and witchcraft, Brain addresses the question of why witches arebelieved to exist in some societies and not others. Here the author’s “mobility theory,” based on thenomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers, offers a provocative explanation for the absence of witchcraftamong these peoples but its presence among sedentary horticultural societies.

Reprinted from Jean R. Brink, Allison P. Coudert, andMaryanne C. Horowitz, eds., THE POLITICS OF GENDERIN EARLY MODERN EUROPE (Kirksville, Mo.: SixteenthCentury Journal Publishers, Inc., 1989), pp. 15–27. Bypermission of the publisher. The article’s citations, originallynumbered footnotes, have been interpolated into the text inthis volume for consistency of presentation.




seventeenth-century men and women (Cohn 1975:258–63). Margaret Murray and, to a certain extent,Carlo Ginzburg locate the origins of European witch-craft beliefs in pre-Christian religions (Ginzburg1983; Murray 1931/1970).

It would be unfortunate if we were to reviveMurray’s hypothesis. The beliefs about witches canbe explained without reference to pre-Christian reli-gions, if we assume that witch-like behavior is asimple reversal of normal and socially accepted be-havior. In Catholic Europe, the Church demandedattendance at mass in the daytime on Sundays; thepredominant color there was white. By reversingthis, one can easily predict that witches will cele-brate their own sabbath at night, and that blackwill be the predominant color in their community orcongregation—hence the term “black mass.” Reversalalso predicts that whatever ritual or service is per-formed will be a reversal of the Christian mass—therecitation of prayers backwards, the reversed cross,and worship of some form of Antichrist. The Churchdemanded acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity,in which subliminally one can perceive that Mary ismade pregnant by her own son in the shape of theHoly Ghost; the reversal of this doctrine makes pro-fane incest an attribute of witches. If there was a sa-cred act of ritual cannibalism in Holy Communion,then witches could be expected to take part in someblasphemous form of cannibalism. The belief inJesus’ conquest of death and decay manifested itselfin the idea that the bodies of saints do not decay atdeath; in witch beliefs, this finds its reversal in thebelief in vampires that do not decay. If heterosexual-ity is the extolled norm, then homosexuality will beseen as witch-like, and if chastity is the ultimate con-dition of holiness then obviously one should expectwitches to engage in sexual orgies.

This point can be carried even further: if patriar-chal authority is divinely ordained, as Saint Paul in-sisted, then any attempt by women to subvert or toassume that authority can be seen as an illicit rever-sal and hence as witch-like behavior. The first exam-ple of the subversion of divine authority, of course, isattributed to Eve in her disobedience. Both Protes-tants and Catholics were concerned with issues ofauthority and women. Martin de Castañega’s trea-tise on superstition and witchcraft (1529) answersthe question of why women are more prone to bewitches than men thus: “The first reason is because

Christ forbade them to administer the sacramentsand therefore the devil gives them the authority todo it with his execrations” (Darst 1979: 298–322).Here we see not only the reversal of normal, i.e.,God-given authority, but also the idea of the admin-istration of blasphemous, heretical sacraments. Ad-ditional reversals occur in his explanations of howand why witches, like angels and Christ, can fly; howand why they, like Christ can walk on water; andhow and why they, like Christ and the devil, can be-come invisible or change their shape (Darst 1979:306). In the pattern of inheritance D. H. Darst recordsanother reversal. Instead of passing on inheritancefrom father to son, witches inherit their discipleshipto the devil from mother to daughter, from aunt toniece, or from grandmother to granddaughter.

To the issue of authority, feminist anthropologicalscholarship offers very cogent insights (Rosaldo1974: 1–42). Authority is always legitimate; powermay be, but often is not. Where women are deniedauthority, they inevitably seek their ends by the ma-nipulation of the power they possess: by denyingsex, food or nurture; by failing to perform householdtasks, by outright disobedience, or by passive resis-tance in the form of sulking, scolding, and gossiping.All of these possibilities subvert legitimate male au-thority and can, therefore, be seen as evidence ofwitchcraft. One can conceive of a sliding scale: theless authority—or responsibility—women possess,the more manipulation of power will occur, and viceversa. Thus we can confidently expect to find theparadox that women are often extremely powerful insocieties in which they are denied any authority; inthese social organizations they develop strategies toattain their ends outside the legitimate parameters ofauthority.

This paradigm has great relevance to women inRenaissance Europe in terms of the generation ofmisogyny. As Lamphere demonstrates, the image ofwomen in patrilineal and patrilocal societies is in-variably negative: women are believed to be deceit-ful, untrustworthy and manipulative (Lamphere1974: 97–112). This negative image is a direct result ofmarriage practices: the men are all related by blood;the women, because of rules of clan exogamy, are allstrangers both to the men and to each other. In alarge extended family, the men will have the solidar-ity of kinship; the women will lack any solidarity. Insuch societies the only possible way for a woman to





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tion of ritual pollution is used widely to “prove” thatwomen are inferior, and doubtless has much to dowith latter-day disputes about the ordination ofwomen. All bodily emissions are considered pollut-ing or, in our modem idiom, disgusting. Amongothers, Mary Douglas seeks an explanation for thisattitude (Douglas 1966). In her opinion, all such sub-stances are considered threatening because they areliminal, because they have “traversed the boundaryof the body” and are thus of the body but yet not ofthe body, and thus do not fit our standard categories.While I do not dispute this point, I have argued else-where that what makes these substances so deeplythreatening is that they remind us of death (Brain1977b: 371–84). It is no coincidence that they areoften sought for and used in magic intended to bringabout the death of the victim. Of course, both menand women produce polluting emissions, but onlywomen menstruate, give birth messily, and lactate.Customarily women take care of small babies who,like animals, are uncontrolled in their excretions,and the association with babies makes women addi-tionally polluting. The issue of pollution throwsadditional light on why midwives were dispro-portionately often accused of witchcraft. Becausethey assisted at birth, they inevitably became conta-minated with polluting substances. It should alsobe recalled that midwives traditionally laid out thedead and were contaminated by death, the ultimatepollutant.

Women’s very physiology therefore makes themappear more polluted and polluting than men. Evenin regard to the sexual act itself, a man can more eas-ily be cleansed since his genitals are external and canbe readily washed. A woman cannot be so readilycleansed, since her own polluting bodily fluids havebeen augmented by the deposition of the man’ssemen. Pollution alone would not make a witch, yetthe Malleus makes clear that pollution is a primaryaspect of sexuality. Sexuality is allied to temptation,and the Devil is the great tempter. Nowhere is thismore powerfully demonstrated than through themedium of lust for women—“though the deviltempted Eve to sin, yet Eve seduced Adam”(Malleus: Part 1, Question 6).

Although the Malleus is obsessive in its misogynyand loathing of sex, it seems to deal only indirectlywith one sexual matter—the nature of semen. Liter-ary references of the Shakespearian period show that

achieve her goals is for her to manipulate those whopossess legitimate authority—her husband and hersons. Lamphere contrasts this inevitably negativeimage of women with the very positive image en-joyed by Navajo women. In that matrilineal societymarriage is often matrilocal, so that it is the husbandwho moves to his wife’s family. Here he is the onesurrounded by strangers and must depend on hiswife to negotiate concessions for him. Under thesecircumstances women are viewed as competentmanagers and good negotiators. This shows that thelocality of marriage is crucial in determining theimage of women. While it is true that in northernEuropean societies bilateral descent was the norm,most marriages probably have demanded thatwomen move to join their husbands. If manipulationof power is the only available route a woman can fol-low to achieve her ends then inevitably her imagewill be that of a manipulative bitch—as the MalleusMaleficarum makes abundantly clear.

There is little doubt that a contributing factor tothe denigration of women in European thoughtwas the legacy of Aristotle by way, particularly, ofAugustine. “Conceiving of the soul as possessingnutritive, sensitive or appetitive and reasonable fac-ulties, Aristotle saw women’s souls as deficient in allthree aspects, but especially in the faculty of reason”(Robertson n.d.). Acceptance of this idea leadsinexorably to the dicta of the Malleus about the pre-disposition of women to be witches because of theirmanifold weaknesses (Question 4) (Kramer andSprenger 1971).

Not only was the woman’s soul seen as inferior;her body was too. “In Aristotelian and Galenicterms, woman is less fully developed than man. Be-cause of lack of heat in germination, her sexual or-gans have remained internal, she is incomplete,colder and moister in dominant humors. She has lessbody heat and thus less courage, liberality, moralstrength” (Robertson n.d.). That these ideas may ap-pear absurd to us has to be tempered by their legacyand persistence in more recent times. Darwin be-lieved that women were less evolved than men be-cause of their childlike skins and softness (Dykstra1986: 167–73), and the Freudian doctrine of penis-envy surely owes something to them.

The denigration of the body leads into anotherarea germane to the witch stereotype and one thathas been much explored by anthropology. The ques-




this was a subject that exercised men’s minds. Insome ways, this belief is still widely held as part offolk beliefs even today in the United States. The basicassumption of this belief is that marrow and semenare the same substance; the skull is the largest bonein the body and the brain is its marrow. Thereforeany emission of semen depletes a man’s life force andintelligence. “As the main storehouse of bone mar-row, the brain is the source of semen, via the spinalcord. The supply is limited. . . . Loss of manhood,power, and ultimate life itself results from the‘spending’ of the life force, which is a finite capital”(La Barre 1984: 130). Francis Bacon wrote in 1626 that“The skull has Braines, as a kind of Marrow, withinit”; and even Leonardo da Vinci apparently believedin a duct connecting the brain to the penis via thespinal cord (La Barre 1984: 115–18). Understandingthe belief that semen and marrow were one and thesame gives point to the many references in literatureto the danger of expending a man’s marrow. If wegrasp this unfounded fear, we can well understandyet another aspect of the witch image: that of the suc-cubus and its terrifyingly debilitating potential.

Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested that the primarypair of oppositions is that of nature versus culture(Leach 1970: 35). Sherry B. Ortner claims that univer-sally women are perceived as being, if not part of nature,at least as closer to nature than men, who are per-ceived as the generators of culture (Ortner 1974:67–87). This position has been challenged (McCormackand Strathern 1980), but it is convincing. It generatesthe following sets of oppositions (always unequal invalue):

Nature—CultureWomen—MenDarkness—LightLeft—RightDisorder—OrderDeath—Life

It is significant that in many languages the word forleft is synonymous with female and right with male(Brain 1977a: 180–92). One should note that “right”as in side or hand and “right” as in correct or “theright to” are not merely homonymous. The same istrue of “droit” or “recht.” Perceptually, witches arealways believed to do and to be everything that isthe reverse of normal and right. Similarly, all the

other characteristics in the left column are applicableto the witch stereotype.

The link between women and nature suggestedby Ortner was hardly an unfamiliar one in Renais-sance Europe. Bacon in particular took the view thatthe mission of science was the subjugation of nature.Moreover, he participated in the “rhetoric that con-joins the domination of nature with the insistentimage of nature as female” (Fox-Keller 1983: 116).

That the image of witch as woman (or vice versa)is extremely widespread in the world is beyonddoubt. Elsewhere in the world, and in Europe beforethe association of witchcraft with heresy, witchcraftwas considered bad but of minor importance. Dur-ing the witchcraze a new doctrine emerged thatlinked witchcraft with devil worship and hence withheresy. This change in doctrine made the image ofwoman as witch lethal to women. The change didnot occur in a vacuum, and there are many powerfulreasons why the witchcraze occurred. The witch-craze ended, but misogyny and gynophobia are stillalive and well at the end of the twentieth century.

Mobility as a Factorin the Nonexistence or Declineof Witchcraft Beliefs

Examining non-Western small-scale societies, onediscovers a rather startling fact. Societies with thesimplest technologies of all—hunter-gatherers suchas the San of the Kalahari, the Mbuti pygmies of theIturi Forest, and the Hadza of northwest Tanzania—are quite unconcerned about witchcraft and do notthink that it occurs in their societies (Marshall 1962:221–52; Turnbull 1968: 132–37; Woodburn 1968:49–55). They do, however, impute it to their seden-tary agricultural neighbors (Turnbull 1961: 228;Woodburn 1982a: 431–51; Lee 1976: 127–29). Whenthey themselves are forced into a sedentary way oflife, “witchcraft fears are rampant” (Woodburn1982b: 187–210). Why fears of witchcraft are unim-portant to such peoples is described by several au-thors. Of the San peoples, L. Marshall writes, “thecomposition of a band is fluid—marriage takes indi-viduals from one band to another, and whole fami-lies move from one band to another; bands split anddisband completely” (Marshall 1976: 180). Similarly,Richard Lee notes that “hunters have a great deal of






latitude to vote with their feet, to walk out of an un-pleasant situation” (Lee 1972: 182). In J. Woodburn’sdescription of conflict resolution in these societieslies the key to the absence of witchcraft beliefs. Whenconflict arises, people move, giving an ecologicalreason. Thus, “they solve disputes simply by refus-ing to acknowledge them” (Woodburn 1968: 156;1979: 244–60).

It is significant that all these African hunter-gatherers possess negligible property and practicebilateral descent. The situation is very different in so-cieties that practice unilineal descent. In his essay,Meyer Fortes suggests that unilineal descent is char-acteristic of societies in which property rights areacknowledged (Fortes 1953: 17–41). Such societiesinvariably subscribe to a belief in sorcery or witch-craft or both. Unlike their African counterparts, Aus-tralian hunter-gatherers practice unilineal descent.They claim ownership over totemic sites and believein evil magic, as evidenced by accounts of “bone-pointing” (Thomas 1906; Spencer and Gillen 1904:462–63; Spencer and Gillen 1899/1938: 533; Elkin1938: 203–05; Meggitt 1962: 139, 176). All the accountsemphasize, however, that only men are involved;that the practice is thought to be rare. It is also be-lieved that “the professional worker of magic is al-ways to be found in another tribe” (Elkin 1938: 203).Woodburn suggests that the crucial factor that differ-entiates African from Australian hunter-gatherers is“the relatively tight control which men exercise overwomen” among the Australians (Woodburn 1979:258). This point has relevance to the European witch-craze. It is also important that Woodburn describesthe African hunter-gatherers as having an “immedi-ate return system” of economics, whereas the Aus-tralians, more like sedentary peoples, have “delayedreturn systems” (Woodburn 1982a: 258).Acomparablepeople, the Ona (or Selk’nam) of Tierra del Fuego,are a hunting-gathering people. Anne Chapman de-scribes them as inegalitarian, oppressive to women(unlike the African hunter-gatherers). They put an“emphasis on patrilineality, and patrilocality [and]the preeminence of territoriality” (Chapman 1984:63). Like the Australians, they change campsites fre-quently; like them they believe in sorcerers; likethem they claim that sorcerers belong to anothertribe (Bridges 1949: 213, 373).

If we turn to the nomadic pastoral peoples, weshould, according to my hypothesis, find a situation

similar to that found among the Australians and theOna/Selk’nam, since all pastoralists practice patri-lineal descent, and own property, but move fairlyfrequently. This proves to be the case. There is nomention of witchcraft among the Fulani (Peuls) ofthe Sahel region of West Africa (Stenning 1959, 1965),while among the pastoral Somali “magic, witchcraftand sorcery play a small part” (Lewis 1965). Thesame is true of the Turkana and Dodos of NorthernKenya (Gulliver and Gulliver 1953: 86), and theKaramojong of Northern Uganda (Dyson-Hudson1966: 40), where “in theory, witches are never foundin one’s own settlement but always in a differentgroup from one’s own” (Gulliver and Gulliver 1953:49). The closely related Jie, their neighbors, haveadopted a partially sedentary mode of existence.They diagnose witchcraft as the cause for a sequenceof misfortunes, and their “normal procedure [then]is to move to a new homestead to avoid the evil in-fluence” (Gulliver 1955: 104). Similarly, the nomadicpastoral Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania believe thatone can learn the techniques of sorcery, but “theyhave no conventional category of supernational‘witches’ . . . and they often make fun of their Bantuneighbors who they know do possess such beliefs”(Jacobs 1985). Their linguistically and ethnically sim-ilar sedentary neighbors, the Arusha (il Arusa), onthe other hand, are very concerned about witchcraft(Gulliver 1963: 21). The same holds true for theclosely related agricultural Nandi and Kipsigis inKenya (Peristiany 1939: 94–95; Langley 1979: 10, 62),and for the related Lango and Teso of Uganda(Driberg 1923: 241ff; Lawrence 1957: 182; Gulliverand Gulliver 1953: 26). The ethnically different, click-speaking Sandawe, not far away, who were probablyformerly hunter-gatherers, now practice agriculture.Predictably, G. W. B. Huntingford says of them that“witchcraft is prevalent and illness and death are at-tributed either to it or to the anger of ancestral spir-its” (Huntingford 1953: 137–38).

The ethnographic data show that in societies withtotal mobility and little attachment to property andwith consequently little development of hierarchyand authority, there are no fears about witchcraft.Where there is considerable mobility but some at-tachment to property—often expressed by the pres-ence of unilineal descent—we can expect to find abelief that witchcraft exists. The assumption is, how-ever, that it is located in some other group and can




easily be avoided by the move of a homestead. Asdwellings are temporary huts in a thorn corral orsomething similar, this is not considered a particu-larly serious matter. When we turn to the sedentarypeoples of the non-industrial world, however, wecan expect always to find beliefs in witchcraft. Thedetails of the beliefs may vary, but, as I have alreadymentioned, there is a remarkable consistency aboutaspects of the beliefs.

At the same time, it is manifest that particularforms of social organization or socio-political situa-tions can generate more or less acute fears of witch-craft. Siegfried Frederick Nadel shows convincinglythat two peoples that are almost identical ethnically,linguistically, and culturally can demonstrate radi-cally different attitudes to witchcraft (Nadel 1952:18–29). One society was rife with fears and accusa-tions; the other had none. The only difference be-tween the two societies is that the former has threeage grades; the latter six. To move into the nexthigher grade, men had to forego the privileges of theage group they were relinquishing. Where there are sixgrades this presents no problem; where there areonly three, suspicions and accusations proliferate be-tween the young men and those in the middlegrade—who are understandably reluctant to assumethe mantle of old age and to eschew sexual activityand other privileges. Comparably, J. C. Mitchellshows that even in the circumstances of a modern to-bacco estate in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), relativelywell-educated permanent staff members constantlysuspected their colleagues of evil magic directedagainst them (Mitchell 1965: 196). Uneducated ca-sual laborers on the same estate who in their homeareas might well have been anxious about witchcraftwere quite unconcerned during their temporary so-journ on the estate. The more highly educated work-ers were in constant contact with one another andwere always in competition for the favors of thewhite management.

. . . That virtually everywhere people believed inwitchcraft from time immemorial until the eigh-teenth century is well established (Trevor-Roper1969: 91). Why, then, was there the enormous surgeof accusations during the Renaissance period? Andwhy did the craze draw to a close? As Thomas notesof the decline in belief and the acceptance of a morerational viewpoint, “the ultimate origins of this faithin unaided human capacity remain mysterious.”

Thomas accepts that “the decline of magic coincidedwith a marked improvement in the extent to whichthe environment became amenable to control”(Thomas 1971: 650, 663). Better food supplies andconditions of health, the cessation of plague(Midelfort 1972: 194), better communications andbanking services, insurance, better fire-fighting—allthese factors undoubtedly contributed to a greatersense of security. While it is true that the human im-pulse to seek scapegoats remains with us in thetwentieth century, we have, in the main, abandonedthe idea of personal malice as a cause for misfortune.In contemporary small-scale societies this personalview of misfortune persists, as numerous anthropo-logical studies show.

It is quite clear to anyone who has worked incountries where there is still a general belief inwitchcraft that education alone, even at universitylevel, does not destroy the belief. It is quite easy tograft a theory of witchcraft onto a scientific theory ofcausation such as the germ theory (Offiong 1985:107–24), and thus to assume that even a microor-ganism can attack one person rather than anotherbecause some person used evil magic. Moreover,most rational scientific observers would admit thatpsychological factors are important in reducingimmunity. The reality of psychosomatic afflictions,however, is rather different from imputing each mis-fortune to the malevolence of one’s kin or neighbors.If we look at the history of Europe it is only too evi-dent that education per se was not the major reasonfor the waning of the craze; indeed, as Joseph Klaitsnotes, “the educated were in the forefront of thewitch hunts” (Klaits 1985: 1–2). The rebirth of ideasafter the medieval period should, one would think,have signalled the end of belief, yet Trevor-Roper ob-serves, “There can be no doubt that the witch-crazegrew, and grew terribly, after the Renaissance”(Trevor-Roper 1969: 91).

The skeptics who had the courage to challengethe prevailing orthodoxy about witches did not dis-pute the existence of witchcraft. Not to believe inwitches was often seen as tantamount to being anatheist, as Sir Thomas Browne pointed out (Browne1964: 29). What Weyer and Scot in the sixteenth cen-tury objected to was the injustice of accusing thewrong people. Bekker in the seventeenth centurybased his challenge on a fundamentalist piece of the-ology: if the devil on his fall from heaven was locked






up in hell, how then could he be involved withwitches here on earth (Trevor-Roper 1969: 174).

Precisely what caused the change from the rela-tively benign attitude toward witches in the MiddleAges to the hysterical attitude characteristic of theMalleus Maleficarum (Midelfort 1972: 193–94) is the sub-ject of an ongoing debate. Cross-cultural study maycontribute to our understanding of what caused theend of the witchcraze. One reason may be the onlyconceivable aspect that our social organizationshares with that of the African hunter-gatherers: ourmobility.

Humanity is by its nature a mass of contradic-tions. Impulses for conformity war with those for in-dividualism. Tension develops and somehow has tobe resolved. Where it is possible physically to removeoneself from those with whom one is in conflict, thetension disappears. Where this is not possible andwhere it is socially unacceptable to admit to tensionarising from feelings of hate toward close kin,spouses, affines or neighbors, the human imagina-tion seems to build up a whole edifice of fantasyabout witches based on childish fears and imagin-ings. This holds especially true for societies wherechildrearing practices are harsh. While the details ofbeliefs may vary according to cultural prescription,the broad outlines are remarkably similar world-wide. They retain their fascination even in our skep-tical, secular world, as Bruno Bettelheim has remindedus (Bettelheim 1977).

It is Thomas’s contention that the surge in witch-craft accusations in the late sixteenth and early

seventeenth centuries was not generated by any fun-damental change in folk beliefs, but by a change inthe structure of society. He speaks of the “increas-ingly individualistic forms of behavior which ac-companied the economic changes” (Thomas 1971:561). Cross-culturally one might draw a parallel withpresent-day Africa, where scholars have universallyreported the widespread belief that the practice ofevil magic has proliferated (Middleton and Winter1963: 25). In Europe the change was from a feudalsociety with its well-understood certitudes aboutclass and status; in Africa from a tribal form of socialorganization in which status was largely ascribedto the emerging societies, in which status can beachieved through education, wage employment,cash-cropping, entrepreneurial, political and reli-gious activities; class divisions have begun to appearand become institutionalized (Gluckman 1965).

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesthere was enormous social, political, economic, andreligious ferment in Europe. This led initially to feel-ings of deep insecurity in all these arenas of humanactivity, exacerbated by the Copernican revolution; italso led to unrivaled opportunities for the acquisi-tion of wealth, power, and social status. All this ac-tivity generated great divisions in society, as well aspowerful emotions such as envy, jealousy, hostility,self-questioning, and guilt. This is entirely consistentwith the large number of witchcraft accusations inthe Tudor and early Stuart periods. A similar phe-nomenon—though not on quite so lethal a scale—istaking place in Africa today. . . .




290

In the study of what we now recognize as “de-viance” in Pacific societies, the work of Malinowskiis central. Vincent considers his treatment of sorcery,in particular, to be “pathbreaking.” In the Trobriands,sorcery was both a criminal practice and a method ofadministering justice. Which it was in any particular

case depended on who was practising it on whomand when he was doing it. On the one hand, sorcerywas

the main criminal agency (Malinowski 1926: 85);on the other, the Trobriand chief used sorcery topunish offenders. . . . Thus he concluded that wherethere was no formal code or administration ofjustice, it was very difficult to draw a line betweenthe “quasi-legal” and the “quasi-criminal.” (Vincent1990: 165–66)

The line was usually drawn in some public arena.

34

Sorcery and Concepts ofDeviance Among the Kabana,West New BritainNaomi M. McPherson

Most beginning students of comparative religion picture sorcerers as practitioners of evil with few, ifany, positive functions in their societies. Contrary to this general view, Naomi McPherson’s datademonstrate that, depending on the circumstances that initiate the attack, sorcery may or may not beconsidered by the Kabana as a criminal act. She writes (Anthropologica, vol. 33, no. 1–2, 1991, p. 127):

For the Kabana of New Britain, deviant behavior is essentially the advancement of self-interestuntempered by self-regulation such that the individual infringes on the ability of others to pur-sue their own self-interest. Social labeling is applied to deviant behaviors, but no permanentstigma attaches to individuals. Reactions to deviance include shame, gossip and ridicule, pro-ceedings before the village magistrate, and sorcery. The performance of sorcery, a major cause ofdeath, is a complex and ambiguous event, insofar as a sorcerer’s threat may both inhibit devianceand mediate conflict, but the actual enactment of the threat is itself a deviant act. In cases wherea victim’s illness is attributed to sorcery, a moot may be held to discern the motives of sorceryand identify the sorcerer. In a particular case, which is examined at length here, failure clearly toidentify the sorcerer was followed by the victim’s death.

Deaths resulting from sorcery are always classified as “bad deaths” by the Kabana.

“Sorcery and Concepts of Deviance Among the Kabana, West NewBritain” reprinted with permission from ANTHROPOLOGICA,Vol. 33, No. 1–2, 1991, pp. 127–43.




In this early view, sorcery may be either devianceper se, or it may be the control of deviance. This treat-ment is compatible with the labelling theory of de-viance that has developed since Malinowski wrote,especially in its focus on reactions to deviance ratherthan deviance itself. Indeed, the earliest statement oflabelling theory by Becker (1963: 10–11) included alengthy citation of one of Malinowski’s cases fromCrime and Custom in Savage Society (Malinowski1967). Becker used this quote to differentiate be-tween the relatively common commission of an actand the rare adjudication of the same act as deviant byvirtue of the reaction to it.

In this paper, a similar analysis is applied to theKabana of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea.Labelling theory is used to call attention to the mul-tiple levels of political negotiation that go into a de-cision about whether an act of sorcery is—or is not—deviant. In the process, the analysis leads us to anexamination of the organizational complexity of la-belling. In order to provide context for the analysis, Ibegin with a discussion of Kabana morality and thenmove to a discussion of lower, “pre-sorcery” levels ofsocial control among the Kabana, and, finally, I ex-amine Kabana notions of sorcery as a social sanction.With this background established, the paper thenmoves to an extended analysis of a particular case ofalleged sorcery and the political negotiation thattook place, when villagers tried to decide whetherthe sorcery was deviance or had been used as ameans to control deviance. The case is a provocativeand rich one, because the outcome of the negotiationwas indeterminate. The line between sorcery as de-viance and sorcery as control of deviance could notbe drawn, and the case entered Kabana history asbackdrop for some dispute that would arise later.

Kabana Morality

Among the Kabana of West New Britain, Papua NewGuinea, the framework of ideal social values andmorals is grounded in concepts of human nature andthe obligations inherent in the structure of human re-lations. It is this ethic of morality which provides aguide for individual action, and against which ac-tions are judged. In this non-literate society, wherethe locus of individual experience is social, relationsamong individuals and groups do not exist in the ab-stract but always and only in connection with some-

one or something else. Given the extensive and over-lapping network of Kabana social relations, there isan equally extensive range of behaviour that can beperceived as deviant to some degree and can elicitvarying degrees of response from a particular audi-ence. What constitutes deviant behaviour thus de-pends on whether relevant others perceive a certainact as a threat to the basic tenets of Kabana social life,that is, to the moral obligations which structurehuman relations.

Offended persons may select from a hierarchy ofresponses of increasing complexity to restore and re-structure their interpersonal relations. Ultimately,social conformity derives from a fundamental princi-ple of reciprocal self-interest which is based upontwo related concepts: self-regulation and self-help.Self-regulation entails that all individuals aredeemed to be in control of their own existence and,therefore, are accountable to, and responsible for,others. Self-help is the principle whereby individualswho perceive their rights to have been infringedupon may rightfully take retaliatory action againstthose who have infringed upon them (cf. Lawrence1984: 161). The interrelated concepts of self-help andself-regulation are, in turn, based on the Kabana be-lief in personal autonomy, that is, that all individualshave the freedom to empower their existence as abasic human right. For the Kabana, deviant behav-iour is essentially the advancement of self-interestuntempered by self-regulation such that the individ-ual infringes on the ability of others to pursue theirown self-interest.

The Kabana label behaviour but not individualsas deviant, and the imposition of negative sanctionsin no way implies an intent to permanently discrim-inate against or stigmatize an offender. The aim ofany sanction is to provide the culprit with the oppor-tunity for expiation thereby limiting the conse-quences of the transgression to that single event.There is no intentional discrimination against, andno stigma applied to, offenders, for to stigmatizepersons is to set aside and mark them permanentlyas incorrigibly different, thus denying them the op-portunity to redress the imbalance in social relationscaused by their offenses. By not allowing a person torectify wrongful behaviour, others arbitrarily rescindthat individual’s personal autonomy, integrity andright to self-help, thus effectively reducing the indi-vidual to a non-social (and, therefore, non-human)

MCPHERSON • SORCERY AND CONCEPTS OF DEVIANCE AMONG THE KABANA, WEST NEW BRITAIN | 291





being. To label an individual permanently as deviantis to place him or her outside the pale of human rela-tions as a social pariah. Ultimately, such action is tan-tamount to a death sentence, because in societies ofthis nature, no one can exist outside the context ofsocial relations. The only options left to the stigma-tized individual would be exile or suicide (cf. Countsand Counts 1984; Lawrence 1984: 132).

Most reactions to deviance occur at the level ofpersonal relations, though they may involve wholefamilies. On occasion, however, reactions to de-viance can be escalated to levels that involve multi-ple families within villages, and may even includewhole villages. Sorcery events also involve theirown levels of organization and styles of politicalnegotiation.

After briefly delineating the range of responses tolower levels of deviance, I focus on a traditional vil-lage “court” proceeding which was convened in re-action to a particular sorcery event. Sorcery is themost pervasive and powerful regulatory device thatthe Kabana have for dealing with deviant behaviour.The practice of sorcery is not unambiguously right orwrong. As a negative sanction, sorcery is a legitimateform of social control, both an expected and acceptedconsequence of a breach of morality. Since sorcery isalways potentially lethal, however, any act of sor-cery, regardless of the circumstances, can be con-strued as a deviant act and thus be subject to nega-tive social sanctions itself. The case history presentedhere demonstrates how the community reacted tothe ambiguous nature of sorcery, when they at-tempted to determine whether or not one woman’simminent death by sorcery was a legitimate form ofsocial control or a case of homicide, which, in turn,would require control.

Lower Levels of Social Control

All Kabana relationships are face-to-face relationsand everyone is known to, and knows about, every-one else. Anonymity is impossible and no behaviour,albeit good, bad or indifferent, goes undiscovered.For the most part, a perceived breach of the ideal ofreciprocal self-interest is couched in terms of positivecriticism. Someone who ignores the rules of reciproc-ity is advised or reminded of the potentially negativeconsequences that could be experienced as a result ofthe impropriety. For example, a youth who avoids

assisting his kin in cutting and hauling trees to makea garden fence may be criticized for his laziness andwarned that when he needs the aid of these same kinin some venture of his own, such as the amassing ofhis bride-wealth, help may not be forthcoming. Con-tinued failure to observe proper behaviour reducesa person’s chances for success in other desiredachievements, and, since it is in their own best inter-ests to do so, most people adjust their behaviour inresponse to the pressure exerted on them to conform.

The Kabana do not equate simple non-conformitywith deviance. Idiosyncratic personality types aremarked, for example, by teasing or nicknaming.They may become the butt of jokes, be lampooned,criticized or otherwise disparaged, but there is nostigma imposed on them. When a person is recog-nized as having social or physical disabilities, otherscompensate for the idiosyncratic personality by low-ering their expectations. Acknowledging individualdifferences defines the attributes of individuals whocomprise a relationship, but the relationship itself re-mains unaffected, operating according to the level ofexpectations of all involved. Within the frameworkof lowered expectations, the idiosyncratic personal-ity is recognized but not stigmatized in the sense ofbeing negatively stereotyped or marginalized.

Shaming, gossip and ridicule are extremely effec-tive means of sanctioning deviant behaviour. Thepower of shame as an overt negative sanction de-rives from the discomfort of “an intrusion of one’sprivate self into public awareness and the reciprocalinvasion of the self by public scrutiny” (Jorgensen1983–84: 123). Shaming and gossip expose the inade-quacies of the individual and exert pressure on thetarget to behave according to commonly held valuesand to repair the imbalance in social relations. Thebalance between public and private, self and other, isrestored through a process of negotiations and set-tled when the culprit presents a gift of wealth tothose who have gossiped about or shamed the vic-tim. The gift of wealth both relieves the culprit of thesense of shame and obliges the recipients to curtailtheir slander or risk censure themselves for perpetu-ating a situation that has been resolved satisfactorily.

At a higher level of response, theft, physical vio-lence and adultery often result in the perpetratorbeing brought before the village magistrate by the in-jured party. More often than not, in communities ofthis type, “the culprit is condemned on the basis of





ideal social values even by those who have beenguilty of the same offense in the past” (Lawrence1984: 132). Again, since the Kabana label only behav-iour, not individuals, as deviant, any sanction im-posed by the public court allows the culprit theopportunity for expiation and limits the conse-quences of the transgression to a single event. Oncereparation is made, usually in the form of a compen-sation payment, the incident is forgiven, althoughrarely forgotten, and the culprit resumes his or herusual place in the community. There is no intentionaldiscrimination against, and no permanent stigmaapplied to, the offender.

For the Kabana, observation of the moral obliga-tions that structure and organize normal relationscan be, ultimately, a life-and-death matter. Personswho survive to an extreme old age are by definitionthose persons who have lived a morally correct life.Death from old age is a good death (cf. Counts andCounts 1976–77), a death which is the result of, andperforms closure on, a socially correct and moral lifespan. The Kabana observe, however, that human na-ture being what it is, very few people survive to theculturally defined life span that culminates in a gooddeath. With few exceptions, most people die a baddeath as victims of sorcery (see Scaletta 1985).

Sorcery as Social Sanction and as Deviance

Sorcery can be defined as a form of esoteric knowl-edge bestowing personal power which the adept canuse willfully to realize desired ends. While noteveryone could or would acquire the knowledge andskill to become a sorcerer, all have access to sorceryas a mode of self-help by purchasing the services of aknown sorcerer. Awareness of the fact that others canchoose to exercise their right to self-help throughsorcery serves to define sorcery as the primary deter-rent to deviant behaviour. Victims of sorcery are as-sumed to be persons who have violated social moresand values thereby infringing on the rights of others.Because sorcery is notoriously difficult to controlonce unleashed, both the decision to sorcerize andthe execution of that decision should result from cor-porate deliberation and follow certain other proce-dural rules. The injured party should discuss any in-tention to instigate redressive action in the form ofsorcery with his or her kin. If one’s kin are not in

agreement with such measures, the whole matter isdropped or deferred. If there is sufficient agreementto warrant action, however, usually because othershave complaints against the intended victim or be-cause the offence is such that sorcery is the only ap-propriate form of punishment, then the services of asorcerer are solicited. Sorcery is a male prerogativeacquired through apprenticeship and arranged inthe lum, “men’s house.” Once the sorcerer has beenapproached and all the details have been workedout, the sorcerer and his clients exchange equallengths of the most highly valued category of shell-money, bula misi. This exchange of wealth “buys”both the sorcerer’s services and the silence and com-plicity of those employing him. Since the men’shouse is a semi-public domain, there is no questionthat the business of soliciting a sorcerer has beenwitnessed by other men in or near the building, andthe whole episode becomes a topic for discreet gos-sip, a public secret, and moves into a wider area ofinvolvement.

The sorcerer’s role may also be construed as thatof a mediator hired to resolve a conflict between twoparties. Acting on behalf of his client, the sorcererleaves a “calling card” (Zelenietz 1981: 105) whichalerts the recipient that some action on his or herpart has offended another party, thus jeopardizingtheir relationship. The calling cards of Kabana sor-cerers can take a number of forms: a large basket, ofthe type only sorcerers carry, lodged in the raftersof the victim’s house; a gutted frog pinioned onthe footpath the victim travels to the gardens; a bun-dle of croton leaves tied in a particular way andplaced conspicuously where the victim will find it,and so on.

Kabana sorcerers also send calling cards in theform of ensorcelled stones that they throw onto orinto the victim’s house. The stone called pamodo-donga carries a form of sorcery that causes the victimto become ill for an indefinite period or time. It isgenerally assumed that, during the illness, victimswill examine their consciences, review their actionsand deduce for themselves the nature of their trans-gressions. They can then take steps to rectify the sit-uation by approaching those with whom they are inconflict and trying to negotiate a resolution to thedifficulty. If a resolution is reached, they pay the sor-cerer to rescind his spell. If they are unable to iden-tify the locus of conflict, the sorcerer might approach




them, inform them why they have been ill, removethe spell and restore health. It is more common,however, because sorcery is a non-confrontationalsocial act, for spells to be removed as stealthily asthey were applied. Then, a second stone, angual, isthrown on the victim’s house. Sorcery of this typeputs transgressors on notice that they should dis-cover the source of the conflict and repair the rift intheir relationships, before they develop into openconfrontation.

Although sorcery is an expected negative sanc-tion for breach of expected behaviour, the actual im-plementation of sorcery as a form of self-help is, in it-self, a deviant act. Evidence of sorcery indicates thatsomeone has succeeded in a private act of collusion.When sorcery is suspected, “the contradiction be-tween autonomy and control is flagrantly exposedand every villager is witness to his or her own vul-nerability” (Weiner 1976: 223). Sorcery takes awayfrom the victim all that the Kabana define as humanrights: the right to self-help, personal autonomy andcontrol over one’s existence. To be a victim of sorceryis to be threatened with death, for one’s “personalautonomy has collapsed” (Weiner 1976: 219). It is forthis reason that death by sorcery is a bad death. It isa bad death not just because of the manner in whichit occurred, but also because of the manner in whichit was incurred. Death by sorcery entails a negativejudgment upon the behaviour of the victim by rele-vant others, but does not allow the culprit to amendthe situation in his or her own best interests. Per-sonal autonomy is negated and the target becomes avictim of the power that others wield in pursuit oftheir own self-interest. Death by sorcery is a moralissue, and those who practise it are themselves sub-ject to public disapprobation: “Individual power, thecause of all death, demands the display of grouppower” (Weiner 1976: 226).

A Case of Sorcery

Jean had been seriously ill for three months. Duringthis time, attempts to cure her had proved fruitless.Treatments at the local hospital and by local healers,and the attempts of a sorcerer-curer to heal her by ex-tracting foreign substances from her body were allineffective. From the beginning of her illness, Jeanwas convinced that she had been sorcerized, a con-viction reinforced when all attempts to cure her

failed. Only the sorcerer who inflicts the spell has thecorrect formula for rescinding it and restoring thevictim to health. As her illness progressed, Jean be-came more and more incapacitated. She became anon-participant in the myriad conceptual and socialminutiae that make life worth living. As an invalid,her social interactions were essentially passive. Shewas dependent on others to care for her, and she re-sented being powerless, the victim of someone’s ill-will. There was no question in anyone’s mind, leastof all Jean’s, that she was dying. Her family refused,however, to open the magic bundle containing hervital essence, tautau, and kept it in contact with herbody to prevent her death. The final indignity, fromJean’s perspective, was that she was denied the rightto take control of the situation and end her own life.(See Scaletta 1985 for a detailed discussion of theseevents.)

Given that illness or death caused by sorcery arethe result of specifically inflicted punishment for abreach of socially expected behaviour on the part ofthe victim (or her family), Jean’s condition createda climate of heightened awareness of a variety ofsocial relations. Relations between Jean and otherindividuals, between her family and other familygroups, between her hamlet and the other threehamlets in the village, and between her village as aunit and other villages, particularly the two vil-lages where the majority of her cognatic kin lived,were all minutely scrutinized. There was constant re-evaluation and discussion of past events, inter-personal and intergroup interactions, in order to de-termine why, and by whom, she was sorcerized.Jean’s personal crisis as an individual escalated tothe level of an intervillage social crisis.

Jean added to the escalating tensions by makingspecific charges of sorcery against three men in thevillage. She accused Ken, her deceased husband’sbrother. His motive, she said, was revenge: Ken andhis kin group were avenging the death of theirbrother by attacking his wife. The second man sheaccused was Lari. She had no specific reason for ac-cusing him, except that he had renown as a powerfulsorcerer, and was, at the time, under suspicion byeverybody in the area as the individual responsiblefor the current drought. She argued that if Lariwould create hardship in the whole area in his effortsto destroy a rival, then it was reasonable that heshould attack her for no motive other than that it was






in the nature of his disposition to do so. The thirdman she accused was Tomi, her sister’s husband.Tomi was obsessively jealous of his wife and re-sented the time she spent in Jean’s company. Byeliminating her, Jean reasoned, Tomi was eliminatinga major competitor for his wife’s affection.

In all these accusations, Jean portrayed herself asan innocent victim. At no time did she name anyonewho may have had reason to resort to sorcery in re-taliation for some misdeed on her part. In proclaim-ing her innocence, she was implying that sorcerywas being practised arbitrarily and, therefore, thateveryone was vulnerable unless it could be stopped.Jean’s steady decline, the general unease generatedby the active presence of sorcery in their midst, theincreasing strain between her cognatic and affinalkin and the intervillage tensions arising from Jean’saccusations coalesced one morning with the arrivalof a delegation of Jean’s male kin from her natal vil-lage. They came both to express their anger thatsomeone was “killing” their sister and to demandthat a meeting be convened to “break the talk,” toexpose and punish the sorcerer.

Breaking the Talk

To “break the talk” means to cut through the multi-tude of conjecture and gossip about why a personhas been sorcerized and by whom. When the “talk isbroken,” it is exposed to public scrutiny so that itsveracity can be analyzed and a logical sequence ofevents leading up to the illness or death can be re-constructed. When the nature of the victim’s offencehas been determined, thereby identifying those whohad reason to sorcerize her, witnesses can either re-fute or confirm the charges of culpability. The meet-ing to “break the talk” also provides a forum wherepersons who are associated with the illness or death,because of past disputes with the victim, can pro-claim their innocence and clear their names, therebyavoiding the possibility that they might be sorcer-ized by the victim’s avenging kin group. Ideally, thisprocedure culminates in a solid case of circumstan-tial evidence identifying the protagonists in the con-flict, and leaves no doubt as to who caused the vic-tim to become ill or to die. Any doubt as to theidentity of the sorcerer is dispelled when those whowitnessed the meeting between the sorcerer and thepersons who employed him produce the length of

shell-money they were given to “buy” their silence.Ultimately, the “talk is broken” when the silence sur-rounding the act of collusion is broken, thus publiclyexposing those who participated in the decision tosorcerize.

A meeting to “break the talk” is a highly chargedpublic confrontation and represents the most com-plex level of the adjudication of deviance in Kabanaculture. At such meetings in the past, it is said, theend came with a fight and the killing of the exposedsorcerer. The sorcerer’s death was considered com-pensation for the death of the victim, and obviated(in theory, if not always in practice) the need for ret-ributive sorcery by balancing the losses on both sidesof the conflict. The death of the sorcerer was a publicstatement to those who sought control over othersthat homicidal sorcery was an amoral act so heinousthat death was the only appropriate social response.

On the day of the meeting, all the adult malesfrom the four concerned villages convened in theplaza in front of the “men’s house.” There were nowomen (except myself) or children visibly present. Itwas dangerous for them to be there. The meetinglasted for five hours, during which the discussionranged widely. Several young men professed theirlack of knowledge of sorcery, and called on their se-nior male relatives to attest to the fact that they hadnot instructed them in the ways and means of sor-cery. Another man acknowledged that he had dis-puted with Jean and her sister over the ownership ofcertain sago palms, but said they had settled theproblem, and that the altercation could not, there-fore, be construed as a motive for sorcery on his part.Much of the meeting proceeded in this manner, theunderlying premise being that unchallenged, publicdenials of guilt or involvement are sufficient toprove innocence. The most important contributionscame from the three men specifically accused byJean, and from Jean’s brother.

The three accused took the opportunity to refuteJean’s charges against them. Tomi, Jean’s sister’shusband, stated that he did not and could not knowsorcery because he was associated with women (aconsequence of his jealous obsession with his wife).This was common knowledge, he went on, for didnot everyone refer to him as “first woman”? Sorcery isthe business of men, and a man who spends his timewith women would not have occasion to learn the art.Even if he did, his powers would be diminished by




his contact with females, who are “different” (TokPisin: narapela kain) from men. It was true, he admit-ted, that he had tried to purchase rain magic (a formof sorcery) from an old man in another village, but hehad been refused. Tomi had given valid reasons whyhe could not know sorcery, and why, even if he didhave some skill as a sorcerer, this skill would be min-imal. He had admitted to being in the company of asorcerer, given reasons for being there and revealedthe outcome of the meeting, thus forestalling anymisconstruction of his behaviour by others whomight have witnessed the meeting. No one chal-lenged what he had to say.

Ken, Jean’s husband’s brother, also denied her ac-cusations against him. He pointed out that when shefirst became ill, she had come to him on her own ini-tiative and asked him to use his skills to cure her. Hehad assumed she was suffering from the effects of“bad blood,” a problem peculiar to post-menopausalwomen. He had prepared the appropriate cure,which proved ineffective. Because of this and herworsening condition, she became fearful and ac-cused him of sorcerizing rather than curing her. Healso noted that she, and perhaps other members ofher family, thought he might have attacked her in re-venge for the death of his brother, Jean’s husband.He denied the credibility of such speculations on thegrounds that he was a member of the CatholicChurch which forbade the practice of sorcery. Hefurther denied the fact of sorcery, saying that sick-ness and death were not caused by human actors,but by God, as divine punishment for sins commit-ted. Jean was dying, he concluded, because God waspunishing her as a sinner.

The third man accused by Jean was Lari. As theperson considered responsible for the drought and aself-acknowledged sorcerer, Lari defended himselfon both counts. He argued that no one could claimthey had actually seen him practising weathermagic. Even though he had all the paraphernalia,which he then produced for all to see, without eye-witnesses, all the talk about him was nothing but air,insubstantial and without truth value. Did peoplethink, he demanded, that he or a member of his fam-ily would be so “insane” (Kabana: mangamanga) as toattack this woman and run the risk of retaliationfrom her kin? They must look to the woman herself,he admonished, for the origin of her problem. Fromthe time of their ancestors, he continued, there were

two reasons why females were attacked by sorcery.They were sorcerized for being foul-tempered, mali-cious gossips, and for repulsing the sexual advancesof males, or conversely, for engaging in illicit love af-fairs. (The seeming paradox of this situation is moreapparent than real, but a detailed discussion is be-yond the scope of the task at hand.)

Lari’s point here was to prompt people to exam-ine Jean’s behaviour rather than continuing to lookfor wrongdoing on the part of others. He was, in ef-fect, both denying the validity of the scenario thatJean had created in which she played the role of in-nocent victim, and situating the whole episode withinthe accepted explanatory framework—people aresorcerized for breach of social norms. It then cameout that during the weeks of Jean’s illness, there hadbeen a great deal of discussion about her reputationfor maligning others, particularly two senior womenwho were highly respected. There was also talk ofher affair with a married man who was also a personof some renown. It was further reported that she hadaccepted a proposal of marriage, and the shellmoney that accompanied it, from a man in the Kovedistrict. She had later reneged on her promise tomarry him, claiming that she wanted to remain awidow and live near her children, but had failed toreturn the shell money. The rejected man thus hadmotive—the loss of his shell money, not the brokenpromise—and the wherewithal to attack her, theKove being notorious sorcerers. All agreed that anyone of the foregoing was a likely origin of her illnessand, if so, that (1) she had gotten only what shedeserved, and (2) that, if the sorcery originated withthe Kove man, her chances of recovery were slimbecause no one knew either the Kove techniques,or, consequently, the specific counter spell to effecta cure.

Discussion turned to the possibility that Jean waspart of a long-standing vendetta to eliminate all themembers of her family. In the past five years, sorceryhad claimed the lives of Jean’s father, her 20-year-oldson, a classificatory son and her eldest son’s wife.Everyone knew that her father had died of mosi “pri-vately owned designs.” Without permission or pay-ment, he had used the traditional totemic designs ofanother kin group on a set of spirit masks of his owngroup. Death by sorcery was the expected and ac-cepted response to such a serious crime; hence, therehad been no “talk” or retaliation, and the incident






was closed. Perhaps, however, the issue was notclosed, and Jean was the most recent casualty of theoffended group’s unrequited anger for her father’stransgression against them.

These observations focussed attention on indige-nous ancestral laws, and Lari began a forceful ha-rangue about the loss of traditional customs. In thepast, he began, this meeting would have taken placeinside the men’s house, not in the open plaza. Nowthe men’s house stood abandoned, and young menno longer gathered there to learn from their elders.Now men slept, not in the men’s house, but withtheir wives and children in the women’s houses.Even the practice of sorcery was no longer done ac-cording to tradition. In the time of their grandfa-thers, sorcery was always undertaken by two orthree men with the sanction of their kin group. Withthese several people involved, it was possible to“break the talk,” discover who worked the sorceryand why, and thus permit resolution of the situation.This was no longer possible because sorcery wasbeing practised on an individual basis, making it im-possible to expose and control the practice of sorcery.

Jean’s elder brother Karl, located at the outerperimeter of the assembly, had stood quietlythroughout the foregoing, awaiting his opportunityto speak. When he had everyone’s attention, hebegan by reprimanding people for listening to Jean’saccusations. The ravings of a sick person should notbe given credibility. Such talk is mangamanga, “hys-terical,” and based on fear. He went on to point outthat those who brought up his father’s death by sor-cery were wrong to revive this incident, for it im-plied that he, or a member of his family, had avengedtheir father’s death and that Jean’s illness was retali-ation for that second death. When their father died,he and his brothers had “put on the grass skirt”worn by women. Metaphorically, he was arguingthat they had become like women, and thus did notknow or engage in sorcery. The death of their fatherhad nothing to do with his sister’s dying, and suchtalk must cease, he emphasized, so that old animosi-ties were not revived. He reiterated that they mustlook to Jean’s own behaviour as the cause of herdying, and, having nicely set the mood, he went onto elaborate what, in his opinion, that behaviourmight have been.

Some years before, Jean and her husband hadcontracted a marriage between one of their sons and

the daughter of Rio and Sandra, a couple who haveconsiderable prestige in the area. During a ceremo-nial feast at another village, Jean’s son had an affairwith another woman. The young people were dis-covered, and, when confronted with the options ofeither paying fines to “buy their shame,” or with get-ting married, the two said they wished to be mar-ried. With this public declaration of intent, they weremarried de facto, and the betrothal previouslyarranged by the young man’s parents was nullified.

When the jilted girl’s parents heard this, theywere furious and confronted Jean and her husband.While venting her anger, the girl’s mother assumedthe stylistic stance associated with throwing spearsduring battle, and called down the name of her per-sonal protective spirit upon Jean’s head, an effectiveand sometimes deadly curse. She berated Jean forbreaking the marriage contract, thereby shamingboth her and her daughter. Jean claimed she hadnothing to do with the situation, and had heard ofher son’s behaviour and marriage only after the fact.

Two days after this confrontation, Jean sat onsome wood shavings on her verandah, and, severaldays later, her legs became swollen. It was assumedthat Jean had been sorcerized by the offended par-ents through the medium of wood shavings. She wastreated by a curer familiar with that type of sorcery,and the condition was removed. It now appearedthat the sorcery had not been neutralized, but hadlain dormant in her body these past years, and wasonly now manifesting itself as her current illness.

Karl’s speech was extremely effective. He haddiscredited Jean’s accusations against others as theravings of a sick and frightened person, thus sooth-ing the anxieties of the accused; he had denied thather illness was a continuation of the conflict that re-sulted in their father’s death, thus avoiding the pos-sibility of old animosities resurfacing, and he had de-scribed a specific breach of moral obligation—thebreaking of a marriage contract. At the same time, hehad left it an open question whether or not Jean wasresponsible for the breach. (Everybody knew thatnowadays children made up their own minds aboutwhom they would or would not marry.) His sugges-tion that specific, known events and individualsmight be responsible for Jean’s illness helped defusethe tensions that had built up around people’s fearsthat sorcery was being practised arbitrarily. The indi-viduals implicated had been away from the village




for the past year, living in urban centres, and so werenot on hand to give their interpretation or to defendthemselves. No one else present hurried to defendthem either, possibly because one of them was al-ready considered responsible for other recent, andunresolved, sorcery related incidents. At the conclu-sion of his speech, the meeting was brought to aclose. Karl had provided an acceptable explanatoryframework for Jean’s condition, thus redressing the“threat of disorderliness” that a motiveless death im-plies (Zelenietz 1981: 9). The consensus was, how-ever, that the meeting had not been totally satisfac-tory. They had been unable to “break the talk” andprove conclusively the validity of the reconstruction.No one had come forth to bear witness against thesorcerer whose behaviour threatened Jean’s life andthe moral infrastructure of social order. Because thesituation was not totally resolved, there was littlehope that Jean could be cured.

Three weeks later, Jean died. When the funeralrites and period of mourning were finished, life inthe village reverted to the status quo ante; the crisiscreated by Jean’s dying and death might never haveoccurred. When I inquired of my informants whatsteps, if any, would be taken to avenge her death orpunish the sorcerer, I was advised that we ought notto discuss such matters. Others might hear of ourtalk, assume we are plotting vengeance and takesteps to protect themselves by striking first; we couldbe sorcerized. Circumstances surrounding her deathare not forgotten. The entire experience will bewoven into the fabric of ongoing personal and socialrelations where it will affect people’s motives andbehaviour in the future.

Conclusion

This analysis of sorcery and deviant behaviour inKabana society shows that the generic processesnoted in labelling theory can be applied to the cross-cultural study of deviance, even in a society in whichdeviants are not specifically “labelled.” Certainkinds of behaviour, under certain conditions, are re-acted to as deviant in Kabana society, and there arerules about what constitutes a socially acceptable re-sponse to deviant behaviour. The Kabana data showthat, regardless of the level of community involve-ment, the reaction to deviant behaviour does notresult in the typing of individuals as permanently

deviant, or in the differentiation of people into groupsdefined as “normals” and “deviants.” Given the egal-itarian ideology and lack of stratification in Kabanasociety, the creation of a class of deviants is un-likely, and, in Kabana terms, philosophically unten-able. Rather, deviance is a highly negotiated, highlycomplex phenomenon which occurs in an interper-sonal network. Sorcery is an interesting case in point.While it is inherently neither deviant nor a norma-tive sanction for the social control of deviance, it maybe negotiated as either according to the specifics ofany particular case. It may begin with individual re-lations and end there; it may rise to the familial leveland end there or escalate to even more complex levelsbefore it is publicly mooted. In the moot, sorcery maybe judged to be a device for the legitimate control ofdeviance, deviance in and of itself, or the problem ofwhat it is may prove to be insoluble. Whatever the out-come, the case remains in the cultural memory of thegroups involved and forms part of relevant knowl-edge that will be brought to bear in subsequent casesof sorcery or other trouble.

Afterword

The events described above took place in early 1983.When I returned to the village in 1985, one of the firstpieces of news that I was given was that Ken, Jean’shusband’s brother, had been ill for some months andwas currently at the local health clinic for medicaltreatment. The public explanation for his illness wasthat he “had no blood” (acute anaemia, possiblyleukaemia?); the very private explanation was that hehad been sorcerized. In response to my queries aboutwho had sorcerized him and why, people referred tothe case of Jean and her accusations against herbrother-in-law. I was also advised not to pursue thismatter with “certain other people,” lest those peopleinfer that my inquiries were informed by the (mali-cious) speculation of the people who spent time withme, thus placing them at risk. It was clear that Ken’slingering illness was linked to Jean’s death by sor-cery, but people preferred not to make this connec-tion a matter of public record or public moot. Thefeeling was that, if ignored, the attacks and counter-attacks of sorcery would cease, and order and well-being would prevail. I respected these views and didnot pursue the matter further. Ken died in 1986 aftera prolonged and painful dying process.





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Full moon, November 1984. In a witches’ coven innortheast London, members have gathered from asfar away as Bath, Leicester and Scotland to attendthe meeting at the full moon. We drink tea until

nine—in London, most rituals follow tea—and thenchange and go into the other room. The sitting roomhas been transformed. The furniture has been re-moved, and a twelve foot chalk circle drawn on thecarpet. It will be brushed out in the morning. Fourcandlesticks stake out the corners of the room, cast-ing shadows from the stag’s antlers on the wall. Theantlers sit next to a sheaf of wheat, subtle sexualsymbolism. In spring and summer there are flowerseverywhere. The altar in the centre of the circle isa chest which seems ancient. On top an equally

35

The Goat and the Gazelle:WitchcraftT. M. Luhrmann

The following material is an excerpt from the author’s book-length study of contemporary witches inEngland, based on fieldwork in London beginning in 1983. Luhrmann traces the modern revival ofwitchcraft to the influential writings of Gerald Gardner in the 1940s. However, from the point of viewof present-day participants, nature-centered, or earth-centered, witchcraft is the most ancient of all re-ligions, honoring goddess figures as personifications of nature. Its rituals relate to seasons and thenatural world and are based on participants’ reconstructions of pagan, or pre-Christian, religiouspractices. The author describes typical contemporary witches and their motivations for involvement,as well as their covens, including the one into which Luhrmann herself was initiated. She describeswitches’ rituals as typically involving chanting; the reading of texts; the use of magical circles, altars,and candles; and the symbolic offering of fruits.

Luhrmann’s ethnography raises questions central to the anthropological consideration of magic,be it in England, Africa, or elsewhere (Luhrmann 1989: 7–8): Why do people find magic persuasive?How is it that some people, more than others, come to accept or “believe in” what is irrational andunacceptable to others? The witches documented by Luhrmann are ordinary people, well educatedand usually middle-class, not mentally ill or in economic desperation (ibid.). The author documentsthe process by which emotional patterns and intellectual strategies change as participants come toaccept the reality of magic. Such processes are at work, Luhrmann argues, in any circumstances inwhich specialized knowledge is acquired. What she discovers about contemporary witches holdsintriguing parallels for us all, as we acquire the knowledge necessary to carry out our jobs or otherroles in adult life.

Reprinted by permission of the publisher from PERSUASIONSOF THE WITCH’S CRAFT: RITUAL MAGIC INCONTEMPORARY ENGLAND by T. M. Luhrmann,pp. 42–54, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,Copyright © 1989 by T. M. Luhrmann.




ancient box holds incense in different drawers. On it,flowers and herbs surround a carved wooden Pan; aMinoan goddess figure sits on the altar itself amida litter of ritual knives and tools.

The high priestess begins by drawing the magiccircle in the air above the chalk, which she does withpiety, saying “let this be a boundary between theworld of gods and that of men.” This imaginary circleis then treated as real throughout the evening. Toleave the circle you slash it in the air and redraw itwhen you return. The chalk circle is always drawnwith the ritual knife; the cakes, wine and the dancingalways move in a clockwise direction. These rulesare part of what makes it a witches’ circle and they arescrupulously observed. On this evening a covenmember wanted us to “do” something for a friend’ssick baby. Someone made a model of the baby andput it on the altar, at the Minoan goddess’ feet. Weheld hands in a circle around the altar and thenbegan to run, chanting a set phrase. When the circlewas running at its peak the high priestess suddenlystopped. Everyone shut their eyes, raised theirhands, and visualized the prearranged image: in thiscase it was Mary, the woman who wanted the spell,the “link” between us and the unknown child. Wecould have “worked” without the model baby, but itserved as a “focus” for the concentration. Witches offolklore made clay and waxen effigies over whichthey uttered imprecations—so we made effigies andkept a packet of plasticene in the altar for the pur-pose. By springtime, Mary reported, the child had re-covered, and she thanked us for the help.

Modern witchcraft was essentially created in theforties—at least in its current form—by a civil ser-vant, Gerald Gardner, who was probably inspired byMargaret Murray’s historical account of witchcraftas an organized pre-Christian fertility religionbranded devil-worship by the demonologists, andmore generally by the rise of interest in anthropol-ogy and folklore. Gardner had met Aleister Crowley,knew of the Golden Dawn, and may have been aFreemason. (Indeed his rituals show Crowleyian andMasonic influence.) In the early fifties, Gardner pub-lished fictitious ethnographies of supposedly con-temporaneous witches who practised the ancient,secret rites of their agrarian ancestors and wor-shipped the earth goddess and her consort in cere-monies beneath the full moon. He claimed to have

been initiated into one of these groups, hidden fromwatchful authorities since the “burning times.” In hiseyes, witchcraft was an ancient magico-religiouscult, secretly practised, peculiarly suited to the Celticrace. Witches had ancient knowledge and powers,handed down through the generations. And unlikethe rest of an alienated society, they were happy andcontent. This paragraph gives the flavour of hisromanticism:

Instead of the great sabbats with perhaps athousand or more attendents [the coven] became asmall meeting in private houses, probably a dozenor so according to the size of the room. Thenumbers being few, they were no longer able togain power, to rise to the hyperaesthetic state bymeans of hundreds of wild dancers shriekingwildly, and they had to use other secret methodsto induce this state. This came easily to thedescendants of the heath, but not to the people ofnon-Celtic race. Some knowledge and power hadsurvived, as many of the families had intermarried,and in time their powers grew, and in out of theway places the cult survived. The fact that theywere happy gave them a reason to struggle on. It isfrom these people that the surviving witch familiesprobably descend. They know that their fathers andgrandfathers belonged, and had spoken to them ofmeetings about the time of Waterloo, when it wasan old cult, thought to exist from all time. Thoughthe persecution had died down from want of fuel,they realized that their only chance to be left alonewas to remain unknown and this is as true todayas it was five hundred years ago.

The invention of tradition is an intriguing topic:why is it that history should grant such authority,even in so rational an age? Witches speak of a secre-tive tradition, hidden for centuries from the Church’sfierce eye, passed down in families until the presentgeneration. There is no reason that such claims couldnot be true, but there is very little evidence to sup-port them. The most sympathetic scholarship thatspeaks of an organized, pre-Christian witchcraft hasvery shaky foundations—although there is more re-cently work that suggests that there were at leastshared fantasies about membership in witch-relatedsocieties. But those accused of witchcraft in earlymodern Europe were very likely innocent of anypractice.

Witches have ambivalent attitudes towards theirhistory, as a later chapter details. They share, however,





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a common vision of their past, differing only onwhether this past is myth or legend. Many of themsay that the truth of the vision is unimportant: it isthe vision itself, with its evocative pull, that matters.The basic account—given by someone who describesit as a myth—is this:

Witchcraft is a religion that dates back to paleolithictimes, to the worship of the god of the hunt and thegoddess of fertility. One can see remnants of it incave paintings and in the figurines of goddessesthat are many thousands of years old. This earlyreligion was universal. The names changed fromplace to place but the basic deities were the same.

When Christianity came to Europe, its inroads wereslow. Kings and nobles were converted first, butmany folk continued to worship in both religions.Dwellers in rural areas, the ‘Pagans’ and ‘Heathens’,kept to the old ways. Churches were built on thesacred sites of the old religion. The names of thefestivals were changed but the dates were kept.The old rites continued in folk festivals, and formany centuries Christian policy was one of slowcooptation.

During the times of persecution the Church tookthe god of the Old Religion and—as is the habitwith conquerors—turned him into the Christiandevil. The Old Religion was forced underground,its only records set forth, in distorted form, by itsenemies. Small families kept the religion alive andin 1951, after the Witchcraft Laws in England wererepealed, it began to surface again.

It is indeed an evocative tale, with secrecy and mar-tyrdom and hidden powers, and whether or notwitches describe it as actual history they are movedby its affect.

Witchcraft is meant to be a revival, or re-emergence, of an ancient nature-religion, the most an-cient of religions, in which the earth was worshippedas a woman under different names and guisesthroughout the inhabited world. She was Astarte,Inanna, Isis, Cerridwen—names that ring echoes inarchaeological texts. She was the Great Goddesswhose rites Frazer and Neumann—and Apuleius—recorded in rich detail. Witches are people who readtheir books and try to create, for themselves, the toneand feeling of an early humanity, worshipping a na-ture they understand as vital, powerful and mysteri-ous. They visit the stone circles and pre-Christian

sites, and become amateur scholars of the pagan tra-ditions behind the Easter egg and the Yule log.

Above all, witches try to “connect” with theworld around them. Witchcraft, they say, is about thetactile, intuitive understanding of the turn of the sea-sons, the song of the birds; it is the awareness of allthings as holy, and that, as is said, there is no partof us that is not of the gods.1 One witch suggests asimple exercise to begin to glimpse the nature of thepractice:

Perhaps the best way to begin to understand thepower behind the simple word witch is to enter thecircle . . . Do it, perhaps, on a full moon, in a park orin the clearing of a wood. You don’t need any of thetools you will read about in books on the Craft. Youneed no special clothes, or lack of them. Perhapsyou might make up a chant, a string of names ofgods and goddesses who were loved or familiar toyou from childhood myths, a simple string ofnames for earth and moon and stars, easily repeat-able like a mantra.

And perhaps, as you say those familiar namesand feel the earth and the air, the moon appears abit closer, and perhaps the wind rustling the leavessuddenly seems in rhythm with your own breath-ing. Or perhaps the chant seems louder and all theother sounds far away. Or perhaps the woods seemstrangely noisy. Or unspeakably still. And perhapsthe clear line that separates you from bird and treeand small lizards seems to melt. Whatever else,your relationship to the world of living naturechanges. The Witch is the change of definitions andrelationships.

The Goddess, the personification of nature, iswitchcraft’s central concept. Each witch has an indi-vidual understanding of the Goddess, which changesconsiderably over time. However, simply to orientthe reader I will summarize the accounts which I haveheard and have read in the literature. The Goddess ismulti-faceted, ever-changing—nature and nature’stransformations. She is Artemis, virgin huntress, thecrescent moon and the morning’s freshness; Selene,Aphrodite and Demeter, in the full bloom of theearth’s fertility; Hecate and axe-bearing Cerridwen,the crone who destroys, the dying forests which make

1. This is a phrase taken from Crowley’s Gnostic Mass. Itsometimes appears in witchcraft rituals or in writingsabout the practice.




room for new growth. The constant theme of the God-dess is cyclicity and transformation: the spinningFates, the weaving spider, Aphrodite who each yeararises virgin from the sea, Isis who swells and floodsand diminishes as the Nile. Every face of the Goddessis a different goddess, and yet also the same, in a dif-ferent aspect, and there are different goddesses fordifferent years and seasons of one’s life.

The Goddess is very different from the Judaeo-Christian god. She is in the world, of the world, thevery being of the world. “People often ask mewhether I believe in the Goddess. I reply, ‘Do you be-lieve in rocks?’” Yet she is also an entity, a metaphorfor nature to whom one can talk. “I relate to theGoddess, every day, in one way or another. I have alittle chitchat with Mommy.” Witches have talkedto me about the “duality” of their religious under-standing, that on the one hand the Goddess merelypersonifies the natural world in myth and imagery,and that on the other hand the Goddess is there assomeone to guide you, punish you, reward you,someone who becomes the central figure in yourprivate universe. I suspect that for practitionersthere is a natural slippage from metaphor to extantbeing, that it is difficult—particularly in a Judaeo-Christian society—genuinely to treat a deity-figureas only a metaphor, regardless of how the religion isrationalized. The figure becomes a deity, who caresfor you.

Gardner began initiating people into groupscalled “covens” which were run by women called“high priestesses.” Covens bred other covens; peo-ple wandered into the bookstore, bought his booksand then others, and created their own covens. Bynow there are many types of witchcraft: Gardnerian,Alexandrian, feminist, “traditional” and so forth,named for their founders or their political ideals.Feminist covens usually only initiate women andthey usually think of themselves as involved witha particularly female type of spirituality. Groupsstemming from Gardner are called “Gardnerian.”Alexandrian witchcraft derives from Alex Sanders’more ceremonial version of Gardnerian witchcraft.Sanders was a charismatic man who deliberately at-tracted the attention of the gutterpress and became apublic figure in the late sixties. Some of those whoread the sensationalistic exposés and watched thetelevision interviews were drawn to witchcraft, and

Sanders initiated hundreds of applicants, sometimeson the evening they applied. Traditional witchessupposedly carry on the age-old traditions of theirfamilies: whether by chance or otherwise, I met nonewho could substantiate their claim to an inheritedritual practice.

Covens vary widely in their style and custom, butthere is a common core of practice. They meet on (ornear) days dictated by the sky: the solstices andequinoxes and the “quarter days” between them,most of them fire-festivals in the Frazerian past:Beltane (1 May), Lammas (1 August), Halloween (31October), Candlemas (2 February). These are thedays to perform seasonal rituals, in which witchescelebrate the passage of the longest days and thesummer’s harvest. Covens also meet on the fullmoons—most witches are quite aware of the moon’sphases—on which they perform spells, rituals witha specific intention, to cure Jane’s cold or to getRichard a job. Seasonal ritual meetings are called“sabbats,” the full moon meetings, “esbats.”2 Mem-bership usually ranges between three and thirteenmembers, and members think of themselves—orideally think of themselves—as “family.” In my ex-perience, it usually took about a year of casual ac-quaintance before someone would be initiated. Theprocess took so long because people felt it importantthat a group should be socially very comfortablewith each other, and—crucially—that one couldtrust all members of the group. As a result, covenstended to be somewhat socially homogeneous. Inthe more “traditional” covens, there are three “de-grees.” First degree initiates are novices, and in theirinitiation they were anointed “witch” and shownthe witches’ weapons. Second degree initiates usu-ally take their new status after a year. The initiationgives them the authority to start their own coven. Itconsists in “meeting” death—the initiate acts thepart of death if he is male; if she is female, she meetsdeath and accepts him. The intended lesson of theritual is that the willingness to lose the self gives onecontrol over it, and over the transformations of life


2. The terms are probably drawn from Margaret Murray,although esbat appears in a sixteenth-century Frenchmanuscript (Le Roy Ladurie 1987: 7). Sabbat is a standarddemonologist’s term.





and death. Third degree initiation is not taken foryears. It is essentially a rite of mystical sexuality,though it is sometimes “symbolic” rather than “ac-tual.” It is always performed in privacy, with onlythe two initiates present. Behind the initiation liesthe idea that one becomes the Goddess or God inone of their most powerful manifestations, the twodynamic elements of the duality that creates theworld.

Witchcraft is a secretive otherworld, and morethan other magical practices it is rich in symbolic,special items. Initiates have dark-handled knivesthey call “athames,” which are the principal toolsand symbols of their powers: they have special cupsand platters and incense burners, sometimes evenspecial whips to “purify” each other before the ritebegins. There is always an altar, usually strewn withherbs and incense, with a statue of the Goddess, andthere are always candles at the four directions, for inall magical practice the four directions (east, south,west, north) represent the four ancient elements (air,fire, water, earth) which in turn represent differentsorts of “energies” (thought; will power; emotion;material stability). Then, another symbol of the se-crecy and violation of convention, most covens workin the nude. This is ostensibly a sign of freedom, butprobably stems from the evocative association ofwitchcraft and sexuality, and a utopian vision of aparadisial past. There are no orgies, little eroticism,and in fact little behaviour that would be different ifclothes were being worn. That witches dance aroundin the nude probably is part of the attractive fantasythat draws outsiders into the practice, but the fan-tasy is a piece with the paganism and not the sourceof salacious sexuality. Or at least, that seemed to bethe case with the five covens I met.

I was initiated into the oldest of these witches’groups, a coven which has remained intact for morethan forty years. It was once Gardner’s own coven,the coven in which he participated, and three of thecurrent members were initiated under his care. Itpleases the anthropologist’s heart that there aretraces of ancestor worship: the pentacle, the magicalplatter which holds the communion “mooncakes,”was Gardner’s own, and we used his goddess statuein the circle.

The coven had thirteen members while I wasthere. Four of them (three men and one woman) had

been initiated over twenty-five years ago and werein their fifties: an ex-Cambridge computer consul-tant, who flew around the world lecturing to com-puter professionals; a computer software analyst,high priest for the last twenty years; a teacher; an ex-Oxford university lecturer. The high priestess wasinitiated twenty years ago and was a professionalpsychologist. Another woman, in her forties, hadbeen initiated some ten years previously. She joinedthe group when her own coven disbanded; anotherman in his fifties also came from that coven. He wasan electronic engineer in the music industry. By thetime I had been in the group several months, Helgaand Eliot’s coven had disbanded (this was the covenassociated with the Glittering Sword) and Helga atany rate preferred to think of herself as a NordicVolva rather than as a Celtic witch. So she aban-doned witchcraft altogether, though she becamedeeply engaged in the other magical practice, andEliot and another member of his coven, the youngAustrian who was also in the Glittering Sword,joined the group. The rest of the younger generationincluded a woman in her thirties who was a profes-sional artist but spent most of her time then raising ayoung child. Another member was a middle-levelmanager of a large business. He was in his late thir-ties and was my “psychic twin”: we were both initi-ated into the group on the same night. Another man,thirtyish, managed a large housing estate. The com-puter consultant and the teacher had been marriedtwenty-five years, the high priest and high priestesshad lived together for twenty. Four other membershad partners who did not belong to the group, buttwo of them belonged to other magical groups. Threemembers of the group were married to or closely re-lated to university lecturers—but this was an unusu-ally intellectual group.

This coven, then, had a wide age range and wasprimarily composed of middle-class intellectuals,many of whose lovers were not members of thegroup. This was not particularly standard: anothercoven with whom this group had contact had ninemembers, all of whom were within ten years of age,and it included three married couples and three sin-gle individuals. A Cambridge coven had a similarlygreat age span, and as wide a range of professions.But one in Clapham was entirely upper workingclass, and its members were within about fifteen




years of age. For the meetings, the group relied upona standard ritual text. Gardner (with the help ofDoreen Valiente, now an elder stateswoman in whatis called the “Craft”) had created a handbook of rit-ual practice called the “Book of Shadows,” which hadsupposedly been copied by each initiate through theages. (‘Beltane special objects: jug of wine, earthen-ware chalice, wreaths of ivy . . . High priestess in east,high priest at altar with jug of wine and earthenwarechalice . . .’) The group performed these rites as writ-ten, year in and year out: they were fully aware thatGardner had written them (with help) but felt that asthe original coven, they had a responsibility to tradi-tion. In fact, some of them had been re-written by thehigh priest, because Gardner’s versions were so sim-ple: he felt, however, that he should treat them asGardner’s, and never mentioned the authorship.

The seasonal rituals were remarkable because inthem, the priestess is meant to incarnate the God-dess. This is done through a ritual commonly knownas “drawing down the moon.” The high priestess’ritual partner is called the “high priest,” and hestands opposite her in the circle and invokes her as the Goddess; and as Goddess, she delivers whatis known as the “Charge,” the closest parallel to aliturgy within the Craft. Gardner’s Book of Shadowshas been published and annotated by two witches,and it includes this text.

The high priest: Listen to the words of the great Mother;she who of old was called among men Artemis, Astarte,Athene, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Dana,Arianhod, Isis, Bride, and by many other names.

The high priestess: Whenever ye have need of anything,once in the month, and better it be when the moon is full,then shall ye assemble in some secret place and adore thespirit of me, who am Queen of all witches. There shall yeassemble, ye who are fain to learn all sorcery, yet whohave not won its deepest secrets; to these will I teachthings that are yet unknown. And ye shall be free fromslavery; and as a sign that ye be really free, ye shall benaked in your rites; and ye shall dance, sing, feast makemusic and love, all in my praise. For mine is the ecstacyof the spirit, and mine is also joy on earth; for my law islove unto all beings. Keep pure your highest ideal; striveever towards it; let naught stop you or turn you aside.For mine is the secret door which opens up the Land ofYouth, and mine is the cup of the wine of life, and theCauldron of Cerridwen, which is the Holy Grail of im-

mortality. I am the gracious Goddess, who gives the giftof joy unto the heart of man. Upon earth, I give theknowledge of the spirit eternal; and beyond death, I givepeace, and freedom, and reunion with those who havegone before. Nor do I demand sacrifice; for behold, I amthe mother of all living, and my love is poured out uponthe earth.

The high priest: Hear ye the words of the Star Goddess; shein the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven, andwhose body encircles the universe.

The high priestess: I who am the beauty of the green earth,and the white Moon among the stars, and the mystery ofthe waters, and the desire of the heart of man, call untothy soul. Arise and come unto me. For I am the soul ofnature, who gives life to the universe. From me all thingsproceed, and unto me all things must return; and beforemy face, beloved of Gods and men, let thine innermostdivine self be enfolded in the rapture of the infinite. Letme worship be with the heart that rejoiceth; for behold allacts of love and pleasure are my rituals. And therefore letthere be beauty and strength, power and compassion, ho-nour and humility, mirth and reverence within you. Andthou who thinkest to seek for me, know that seeking andyearning shall avail thee not unless thou knowest themystery; that if that which thou seekest thou findest notwithin thee, thou wilt never find it without thee. For be-hold, I have been with thee from the beginning; and I amthat which is attained at the end of desire.

The nature-imagery, the romantic poetry, the freedom—this is the style of language commonly heard withinthese ritual circles. The point of this speech is thatevery woman can be Goddess. Every man, too, can begod. In some Gardnerian rituals—like Halloween—the high priestess invokes the stag god in her priest,and he gives similar speeches.

When the coven I joined performed spells, no rit-ual form was prescribed because no spell was identi-cal to any other. The idea behind the spell was that acoven could raise energy by calling on their mem-bers’ own power, and that this energy could be con-centrated within the magical circle, as a “cone ofpower,” and directed towards its source by collectiveimagination. The first step in a spell was always tochant or meditate in order to change the state ofconsciousness and so have access to one’s ownpower, and then to focus the imagination on somereal or imagined visual representation of thepower’s goal. The most common technique was to






run in a circle, hands held, all eyes on the centralaltar candle, chanting what was supposedly an oldBasque witches’ chant:

Eko, eko, azarakEko, eko, zamilakEko, eko, CernunnosEko, eko, Aradia

Then, the circle running at its peak, the group sud-denly stopped, held its linked hands high, shut itseyes and concentrated on a pre-arranged image.

Sometimes we prefixed the evening with a longerchant, the “Witches’ Rune:”

Darksome night and shining moonEast, then South, then West, then North;Hearken to the Witches’ Rune—Here we come to call ye forth!Earth and water, air and fire,Wand and pentacle and sword,Work ye unto our desire,Hearken ye unto our word!Cords and censer, scourge and knife,Powers of the witch’s blade—Waken all ye unto life,Come ye as the charm is made!Queen of Heaven, Queen of Hell,Horned hunter of the night—Lend your power unto the spell,And work our will by magic rite!By all the power of land and sea,By all the might of moon and sun—As we do will, so mote it be;Chant the spell, and be it done!

The tone of the poem captures much about witch-craft; the special “weapons” with special powers,the earthly power and goddess power used within thespell, the dependence of the spell upon the witches’will.

Most of the coven meetings I attended in Eng-land—in all I saw the rituals of some six Gardnerian-inspired groups—were similar in style. However,there were also feminist covens, a type of witchcraftrelatively rare in England but quite important in theStates. Witchcraft appeals to feminists for a numberof reasons. Witches are meant to worship a femaledeity rather than a male patriarch, and to worshipher as she was worshipped by all people beforethe monotheistic religions held sway: as the moon,the earth, the sheaf of wheat. Members of feministcovens talk about witchcraft and its understanding

of cyclic transformation, of birth, growth and decay,as a “woman’s spirituality,” and the only spiritualityin which women are proud to menstruate, to makelove, and to give birth. These women (and some-times also men) are often also compelled by the de-sire to reclaim the word “witch,” which they see asthe male’s fearful rejection of a woman too beautiful,too sexual, or past the years of fertility. The witchesof European witch-craze fantasies were either beau-tiful young temptresses or hags.

Feminist covens emphasize creativity and collec-tivity, values commonly found in that political per-spective, and their rituals are often quite differentfrom those in Gardnerian groups. Perhaps I couldoffer an example, although in this example the womendid not explicitly describe themselves as “witches”but as participating in “women’s mysteries.”

On Halloween 1983 I joined a group of some fif-teen women on top of a barrow in Kent. One of thewomen had been delegated to draw up a rough out-line of the ritual, and before we left for the barrowshe held a meeting in which she announced that shehad “cobbled together something from Starhawkand Z Budapest [two feminist witchcraft manualauthors].” (Someone shouted, “don’t put yourselfdown.”) She explained the structure of the rite as itstood and then asked for suggestions. Someone hadbrought a pot of red ochre and patchouli oil whichshe wanted to use, and someone else suggested thatwe use it to purify each other. Then it was sug-gested that we “do” the elements first, and peoplevolunteered for each directional quarter. The per-son who had chosen earth asked if the hostess hadany maize flour which she could use. We talkedabout the purpose of the rite. The meeting was likemany other feminist organization meetings: longon equality, emotional honesty and earthiness,short on speed.

When we arrived on the barrow some hours later,we walked round in a circle. Four women invokedthe elements, at the different directions, with theirown spontaneously chosen words. It was an impres-sive midnight: leafless trees stark against a dark sky,some wind, an empty countryside with a bull in thenearby field. Then one woman took the pot of redochre and drew a circle on the cheek of the woman toher left, saying, “may this protect you on Halloweennight,” and the pot passed around the circle. Then thewoman who had drafted the ritual read an invocation




to Hecate more or less taken from Starhawk, copiedout in a looseleaf binder with a pentacle laminatedon the front:

This is the night when the veil that divides theworlds is thin. It is the New Year in the time of theyear’s death, when the harvest is gathered and thefields lie fallow. The gates of life and death areopened; the dead walk, and to the living is revealedthe Mystery: that every ending is but a newbeginning. We meet in time out of time, everywhereand nowhere, here and there, to greet the Deathwhich is also Life, and the triple Goddess who is thecycle of rebirth.

Someone lit a fire in a dustbin lid (the cauldron wastoo heavy to carry from London) and each of us theninvited the women that we knew, living or dead, tobe present. We then chanted, the chant also takenfrom Starhawk, in which we passed around incenseand each person said, “x lives, x passes, x dies”—xbeing anger, failure, blindness, and so forth. The cho-rus was: “it is the cold of the night, it is the dark.”Then someone held up a pomegranate (this wasfound in both Starhawk and Z Budapest) and said,“behold, I show you the fruit of life.” She stabbed itand said, “which is death” and passed it around thecircle, and each woman put a seed in the mouth ofthe woman to her left, saying, “taste of the seeds ofdeath.” Then that woman held up an apple—”Ishow you the fruit of death and lo”—here she slicedit sideways, to show the five pointed star at its cen-tre—”it contains the five pointed star of life.” Theapple was passed around the circle, each womanfeeding her neighbour as before and saying, “taste ofthe fruit of life.” Then we passed a chalice of wineand some bread, saying “may you never be hungry,”pulled out masks and sparklers, and danced aroundand over the fire. Many of these actions required un-rehearsed, unpremeditated participation from allmembers present, unlike the Gardnerian coven,where those not doing the ritual simply watch untilthey are called to worship or to take communion(members often take turns in performing the rituals,though). There was also the sense that the group hadwritten some of the ritual together, and that some ofthe ritual was spontaneous.

There are also “solo” witches, individuals whocall themselves witches even though they have neverbeen initiated and have no formal tie to a coven. Imet a number of these women (they were always

women). One had an organization she called “SpookEnterprises” and sold candles shaped like cats andlike Isis. Another called herself a witch but had neverbeen initiated, although she was well-established inthe pagan world. Another, the speaker at the 1983Quest conference, gave talks on “village witchcraft”:on inquiry, it appeared that she had been born inKent, and was an ex-Girtonian.3

Mick, the woman of this sort whom I knew best,owned a Jacobean cottage where she lived alone onthe edge of the Fens, the desolate drained farmlandoutside Cambridge. She managed a chicken farm.She told me that she discovered her powers at theage of ten, when she “cursed” her math teacher andhe promptly broke his leg in two places. It was clearthat witchcraft was integral to her sense of self, andshe took it seriously, albeit with theatre. She calledher cottage “Broomstick Cottage,” kept ten cats andhad a cast iron cauldron near the fire place. In thecorner of the cottage she had a small statue of Pan onan altar, alongside a ritual knife stained with herown blood. Many of the villagers knew her and inCambridge I heard of the “Fen witch” from at leastfour different sources. Once, when I was sitting inher garden (her Elizabethan herb garden), two littleboys cycled past. One shouted to the other, “that’swhere the witch lives!” Mick got “collected” for herpersonality, she told me: people seem to think it ex-otic to have a witch to supper. And this may havebeen one of the reasons she cherished her claims. Shewas a very funny, sociable woman, always the centreof a party, but a bit lonely, I think, and a bit romantic:witchcraft served a different function for her thanfervent Christianity might have done, but like all re-ligions, the witchcraft reduced the loneliness, lentcharm to the bleak landscape, and gave her a socialrole.

There is a certain feel to witchcraft, a humour andan enthusiasm, often missing in other groups. Witch-craft combines the ideal and the mundane. It blendsspiritual intensity and romanticism with the lovable,paunchy flaws of the flesh. Fantasies of elfin uni-corns side comfortably with bawdy Pans. The highpriest of the coven I joined described this as “thegoat and the gazelle”: “all witches have a little ofeach.” Part of this is the practice itself. People can


3. Girton is the oldest women’s college at Cambridge.





look slightly ridiculous standing around naked insomeone’s living room. One needs a sense of hu-mour in order to tolerate the practice, as well asenough romanticism to take it seriously. And witchesare perhaps the only magicians who incorporate hu-mour into their practice. Their central invocation, the

declamation of the priestess-turned-goddess, callsfor “mirth and reverence.” Laughter often ringswithin the circle, though rarely in the rites. One highpriestess spontaneously explained to me that “beingalive is really rather funny. Wicca [another name forwitchcraft] is the only religion that captures this.”




308

The usual place for a consultation is on the edge ofcultivations far removed from homesteads. Anyplace in the bush screened by high grasses andbrushwood is suitable. Or they may choose the cor-ner of a clearing at the edge of the bush where cropswill later be sown, since this is not so damp as in thebush itself. The object in going so far is to ensure se-crecy, to avoid pollution by people who have not ob-served the taboos, and to escape witchcraft, which isless likely to corrupt the oracle in the bush than in ahomestead.

Oracle poison is useless unless a man possessesfowls upon which to test it, for the oracle speaksthrough fowls. In every Zande household there is afowl house, and fowls are kept mainly with the ob-ject of subjecting them to oracular tests. As a rulethey are only killed for food (and then only cocks orold hens) when an important visitor comes to thehomestead, perhaps a prince’s son or perhaps afather-in-law. Eggs are not eaten but are left to hensto hatch out. Generally a Zande, unless he is awealthy man, will not possess more than half adozen grown fowls at the most, and many peoplepossess none at all or perhaps a single hen whichsomeone has given to them.

Small chickens, only two or three days old, maybe used for the poison oracle, but Azande prefer

36

Consulting the Poison OracleAmong the AzandeE. E. Evans-Pritchard

If one important aspect of religion is helping believers come to know the unknown, it follows that div-ination is important to religion. Divination means learning about the future or about things thatmay be hidden. Although the word itself can be traced to divinity, which indicates its relationship togods, the practice of divination belongs as much to magic as it does to religion proper. In this selec-tion, E. E. Evans-Pritchard describes the Zande poison oracle benge, a substance related to strych-nine, and the myriad sociocultural beliefs surrounding its usage. Anthropological literature has longconfirmed the great importance of divination to the Azande; it is a practice that cuts across every as-pect of their culture. Azande diviners frequently divine with rubbing boards and termite sticks, butfor the most important decisions they consult benge by “reading” its effect on chickens. Control overthe poison oracle by older men assures them power over young men and all women. More impor-tantly, control of benge in all legal cases provides Zande princes with enormous power. Indeed, theentire legal system of the Zande rests with divination-based decisions.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) was one of the most outstanding ethnographers of Africa inthe first half of the 20th century, and his writings on the Azande and the Nuer are classics in an-thropology. His work epitomized the British structural functional approach, which emphasized syn-chronic analyses and the study of social organization.

Excerpted from Part III, Chapter 3: “Consulting the PoisonOracle,” pp. 281–312 from WITCHCRAFT, ORACLES ANDMAGIC AMONG THE AZANDE (1963) by E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.




them older. However, one sees fowls of all sizes at or-acle consultations, from tiny chickens to half-growncockerels and pullets. When it is possible to tell thesex of fowls Azande use only cockerels, unless theyhave none and a consultation is necessary at once.The hens are spared for breeding purposes. Gener-ally a man tells one of his younger sons to catch thefowls the night before a séance. Otherwise they catchthem when the door of the fowl house is openedshortly after sunrise, but it is better to catch them andput them in a basket at night when they are roosting.

Old men say that fully grown birds ought notto be used in oracle consultations because they aretoo susceptible to the poison and have a habit ofdying straight away before the poison has had timeto consider the matter placed before it or even tohear a full statement of the problem. On the otherhand a chicken remains for a long time under the in-fluence of the poison before it recovers or expires, sothat the oracle has time to hear all the relevant detailsconcerning the problem placed before it and to givea well-considered judgment.

Any male may take part in the proceedings. How-ever, the oracle is costly, and the questions put to itconcern adult occupations. Therefore boys are onlypresent when they operate the oracle. Normallythese are boys who are observing taboos of mourn-ing for the death of a relative. Adults also considerthat it would be very unwise to allow any boys otherthan these to come near their poison because boyscannot be relied upon to observe the taboos on meatsand vegetables.

An unmarried man will seldom be present at aséance. If he has any problems his father or uncle canact on his behalf. Moreover, only a married house-holder is wealthy enough to possess fowls and to ac-quire poison and has the experience to conduct aséance properly. Senior men also say that youths aregenerally engaged in some illicit love affair andwould probably pollute the poison if they came nearit. It is particularly the province of married men withhouseholds of their own to consult the poison oracleand no occupation gives them greater pleasure. It isnot merely that they are able to solve their personalproblems; but also they are dealing with matters ofpublic importance, witchcraft, sorcery, and adultery,in which their names will be associated as witnessesof the oracle’s decisions. A middle-aged Zande ishappy when he has some poison and a few fowls

and the company of one or two trusted friends of hisown age, and he can sit down to a long séance to dis-cover all about the infidelities of his wives, his healthand the health of his children, his marriage plans, hishunting and agricultural prospects, the advisabilityof changing his homestead, and so forth.

Poor men who do not possess poison or fowls butwho are compelled for one reason or another to con-sult the oracle will persuade a kinsman, blood-brother, relative-in-law, or prince’s deputy to consultit on their behalf. This is one of the main duties of so-cial relationships.

Control over the poison oracle by the older mengives them great power over their juniors and it isone of the main sources of their prestige. It is possi-ble for the older men to place the names of theyouths before the poison oracle and on its declara-tions to bring accusations of adultery against them.Moreover, a man who is not able to afford poison isnot a fully independent householder, since he is un-able to initiate any important undertaking and is de-pendent on the good will of others to inform himabout everything that concerns his health and wel-fare. In their dealings with youths older men arebacked always by the authority of the oracle on anyquestion that concerns their juniors, who have nomeans of directly consulting it themselves.

Women are debarred not only from operating thepoison oracle but from having anything to do with it.They are not expected even to speak of it, and a manwho mentions the oracle in the presence of womenuses some circumlocutory expression. When a manis going to consult the poison oracle he says to hiswife that he is going to look at his cultivations ormakes a similar excuse. She understands wellenough what he is going to do but says nothing.

The poison oracle is a male prerogative and is oneof the principal mechanisms of male control and anexpression of sex antagonism. For men say thatwomen are capable of any deceit to defy a husbandand please a lover, but men at least have the advan-tage that their oracle poison will reveal secret em-braces. If it were not for the oracle it would be of lit-tle use to pay bridewealth, for the most jealouswatch will not prevent a woman from committingadultery if she has a mind to do so. And whatwoman has not? The only thing which women fear isthe poison oracle; for if they can escape the eyes ofmen they cannot escape the eyes of the oracle. Hence

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it is said that women hate the oracle, and that if awoman finds some of the poison in the bush she willdestroy its power by urinating on it. I once asked aZande why he so carefully collected the leaves usedin operating the oracle and threw them some distanceaway from the bush, and he replied that it was toprevent women from finding them and pollutingthem, for if they pollute the leaves then the poisonwhich has been removed to its hiding place will loseits power.

Occasionally very old women of good social posi-tion have been known to operate the poison oracle,or at least to consult it. A well-known character of thepresent day, the mother of Prince Ngere, consults thepoison oracle, but such persons are rare exceptionsand are always august persons.

When we consider to what extent social life is reg-ulated by the poison oracle we shall at once appreci-ate how great an advantage men have over womenin their ability to use it, and how being cut off fromthe main means of establishing contact with the mys-tical forces that so deeply affect human welfare de-grades a woman’s position in Zande society. I havelittle hesitation in affirming that the customary ex-clusion of women from any dealings with the poisonoracle is the most evident symptom of their inferiorsocial position and means of maintaining it.

Great experience is necessary to conduct a séancein the correct manner and to know how to interpretthe findings of the oracle. One must know how manydoses of poison to administer, whether the oracle isworking properly, in what order to take the ques-tions, whether to put them in a positive or negativeform, how long a fowl is to be held between the toesor in the hand while a question is being put to the or-acle, when it ought to be jerked to stir up the poison,and when it is time to throw it on the ground for finalinspection. One must know how to observe not onlywhether the fowl lives or dies, but also the exactmanner in which the poison affects it, for while it isunder the influence of the oracle its every movementis significant to the experienced eye. Also one mustknow the phraseology of address in order to put thequestions clearly to the oracle without error or ambi-guity, and this is no easy task when a single questionmay be asked in a harangue lasting as long as five orten minutes.

Everyone knows what happens at a consultationof the poison oracle. Even women are aware of the

procedure. But not every man is proficient in the art,though most adults can prepare and question the or-acle if necessary. Those who as boys have often pre-pared the poison for their fathers and uncles, andwho are members of families which frequent thecourt and constantly consult the oracle, are the mostcompetent. When I have asked boys whether theycan prepare the poison and administer it to fowlsthey have often replied that they are ignorant of theart. Some men are very expert at questioning the or-acle, and those who wish to consult it like to be ac-companied by such a man.

Any man who is invited by the owner of the ora-cle poison may attend the séance, but he will be ex-pected to keep clear of the oracle if he has had rela-tions with his wife or eaten any of the prohibitedfoods within the last few days. It is imperative thatthe man who actually prepares the poison shall haveobserved these taboos, and for this reason the ownerof the poison, referred to in this account as theowner, generally asks a boy or man who is undertaboos of mourning to operate the oracle, since therecan be no doubt that he has kept the taboos, becausethey are the same for mourning as for oracles. Such aman is always employed when as in a case of suddensickness, it is necessary to consult the oracle withoutwarning so that there is no time for a man to preparehimself by observation of taboos. I shall refer to theman or boy who actually prepares the poison andadministers it to fowls as the “operator.” When Ispeak of the “questioner” I refer to the man who sitsopposite to the oracle and addresses it and callsupon it for judgments. As he sits a few feet from theoracle he ought also to have observed all the taboos.It is possible for a man to be owner, operator, andquestioner at the same time by conducting the con-sultation of the oracle by himself, but this rarely, ifever, occurs. Usually there is no difficulty in obtain-ing the services of an operator, since a man knowswhich of his neighbors are observing the taboosassociated with death and vengeance. One of hiscompanions who has not eaten tabooed food or hadsexual relations with women for a day or two beforethe consultation acts as questioner. If a man is un-clean he can address the oracle from a distance. It isbetter to take these precautions because contact of anunclean person with the oracle is certain to destroyits potency, and even the close proximity of an un-clean person may have this result.





The owner does not pay the operator and ques-tioner for their services. The questioner is almost in-variably either the owner himself or one of hisfriends who also wishes to put questions to the ora-cle and has brought fowls with him for the purpose.It is usual to reward the operator, if he is an adult, bygiving him a fowl during the séance so that he canplace one of his own problems before the oracle.Since he is generally a man who wears a girdle ofmourning and vengeance he will often ask the oraclewhen the vengeance magic is going to strike itsvictim.

To guard against pollution a man generally hideshis poison in the thatched roof of a hut, on the innerside, if possible, in a hut which women do not use,but this is not essential, for a woman does not knowthat there is poison hidden in the roof and is unlikelyto come into contact with it. The owner of the poisonmust have kept the taboos if he wishes to take itdown from the roof himself, and if he is unclean hewill bring the man or boy who is to operate the ora-cle into the hut and indicate to him at a distancewhere the poison is hidden in the thatch. So good ahiding place is the thatched roof of a hut for a smallpacket of poison that it is often difficult for its ownerhimself to find it. No one may smoke hemp in a hutwhich lodges oracle poison. However, there is al-ways a danger of pollution and of witchcraft if thepoison is kept in a homestead, and some men preferto hide it in a hole in a tree in the bush, or even tobuild a small shelter and to lay it on the ground be-neath. This shelter is far removed from humandwellings, and were a man to come across it in thebush he would not disturb it lest it cover some kindof lethal medicine. It is very improbable that witch-craft will discover oracle poison hidden in the bush.I have never seen oracle poison under a shelter in thebush, but I was told that it is frequently housed inthis manner.

Oracle poison when not in use is kept wrapped inleaves, and at the end of a séance used poison isplaced in a separate leaf-wrapping from unused poi-son. The poison may be used two or three times andsometimes fresh poison is added to it to make itmore potent. When its action shows that it has lost itsstrength they throw it away.

Special care is taken to protect a prince’s oraclepoison from witchcraft and pollution because aprince’s oracles reveal matters of tribal importance,

judge criminal and civil cases, and determinewhether vengeance has been exacted for death. Aprince has two or three official operators who super-vise his poison oracle. These men must be thor-oughly reliable since the fate of their master and thepurity of law are in their hands. If they break a taboothe whole legal system may become corrupted andthe innocent be judged guilty and the guilty bejudged innocent. Moreover, a prince is at frequentpains to discover witchcraft or sorcery among hiswives and retainers which might do him an injury, sothat his life is endangered if the oracle is not workingproperly.

Control of the poison oracle in all legal cases gavethe princes enormous power. No death or adulterycould be legally avenged without a verdict fromtheir oracles, so that the court was the sole mediumof legal action and the king or his representative thesole source of law. Although the procedure was amystical one it was carried out in the king’s nameand he was vested with judicial authority as com-pletely as if a more common-sense system of justicehad obtained.

Azande are very secretive about oracle séancesand wish no one to be present when they are inquir-ing about private matters unless he is a trustedfriend. They do not tell any one except trustedfriends that they are going to consult the oracle, andthey say nothing about the consultation on their re-turn. It frequently happens when a man is about toset out from his homestead to the place of the oraclethat he is visited by someone whom he does not wishto acquaint with his business. He does not tell theunwelcome visitor that he must hurry off to consultthe oracle, but uses any pretext to get rid of him, andprefers to abandon the consultation rather than con-fess his intentions.

After this short introduction I will describe themanner in which poison is administered to fowls.The operator goes ahead of the rest of the party inorder to prepare for the test. He takes with him asmall gourdful of water. He clears a space by tread-ing down the grasses. Afterwards he scrapes a holein the earth into which he places a large leaf as abasin for the oracle poison. From bingba grass hefashions a small brush to administer the poison, andfrom leaves he makes a filter to pour the liquid poi-son into the beaks of the fowls; and from other leaves




he makes a cup to transfer water from the gourd tothe poison when it needs to be moistened. Finally, hetears off some branches of nearby shrubs and ex-tracts their bast to be used as cord for attaching to thelegs of fowls which have survived the test so thatthey can be easily retrieved from the grass when thebusiness of the day is finished. The operator doesnot moisten the poison till the rest of the party arrive.

There may be only one man or there may be sev-eral who have questions to put to the oracle. Eachbrings his fowls with him in an open-wove basket.As it has been agreed beforehand where the oracleconsultation is to take place they know where toforegather. As each person arrives he hands over hisbasket of fowls to the operator who places it on theground near him. A man who is used to acting asquestioner sits opposite to it, a few feet away if hehas observed the taboos, but several yards away if hehas not observed them. Other men who have notkept the taboos remain at a greater distance.

When every one is seated they discuss in lowtones whose fowl they will take first and how thequestion shall be framed. Meanwhile the operatorpours some water from the gourd at his side into hisleaf cup and from the cup on to the poison, whichthen effervesces. He mixes the poison and waterwith his finger tips into a paste of the right consis-tency and, when instructed by the questioner, takesone of the fowls and draws down its wings over itslegs and pins them between and under his toes. Heis seated with the fowl facing him. He takes his grassbrush, twirls it round in the poison, and folds it inthe leaf filter. He holds open the beak of the fowl andtips the end of the filter into it and squeezes the filterso that the liquid runs out of the paste into the throatof the fowl. He bobs the head of the fowl up anddown to compel it to swallow the poison.

At this point the questioner, having previouslybeen instructed by the owner of the fowl on the factswhich he is to put before the oracle, commences toaddress the poison inside the fowl. He continues toaddress it for about a couple of minutes, when a sec-ond dose of poison is usually administered. If it is avery small chicken two doses will suffice, but alarger fowl will receive three doses, and I haveknown a fowl to receive a fourth dose, but nevermore than four. The questioner does not cease his ad-dress to the oracle, but puts his questions again and

again in different forms, though always with thesame refrain, “If such is the case, poison oracle killthe fowl,” or “If such is the case, poison oracle sparethe fowl.” From time to time he interrupts his flow oforatory to give a technical order to the operator. Hemay tell him to give the fowl another dose of poisonor to jerk it between his toes by raising and loweringhis foot (this stirs up the poison inside the fowl).When the last dose of poison has been administeredand he has further addressed it, he tells the operatorto raise the fowl. The operator takes it in his handand, holding its legs between his fingers so that itfaces him, gives it an occasional jerk backwards andforwards. The questioner redoubles his oratory asthough the verdict depended upon his forensic ef-forts, and if the fowl is not already dead he then,after a further bout of oratory, tells the operator toput it on the ground. He continues to address thepoison inside the fowl while they watch its move-ments on the ground.

The poison affects fowls in many ways. Occasion-ally it kills them immediately after the first dose,while they are still on the ground. This seldom hap-pens, for normally a fowl is not seriously affected tillit is removed from the ground and jerked backwardsand forwards in the hand. Then, if it is going to die,it goes through spasmodic stretchings of the bodyand closing of the wings and vomits. After severalsuch spasms it vomits and expires in a final seizure.Some fowls appear quite unaffected by the poison,and when, after being jerked backwards and for-wards for a while, they are flung to the ground peckaround unconcernedly. Those fowls which are unaf-fected by the poison generally excrete as soon as theyare put to earth. Some fowls appear little affected bythe poison till put to earth, when they suddenly col-lapse and die.

One generally knows what the verdict is going tobe after the fowl has been held in the hand for a cou-ple of minutes. If it appears certain to recover the op-erator ties bast to its leg and throws it to the ground.If it appears certain to die he does not trouble to tiebast to its leg, but lays it on the earth to die. Oftenwhen a fowl has died they draw its corpse in a semi-circle round the poison to show it to the poison. Theythen cut off a wing to use as evidence and cover thebody with grass. Those fowls which survive aretaken home and let loose. A fowl is never used twiceon the same day.






The main duty of the questioner is to see thatthe oracle fully understands the question put to itand is acquainted with all facts relevant to theproblem it is asked to solve. They address it withall the care for detail that one observes in courtcases before a prince. This means beginning a longway back and noting over a considerable period oftime every detail which might elucidate the case,linking up facts into a consistent picture of events,and the marshalling of arguments, as Azande canso brilliantly do, into a logical and closely knit webof sequences and interrelations of facts and infer-ence. Also the questioner is careful to mention tothe oracle again and again the name of the manwho is consulting it, and he points him out to theoracle with his out-stretched arm. He mentions alsothe name of his father, perhaps the name of hisclan, and the name of the place where he resides,and he gives similar details of other people men-tioned in the address.

An address consists usually of alternate direc-tions. The first sentences outline the question interms demanding an affirmative answer and endwith the command, “Poison oracle kill the fowl.” Thenext sentences outline the question in terms de-manding a negative answer and end with the com-mand, “Poison oracle spare the fowl.” The consulterthen takes up the question again in terms asking anaffirmative answer; and so on. If a bystander consid-ers that a relevant point has been left out he inter-rupts the questioner, who then makes this point.

The questioner has a switch in his hand, and whilequestioning the oracle beats the ground, as he sitscross-legged, in front of it. He continues to beat theground till the end of his address. Often he will ges-ticulate as he makes his points, in the same manner asa man making a case in court. He sometimes plucksgrass and shows it to the poison and, after explainingthat there is something he does not wish it to consider,throws it behind him. Thus he tells the oracle that hedoes not wish it to consider the question of witchcraftbut only of sorcery. Witchcraft is wingi, something ir-relevant, and he casts it behind him.

While the fowl is undergoing its ordeal men areattentive to their behavior. A man must tighten andspread out his bark-cloth loin-covering lest he ex-pose his genitals, as when he is sitting in the pres-ence of a prince or parent-in-law. Men speak in a lowvoice as they do in the presence of superiors. Indeed,all conversation is avoided unless it directly con-cerns the procedure of consultation. If anyone de-sires to leave before the proceedings are finished hetakes a leaf and spits on it and places it where he hasbeen sitting. I have seen a man who rose for a fewmoments only to catch a fowl which had escapedfrom its basket place a blade of grass on the stoneupon which he had been sitting. Spears must be laidon the ground and not planted upright in the pres-ence of the poison oracle. Azande are very seriousduring a séance, for they are asking questions of vitalimportance to their lives and happiness.




314

The problem of primitive knowledge has been singu-larly neglected by anthropology. Studies on savagepsychology were exclusively confined to early reli-gion, magic, and mythology. Only recently the work ofseveral English, German, and French writers, notablythe daring and brilliant speculations of ProfessorLévy-Bruhl, gave an impetus to the student’s interestin what the savage does in his more sober moods. Theresults were startling indeed: Professor Lévy-Bruhltells us, to put it in a nutshell, that primitive man hasno sober moods at all, that he is hopelessly and com-

pletely immersed in a mystical frame of mind. Inca-pable of dispassionate and consistent observation,devoid of the power of abstraction, hampered by “adecided aversion towards reasoning,” he is unable todraw any benefit from experience, to construct orcomprehend even the most elementary laws of nature.“For minds thus orientated there is no fact purelyphysical.” Nor can there exist for them any clear ideaof substance and attribute, cause and effect, identityand contradiction. Their outlook is that of confusedsuperstition, “prelogical,” made of mystic “participa-tions” and “exclusions.” I have here summarized abody of opinion, of which the brilliant French sociolo-gist is the most decided and the most competentspokesman, but which numbers besides, many an-thropologists and philosophers of renown.

37

Rational Mastery by Manof His SurroundingsBronislaw Malinowski

Rare is the anthropology course that sometime during the semester is not directed to the thought andwritings of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942). This world-famous Polish anthropologist wastrained in mathematics but shifted his interests to anthropology after reading Sir James Frazer’s TheGolden Bough. Malinowski’s fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia influenced the direc-tion of anthropology as an academic discipline. He is recognized as the founder of functionalism, ananthropological approach to the study of culture that believes each institution in a society fulfills adefinite function in the maintenance of human needs. His major works include Crime and Customsin Savage Society (1926), The Sexual Life of Savages (1929), and Coral Gardens and TheirMagic (1935). Malinowski was professor of anthropology at the University of London from 1927until his death in 1942.

In this classic article, originally published in 1925, Malinowski asks two important questions: Dopreliterate people have any rational mastery of their surroundings and can primitive knowledge beregarded as a beginning or rudimentary type of science, or is it merely a crude hodgepodge devoid oflogic and accuracy? Although the author’s use of the word savage is considered a pejorative by an-thropologists today, in Malinowski’s time it was commonplace.

Reprinted from MAGIC, SCIENCE AND RELIGION (NewYork: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 25–35, by permission of the Societyfor Promoting Christian Knowledge.




But there are dissenting voices. When a scholarand anthropologist of the measure of Professor J. L.Myres entitles an article in Notes and Queries “Nat-ural Science,” and when we read there that the sav-age’s “knowledge based on observation is distinctand accurate,” we must surely pause before accept-ing primitive man’s irrationality as a dogma. An-other highly competent writer, Dr. A. A. Golden-weiser, speaking about primitive “discoveries,inventions and improvements”—which could hardlybe attributed to any preempirical or prelogicalmind—affirms that “it would be unwise to ascribe tothe primitive mechanic merely a passive part in theorigination of inventions. Many a happy thoughtmust have crossed his mind, nor was he wholly un-familiar with the thrill that comes from an idea effec-tive in action.” Here we see the savage endowedwith an attitude of mind wholly akin to that of amodern man of science!

To bridge over the wide gap between the two ex-treme opinions current on the subject of primitiveman’s reason, it will be best to resolve the probleminto two questions.

First, has the savage any rational outlook, any ra-tional mastery of his surroundings, or is he, as M.Lévy-Bruhl and his school maintain, entirely “mysti-cal”? The answer will be that every primitive com-munity is in possession of a considerable store ofknowledge, based on experience and fashioned byreason.

The second question then opens: Can this primi-tive knowledge be regarded as a rudimentary formof science or is it, on the contrary, radically different,a crude body of practical and technical abilities, rulesof thumb and rules of art having no theoreticalvalue? This second question, epistemological ratherthan belonging to the study of man, will be barelytouched upon at the end of this section and a tenta-tive answer only will be given.

In dealing with the first question, we shall have toexamine the “profane” side of life, the arts, crafts andeconomic pursuits, and we shall attempt to disentan-gle in it a type of behavior, clearly marked off frommagic and religion, based on empirical knowledgeand on the confidence in logic. We shall try to findwhether the lines of such behavior are defined bytraditional rules, known, perhaps even discussedsometimes, and tested. We shall have to inquirewhether the sociological setting of the rational and

empirical behavior differs from that of ritual andcult. Above all we shall ask, do the natives distin-guish the two domains and keep them apart, or is thefield of knowledge constantly swamped by supersti-tion, ritualism, magic or religion?

Since in the matter under discussion there is anappalling lack of relevant and reliable observations, Ishall have largely to draw upon my own material,most unpublished, collected during a few years’field work among the Melanesian and Papuo-Melanesian tribes of Eastern New Guinea and thesurrounding archipelagoes. As the Melanesians arereputed, however, to be specially magic-ridden, theywill furnish an acid test of the existence of empiricaland rational knowledge among savages living in theage of polished stone.

These natives, and I am speaking mainly of theMelanesians who inhabit the coral atolls to the N.E.of the main island, the Trobriand Archipelago andthe adjoining groups, are expert fishermen, industri-ous manufacturers and traders, but they rely mainlyon gardening for their subsistence. With the mostrudimentary implements, a pointed digging-stickand a small axe, they are able to raise crops sufficientto maintain a dense population and even yielding asurplus, which in olden days was allowed to rot un-consumed, and which at present is exported to feedplantation hands. The success in their agriculturedepends—besides the excellent natural conditionswith which they are favored—upon their extensiveknowledge of the classes of the soil, of the variouscultivated plants, of the mutual adaptation of thesetwo factors, and, last not least, upon their knowledgeof the importance of accurate and hard work. Theyhave to select the soil and the seedlings, they haveappropriately to fix the times for clearing and burn-ing the scrub, for planting and weeding, for trainingthe vines of the yam plants. In all this they areguided by a clear knowledge of weather and sea-sons, plants and pests, soil and tubers, and by a con-viction that this knowledge is true and reliable, thatit can be counted upon and must be scrupulouslyobeyed.

Yet mixed with all their activities there is to befound magic, a series of rites performed every yearover the gardens in rigorous sequence and order.Since the leadership in garden work is in the handsof the magician, and since ritual and practical workare intimately associated, a superficial observer

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might be led to assume that the mystic and the ratio-nal behavior are mixed up, that their effects are notdistinguished by the natives and not distinguishablein scientific analysis. Is this so really?

Magic is undoubtedly regarded by the natives asabsolutely indispensable to the welfare of the gar-dens. What would happen without it no one can ex-actly tell, for no native garden has ever been madewithout its ritual, in spite of some thirty years ofEuropean rule and missionary influence and wellover a century’s contact with white traders. But cer-tainly various kinds of disaster, blight, unseasonabledroughts, rains, bush-pigs and locusts would de-stroy the unhallowed garden made without magic.

Does this mean, however, that the natives at-tribute all the good results to magic? Certainly not. Ifyou were to suggest to a native that he should makehis garden mainly by magic and scamp his work, hewould simply smile on your simplicity. He knows aswell as you do that there are natural conditions andcauses, and by his observations he knows also thathe is able to control these natural forces by mentaland physical effort. His knowledge is limited, nodoubt, but as far as it goes it is sound and proofagainst mysticism. If the fences are broken down, ifthe seed is destroyed or has been dried or washedaway, he will have recourse not to magic, but towork, guided by knowledge and reason. His experi-ence has taught him also, on the other hand, that inspite of all his forethought and beyond all his effortsthere are agencies and forces which one year bestowunwonted and unearned benefits of fertility, makingeverything run smooth and well, rain and sun ap-pear at the right moment, noxious insects remain inabeyance, the harvest yields a superabundant crop;and another year again the same agencies bring illluck and bad chance, pursue him from beginning tillend and thwart all his most strenuous efforts and hisbest-founded knowledge. To control these influencesand these only he employs magic.

Thus there is a clear-cut division: there is first thewell-known set of conditions, the natural course ofgrowth, as well as the ordinary pests and dangers tobe warded off by fencing and weeding. On the otherhand there is the domain of the unaccountable andadverse influences, as well as the great unearned in-crement of fortunate coincidence. The first condi-tions are coped with by knowledge and work, thesecond by magic.

This line of division can also be traced in the so-cial setting of work and ritual respectively. Thoughthe garden magician is, as a rule, also the leader inpractical activities, these two functions are keptstrictly apart. Every magical ceremony has its dis-tinctive name, its appropriate time and its place inthe scheme of work, and it stands out of the ordinarycourse of activities completely. Some of them are cer-emonial and have to be attended by the whole com-munity, all are public in that it is known when theyare going to happen and anyone can attend them.They are performed on selected plots within the gar-dens and on a special corner of this plot. Work is al-ways tabooed on such occasions, sometimes onlywhile the ceremony lasts, sometimes for a day ortwo. In his lay character the leader and magician di-rects the work, fixes the dates for starting, haranguesand exhorts slack or careless gardeners. But the tworoles never overlap or interfere: they are alwaysclear, and any native will inform you without hesita-tion whether the man acts as magician or as leader ingarden work.

What has been said about gardens can be paral-leled from any one of the many other activities inwhich work and magic run side by side without evermixing. Thus in canoe building empirical knowledgeof material, of technology, and of certain principles ofstability and hydrodynamics, function in companyand close association with magic, each yet unconta-minated by the other.

For example, they understand perfectly well thatthe wider the span of the outrigger the greater thestability yet the smaller the resistance against strain.They can clearly explain why they have to give thisspan a certain traditional width, measured in frac-tions of the length of the dugout. They can also ex-plain, in rudimentary but clearly mechanical terms,how they have to behave in a sudden gale, why theoutrigger must be always on the weather side, whythe one type of canoe can and the other cannot beat.They have, in fact, a whole system of principles ofsailing, embodied in a complex and rich terminol-ogy, traditionally handed on and obeyed as ratio-nally and consistently as is modern science by mod-ern sailors. How could they sail otherwise undereminently dangerous conditions in their frail primi-tive craft?

But even with all their systematic knowledge,methodically applied, they are still at the mercy of





powerful and incalculable tides, sudden gales dur-ing the monsoon season and unknown reefs. Andhere comes in their magic, performed over the canoeduring its construction, carried out at the beginningand in the course of expeditions and resorted toin moments of real danger. If the modern seaman,entrenched in science and reason, provided withall sorts of safety appliances, sailing on steel-builtsteamers, if even he has a singular tendency tosuperstition—which does not rob him of his knowledgeor reason, nor make him altogether prelogical—canwe wonder that his savage colleague, under muchmore precarious conditions, holds fast to the safetyand comfort of magic?

An interesting and crucial test is provided by fish-ing in the Trobriand Islands and its magic. While inthe villages on the inner lagoon fishing is done in aneasy and absolutely reliable manner by the methodof poisoning, yielding abundant results withoutdanger and uncertainty, there are on the shores of theopen sea dangerous modes of fishing and also cer-tain types in which the yield greatly varies accordingto whether shoals of fish appear beforehand or not. Itis most significant that in the lagoon fishing, whereman can rely completely upon his knowledge andskill, magic does not exist, while in the open-sea fish-ing, full of danger and uncertainty, there is extensivemagical ritual to secure safety and good results.

Again, in warfare the natives know that strength,courage, and agility play a decisive part. Yet herealso they practice magic to master the elements ofchance and luck.

Nowhere is the duality of natural and supernat-ural causes divided by a line so thin and intricate,yet, if carefully followed up, so well marked, deci-sive, and instructive, as in the two most fateful forcesof human destiny: health and death. Health to theMelanesians is a natural state of affairs and, unlesstampered with, the human body will remain in per-fect order. But the natives know perfectly well thatthere are natural means which can affect healthand even destroy the body. Poisons, wounds, burns,falls are known to cause disablement or death in anatural way. And this is not a matter of private opin-ion of this or that individual, but it is laid down intraditional lore and even in belief, for there are con-sidered to be different ways to the nether world forthose who died by sorcery and those who met “nat-ural” death. Again, it is recognized that cold, heat,

overstrain, too much sun, overeating can all causeminor ailments, which are treated by natural reme-dies such as massage, steaming, warming at a fireand certain potions. Old age is known to lead to bod-ily decay and the explanation is given by the nativesthat very old people grow weak, their esophaguscloses up, and therefore they must die.

But besides these natural causes there is the enor-mous domain of sorcery and by far the most cases ofillness and death are ascribed to this. The line of dis-tinction between sorcery and the other causes is clearin theory and in most cases of practice, but it must berealized that it is subject to what could be called thepersonal perspective. That is, the more closely a casehas to do with the person who considers it, the lesswill it be “natural,” the more “magical.” Thus a veryold man, whose pending death will be considerednatural by the other members of the community, willbe afraid only of sorcery and never think of hisnatural fate. A fairly sick person will diagnose sor-cery in his own case, while all the others might speakof too much betel nut or overeating or some otherindulgence.

But who of us really believes that his own bodilyinfirmities and the approaching death is a purelynatural occurrence, just an insignificant event in theinfinite chain of causes? To the most rational civi-lized men health, disease, the threat of death, float ina hazy emotional mist, which seems to becomedenser and more impenetrable as the fateful formsapproach. It is indeed astonishing that “savages” canachieve such a sober, dispassionate outlook in thesematters as they actually do.

Thus in his relation to nature and destiny,whether he tries to exploit the first or to dodge thesecond, primitive man recognized both the naturaland the supernatural forces and agencies, and hetries to use them both for his benefit. Whenever hehas been taught by experience that effort guided byknowledge is of some avail, he never spares the oneor ignores the other. He knows that a plant cannotgrow by magic alone, or a canoe sail or float withoutbeing properly constructed and managed, or a fightbe won without skill and daring. He never relies onmagic alone, while, on the contrary, he sometimesdispenses with it completely, as in fire-making andin a number of crafts and pursuits. But he clings to it,whenever he has to recognize the impotence of hisknowledge and of his rational technique.




I have given my reasons why in this argument Ihad to rely principally on the material collected inthe classical land of magic, Melanesia. But the factsdiscussed are so fundamental, the conclusionsdrawn of such a general nature, that it will be easy tocheck them on any modern detailed ethnographicrecord. Comparing agricultural work and magic, thebuilding of canoes, the art of healing by magic andby natural remedies, the ideas about the causes ofdeath in other regions, the universal validity of whathas been established here could easily be proved.Only, since no observations have methodically beenmade with reference to the problem of primitiveknowledge, the data from other writers could begleaned only piecemeal and their testimony thoughclear would be indirect.

I have chosen to face the question of primitiveman’s rational knowledge directly: watching him athis principal occupations, seeing him pass fromwork to magic and back again, entering into hismind, listening to his opinions. The whole problemmight have been approached through the avenue oflanguage, but this would have led us too far intoquestions of logic, semasiology, and theory of primi-tive languages. Words which serve to express gen-eral ideas such as existence, substance, and attribute,cause and effect, the fundamental and the secondary;words and expressions used in complicated pursuitslike sailing, construction, measuring and checking;numerals and quantitative descriptions, correct anddetailed classifications of natural phenomena, plantsand animals—all this would lead us exactly to thesame conclusion: that primitive man can observeand think, and that he possesses, embodied in hislanguage, systems of methodical though rudimen-tary knowledge.

Similar conclusions could be drawn from an ex-amination of those mental schemes and physicalcontrivances which could be described as diagramsor formulas. Methods of indicating the main pointsof the compass, arrangements of stars into constella-tions, co-ordination of these with the seasons, nam-ing of moons in the year, of quarters in the moon—allthese accomplishments are known to the simplestsavages. Also they are all able to draw diagrammaticmaps in the sand or dust, indicate arrangements byplacing small stones, shells, or sticks on the ground,plan expeditions or raids on such rudimentarycharts. By co-ordinating space and time they are able

to arrange big tribal gatherings and to combine vasttribal movements over extensive areas. The use ofleaves, notched sticks, and similar aids to memory iswell known and seems to be almost universal. Allsuch “diagrams” are means of reducing a complexand unwieldly bit of reality to a simple and handyform. They give man a relatively easy mental controlover it. As such are they not—in a very rudimentaryform no doubt—fundamentally akin to developedscientific formulas and “models,” which are alsosimple and handy paraphrases of a complex or ab-stract reality, giving the civilized physicist mentalcontrol over it?

This brings us to the second question: Can we re-gard primitive knowledge, which, as we found, isboth empirical and rational, as a rudimentary stageof science, or is it not at all related to it? If by sciencebe understood a body of rules and conceptions,based on experience and derived from it by logicalinference, embodied in material achievements and ina fixed form of tradition and carried on by some sortof social organization—then there is no doubt thateven the lowest savage communities have the begin-ning of science, however rudimentary.

Most epistemologists would not, however, be sat-isfied with such a “minimum definition” of science,for it might apply to the rules of an art or craft aswell. They would maintain that the rules of sciencemust be laid down explicitly, open to control by ex-periment and critique by reason. They must not onlybe rules of practical behavior, but theoretical laws ofknowledge. Even accepting this stricture, however,there is hardly any doubt that many of the principlesof savage knowledge are scientific in this sense. Thenative shipwright knows not only practically ofbuoyancy, leverage, equilibrium, he has to obeythese laws not only on water, but while making thecanoe he must have the principles in his mind. He in-structs his helpers in them. He gives them the tradi-tional rules, and in a crude and simple manner, usinghis hands, pieces of wood, and a limited technicalvocabulary, he explains some general laws of hydro-dynamics and equilibrium. Science is not detachedfrom the craft, that is certainly true, it is only a meansto an end, it is crude, rudimentary, and inchoate, butwith all that it is the matrix from which the higherdevelopments must have sprung.

If we applied another criterion yet, that of the re-ally scientific attitude, the disinterested search for






knowledge and for the understanding of causes andreasons, the answer would certainly not be in a di-rect negative. There is, of course, no widespreadthirst for knowledge in a savage community, newthings such as European topics bore them franklyand their whole interest is largely encompassed bythe traditional world of their culture. But within thisthere is both the antiquarian mind passionately in-terested in myths, stories, details of customs, pedi-grees, and ancient happenings, and there is also tobe found the naturalist, patient and painstaking inhis observations, capable of generalization and ofconnecting long chains of events in the life of ani-mals, and in the marine world or in the jungle. It is

enough to realize how much European naturalistshave often learned from their savage colleagues toappreciate this interest found in the native for na-ture. There is finally among the primitives, as everyfield worker well knows, the sociologist, the idealinformant, capable with marvelous accuracy and in-sight to give the raison d’être, the function and theorganization of many a simpler institution in histribe.

Science, of course, does not exist in any uncivi-lized community as a driving power, criticizing, re-newing, constructing. Science is never consciouslymade. But on this criterion, neither is there law, norreligion, nor government among savages.




320

On each pitching day for the first three months of awinning season, Dennis Grossini, a pitcher on aDetroit Tiger farm team, arose from bed at exactly10:00 A.M. At 1:00 P.M. he went to the nearest restau-rant for two glasses of iced tea and a tuna fish sand-wich. When he got to the ballpark at 3:00 P.M., he puton the sweatshirt and jock he wore during his lastwinning game; one hour before the game he cheweda wad of Beech-Nut chewing tobacco. After eachpitch during the game he touched the letters on hisuniform and straightened his cap after each ball. Be-fore the start of each inning he replaced the pitcher’srosin bag next to the spot where it was the inningbefore. And after every inning in which he gave up arun, he washed his hands.

When I asked which part of his ritual was mostimportant, he said, “You can’t really tell what’s mostimportant so it all becomes important. I’d be afraidto change anything. As long as I’m winning, I doeverything the same.”

Trobriand Islanders, according to anthropologistBronislaw Malinowski, felt the same way about theirfishing magic. Trobrianders fished in two different

settings: in the inner lagoon where fish were plentifuland there was little danger, and on the open seawhere fishing was dangerous and yields variedwidely. Malinowski found that magic was not usedin lagoon fishing, where men could rely solely ontheir knowledge and skill. But when fishing on theopen sea, Trobrianders used a great deal of magicalritual to ensure safety and increase their catch.

Baseball, America’s national pastime, is an arena inwhich players behave remarkably like Malinowski’sTrobriand fishermen. To professional ballplayers,baseball is more than just a game, it is an occupation.Since their livelihoods depend on how well they per-form, many use magic in an attempt to control thechance that is built into baseball. There are three es-sential activities of the game—pitching, hitting, andfielding. In the first two, chance can play a surpris-ingly important role. The pitcher is the player leastable to control the outcome of his efforts. He may feelgreat and have good stuff warming up in the bullpenand then get in the game and get clobbered. He maymake a bad pitch and see the batter miss it for astrike or see it hit hard but right into the hands of afielder for an out. Conversely, his best pitch may beblooped for a base hit. He may limit the opposingteam to just a few hits yet lose the game, and he maygive up many hits and win. And the good and badluck don’t always average out over the course of a

38

Baseball MagicGeorge Gmelch

In the preceding article, Malinowski observed that in the Trobriand Islands magic did not occurwhen the natives fished in the safe lagoons but when they ventured out into the open seas: then thedanger and uncertainty caused them to perform extensive magical rituals. In the following article,anthropologist George Gmelch demonstrates that America’s favorite pastime is an excellent place toput the test to Malinowski’s hypothesis about magic. Anyone who has watched baseball, either at aballpark or in front of a television set, is aware of some of the more obvious rituals performed by theplayers, but Gmelch, drawing upon his previous experience as a professional baseball player, providesan insider’s view of the rituals, taboos, and fetishes involved in the sport. (The following is a 2007revision of Gmelch’s original article.)

Revised from the original article that appeared in TRANSACTION,vol. 8, no. 8 (1971), pp. 39–41, 54. Reprinted by permission of theauthor, George Gmelch.




season. For instance, this past season (2007) [MattCain/Jeriome Robertson] gave up 1.4 more runsper game than his teammate [Noah Lowry/TimRedding] but only won 7 games while losing 16.Lowry won 14 games and only lost 8. Robertson went15-9, while Redding was only 10–14. Both pitchedfor the same team—[the San Francisco Giants/theHouston Astros]—which meant they had the samefielders behind them. By chance, when Cain pitchedthe Giants scored few runs while his teammateLowry enjoyed considerable run support. Regard-less of how well a pitcher performs, the outcome ofthe game also also depends upon the proficiency ofhis teammates, the ineptitude of the opposition,and luck.

Hitting, which many observers call the singlemost difficult task in the world of sports, is also fullof uncertainty. Unless it’s a home run, no matter howhard the batter hits the ball, fate determines whetherit will go into a waiting glove or find a gap betweenthe fielders. The uncertainty is compounded by thelow success rate of hitting: the average hitter getsonly one hit in every four trips to the plate, while thevery best hitters average only one hit in every threetrips. Fielding, which we will return to later, is theone part of baseball where chance does not playmuch of a role.

How does the risk and uncertainty in pitchingand hitting affect players? How do they try to con-trol the outcomes of their performance? These arequestions that I first became interested in many yearsago both as a ballplayer and as an anthropology stu-dent. I had devoted much of my youth to baseballand played professionally as a first baseman in theDetroit Tiger organization in the 1960s. It wasshortly after the end of one baseball season that Itook an anthropology course called “Magic, Reli-gion, and Witchcraft.” As I listened to my professordescribe the magical rituals of the Trobriand Is-landers, it occurred to me that what these so-calledprimitive people did wasn’t all that different fromwhat my teammates and I did for luck and confi-dence at the ballpark.

Routines and Rituals

The most common way players attempt to reducechance and their feelings of uncertainty is to developa daily routine—a course of action which is regularly

followed. Talking about the routines of ballplayers,Pittsburgh Pirates coach Rich Donnelly said:

They’re like trained animals. They come out here[ballpark] and everything has to be the same, theydon’t like anything that knocks them off theirroutine. Just look at the dugout and you’ll seeevery guy sitting in the same spot every night. It’samazing, everybody in the same spot. And don’tyou dare take someone’s seat. If a guy comes upfrom the minors and sits here, they’ll say, “Hey, Jimsits here, find another seat.” You watch the pitcherwarm up and he’ll do the same thing every time. . . .You got a routine and you adhere to it and youdon’t want anybody knocking you off it.

Routines are comforting; they bring order into aworld in which players have little control. The varied elements in routines can produce the tangi-ble benefit of helping the player concentrate. Allballplayers know that it is difficult to think and hit atthe same time, and that following a routine can keepthem from thinking too much. And sometimes prac-tical elements in routines produce tangible benefits,such as helping the player concentrate. But oftensome of what players do goes beyond mere routine.These actions become what anthropologists define asritual—prescribed behaviors in which there is no em-pirical connection between the means (e.g., tappinghome plate three times) and the desired end (e.g.,getting a base hit). Because there is no real connec-tion between the two, rituals are not rational. Some-times they are quite irrational. Similar to rituals arethe nonrational beliefs that form the basis of taboosand fetishes, which players also use to bring luck totheir side. But first let’s take a close look at rituals.

Baseball rituals are infinitely varied. Most are per-sonal, and are performed by individuals rather thanby a team or group. Most are done in a private andunemotional manner, in much the same way playersapply pine tar and rosin to their bats to improve thegrip or dab eye black on their upper cheeks to reducethe sun’s glare. A ballplayer may ritualize any activ-ity that he considers important or somehow linkedto good performance. Recall the variety of thingsthat Dennis Grossini does, from specific times forwaking and eating to foods and dress. White Soxpitcher Jason Bere listens to the same song on hisiPod on the day he is scheduled to start. AtlantaBrave Denny Neagle goes to a movie on days he isscheduled to start. Pitcher Al Holland always played

GMELCH • BASEBALL MAGIC | 321





with two dollar bills in his back pocket. The Oriole’sGlenn Davis used to chew the same gum every dayduring hitting streaks, saving it under his cap. As-tros’ infielder Julio Gotay always played with acheese sandwich in his back pocket (he had a big ap-petite, so there might also have been a measure ofpracticality here). Red Soxer third baseman WadeBoggs ate chicken before every game during his ca-reer, and that was just one of many elements in hispre- and postgamepost game routine, which also in-cluded leaving his house for the ballpark at preciselythe same time each day (1:47 for a 7:05 night game),running wind sprints at 7:17 for a 7:35 start, anddrawing a chai, the Hebrew symbol for life, upon en-tering the batter’s box.

Many hitters go through a series of preparatoryrituals before stepping into the batter’s box. Theseinclude tugging on their caps, touching their uni-form letters or medallions, crossing themselves, andswinging, tapping, or bouncing the bat on the plate aprescribed number of times. Consider the CubsDodger’s shortstop Nomar Garciaparra. After eachpitch he steps out of the batter’s box, kicks the dirtwith each toe, adjusts his right batting glove, adjustshis left batting glove, and touches his helmet beforegetting back into the box. He insists that it is a routine,not superstition. “I’m just doing it to get everythingtight. I like everything tight, that’s all it is, really.”Mike Hargrove, former Cleveland Indian first base-man, had so many time-consuming elements in hisbatting ritual that he was nicknamed “the humanrain delay.” Both players believe their batting ritualshelped them regain their concentration after eachpitch. But others wondered if the two had becomeprisoners of their elaborate superstitions.

Another ritual associated with hitting is tagging abase when leaving and returning to the dugout be-tween innings. Some players don’t feel right unlessthey tag a specific base on each trip between dugoutand field. One of my teammates added some com-plexity to his ritual by tagging third base on his wayto the dugout only after the third, sixth, and ninthinnings.

Players who have too many or particularlybizarre rituals risk being labeled as flakes, and notjust by teammates but by fans and the media as well.For example, ex-Mets pitcher Turk Wendell’s eccen-tric rituals, which include chewing black licoricewhile pitching, only to spit it out, brush his teeth and

reload the candy between innings, and wearing anecklace of teeth from animals he has killed, madehim a cover story subject in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Baseball fans observe a lot of this ritual behavior,such as pitchers smoothing the dirt on the mound be-fore each new batter and position players tagging abase when leaving and returning to the dugout be-tween innings, never realizing its importance to theplayer. The one ritual many fans do recognize, largelybecause it’s a favorite of TV cameramen, is the “rallycap”—players in the dugout folding their caps andwearing them bill up in hopes of sparking a rally.

Most rituals grow out of exceptionally good per-formances. When a player does well, he seldom at-tributes his success to skill alone; he knows that hisskills don’t change much from day to day. So, then,what was different about today that can explain histhree hits? He makes a correlation. That is, he attrib-utes his success, in part, to an object, a food he ate,not having shaved, a new shirt he bought that day, orjust about any behavior out of the ordinary. By re-peating those behaviors, the player seeks to gaincontrol over his performance, to bring more goodluck. Outfielder John White explained how one ofhis rituals started:

I was jogging out to centerfield after the nationalanthem when I picked up a scrap of paper. I gotsome good hits that night and I guess I decidedthat the paper had something to do with it. Thenext night I picked up a gum wrapper and had another good night at the plate . . . I’ve been picking up paper every night since.

When outfielder Ron Wright played for the CalgaryCannons he shaved his arms once a week. It all begantwo years before when he shaved his arm after an in-jury so it could be taped, and then hit three homers.Now he not only has one of the smoothest swings inthe minor leagues, but two of the smoothest fore-arms. Wade Boggs’s routine of eating chicken beforeevery game began when he was a rookie in 1982 andnoticed a correlation between multiple-hit gamesand poultry plates (his wife has 40 chicken recipes).One of Montreal Expo farmhand Mike Saccocio’s rit-uals also concerned food: “I got three hits one nightafter eating at Long John Silver’s. After that whenwe’d pull into town, my first question would be,“Do you have a Long John Silver’s?” Unlike Boggs,





Saccocio abandoned his ritual and looked for a newone when he stopped hitting well.

During one game New York Yankee manager JoeTorre stood on the dugout steps instead of sitting onthe bench when his team was batting. The Yankeesscored a few runs, so he decided to keep on doing it.As the Yankees won nine games in a row, Torre keptstanding. Torre explained, “I have a little routinegoing now. . . . As long as we score, I’ll be doing thesame thing.”

When in a slump, most players make a deliberateeffort to change their routines and rituals in an at-tempt to shake off their bad luck. One player triedtaking different routes to the ballpark, another triedsitting in a different place in the dugout, anothershaved his head, and several reported changingwhat they ate before the game. Years ago, some ofmy teammates rubbed their hands along the handlesof the bats protruding from the bat bin in hopes ofpicking up some power or luck from the bats of oth-ers. I had one manager who would rattle the bat binwhen the team was not hitting well, as if the batswere in a stupor and could be aroused by a goodshaking. Diamondbacks left fielder Luis Gonzalezsometimes places his bats in the room where Base-ball Chapel—a Sunday church service—is about toget underway. Gonzales hopes his bats will benefit,though he doesn’t usually attend the service himself.

Taboo

Taboos (the word comes from a Polynesian termmeaning prohibition) are the opposite of rituals.These are things you shouldn’t do. Breaking a taboo,players believe, leads to undesirable consequencesor bad luck. Most players observe at least a fewtaboos, such as never stepping on the chalk foullines. A few, like Nomar Garciaparra, leap over theentire base path. One teammate of mine would neverwatch a movie on a game day, despite our playingnearly every day from April to September. Anotherteammate refused to read anything before a gamebecause he believed it weakened his batting eye.

Many taboos take place off the field, out of publicview. On the day a pitcher is scheduled to start, he islikely to avoid activities he believes will sap hisstrength and detract from his effectiveness. On theday they are to start, some pitchers avoid shaving,eating certain foods and even having sex (this nos-

trum is probably based on an 18th-century beliefabout preserving vital body fluids, but experts nowagree there is no ill effect and there may actually be asmall benefit). Others will not shave on the day of agame and refuse to shave again as long as they arewinning. Early in one season Oakland’s Dave Stewarthad six consecutive victories and a beard by the timehe lost.

Taboos usually grow out of exceptionally poorperformances, which players, in search of a reason,attribute to a particular behavior. During my firstseason of pro ball I ate pancakes before a game inwhich I struck out three times. A few weeks later Ihad another terrible game, again after eating pan-cakes. The result was a pancake taboo: I never againate pancakes during the season. (Conversely, aftersome success, Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer, insisted oneating pancakes before each of his starts.) PitcherJason Bere has a taboo that makes more sense in di-etary terms: after eating a meatball sandwich andnot pitching well, he swore them off for the rest ofthe season.

While most taboos are idiosyncratic, there are afew that all ballplayers hold and that do not developout of individual experience or misfortune. Theseform part of the culture of baseball, and are some-times learned as early as Little League. Mentioning ano-hitter while one is in progress is a well-known ex-ample. The origins of such shared beliefs are lost intime, though some scholars have proposed theories.For example, the taboo against stepping on the chalkfoul lines when running onto or off the field betweeninnings suggests National Baseball Hall of Fame re-search director Tim Wiles may be rooted in the chil-dren’s superstition, “step on a crack, break yourmother’s back.”

Fetishes

Fetishes are charms, material objects believed to em-body supernatural power that can aid or protect theowner. Good-luck charms are standard equipmentfor some ballplayers. These include a wide assort-ment of objects from coins, chains, and crucifixes to afavorite baseball hat. The fetishized object may be anew possession or something a player found that co-incided with the start of a streak and which he holdsresponsible for his good fortune. While playing inthe Pacific Coast League, Alan Foster forgot his




baseball shoes on a road trip and borrowed a pairfrom a teammate. That night he pitched a no-hitter,which he attributed to the shoes. Afterward hebought them from his teammate and they became afetish. Expo farmhand Mark LaRosa’s rock has a dif-ferent origin and use:

I found it on the field in Elmira after I had gottenbombed. It’s unusual, perfectly round, and itcaught my attention. I keep it to remind me of howimportant it is to concentrate. When I am going wellI look at the rock and remember to keep my focus.The rock reminds me of what can happen when Ilose my concentration.

For one season Marge Schott, former owner of theCincinnati Reds, insisted that her field manager rubher St. Bernard “Schotzie” for good luck before eachgame. When the Reds were on the road, Schottwould sometimes send a bag of the dog’s hair to thefield manager’s hotel room. Religious medallions,which many Latino players wear around their necksand sometimes touch before going to the plate ormound, are also fetishes, though tied to their RomanCatholicism. Also relating to their religion, someplayers make the sign of the cross or bless themselvesbefore every at bat (a few like Pudge Rodriguez do sobefore every pitch), and a few point or blow a kiss tothe heavens after hitting a home run.

Some players regard certain uniform numbers aslucky. When Ricky Henderson came to the Blue Jaysin 1993, he paid teammate Turner Ward $25,000 forthe right to wear number 24. Don Sutton got offcheaper. When he joined the Dodgers he convincedteammate Bruce Boche to give up number 20 in ex-change for a new set of golf clubs. Oddly enough,there is no consensus about the effect of wearingnumber 13. Some players shun it, while a few re-quest it. When Jason Giambi joined the Oakland A’shis favorite number 7 was already taken, so he set-tled for 16 (the two numbers add up to 7). When hesigned with the Yankees, number 7 (Mickey Mantle’sold number) was retired and 16 was taken, so he set-tled for 25 (again, the numbers add up to 7).

Number preferences emerge in different ways. Ayoung player may request the number of a formerstar, sometimes hoping that it will bring him the samesuccess. Or he may request a number he associateswith good luck. Colorado Rockies’ Larry Walker’sfixation with the number 3 has become well known tobaseball fans. Besides wearing 33, he takes three prac-

tice swings before stepping into the box, he showersfrom the third nozzle, he sets his alarm for three min-utes past the hour, and he was wed on November 3 at3:33 P.M. Fans in ballparks all across American risefrom their seats for the seventh-inning stretch beforethe home club comes to bat because the number 7 islucky, although the specific origin of this tradition hasbeen lost.

Clothing, both the choice and the order in whichit is put on, combines elements of both ritual andfetish. Some players put on each part of their uni-form in a particular order. Expos farmhand JimAustin always puts on his left sleeve, left pants leg,and left shoe before the right. Most players, however,single out one or two lucky articles or quirks of dressfor ritual elaboration. After hitting two home runs in agame, for example, ex-Giant infielder Jim Davenportdiscovered that he had missed a buttonhole whiledressing for the game. For the remainder of his ca-reer he left the same button undone. Phillies’ LenDykstra would discard his batting gloves if he failedto get a hit in a single at-bat. In a hitless game, hemight go through four pair of gloves. For outfielderBrian Hunter the focus is shoes: “I have a pair of hightops and a pair of low tops. Whichever shoes don’tget a hit that game, I switch to the other pair.” At thetime of our interview, he was struggling at the plateand switching shoes almost every day. For Birming-ham Baron pitcher Bo Kennedy the arrangement ofthe different pairs of baseball shoes in his locker iscritical:

I tell the clubbies [clubhouse boys] when you hangstuff in my locker don’t touch my shoes. If youbump them move them back. I want the Ponys infront, the turfs to the right, and I want them niceand neat with each pair touching each other. . . .Everyone on the team knows not to mess with myshoes when I pitch.

During hitting or winning streaks players maywear the same clothes day after day. Once I changedsweatshirts midway through the game for sevenconsecutive nights to keep a hitting streak going.Clothing rituals, however, can become impractical.Catcher Matt Allen was wearing a long sleeve turtle-neck shirt on a cool evening in the New York-PennLeague when he had a three-hit game. “I kept wear-ing the shirt and had a good week,” he explained.“Then the weather got hot as hell, 85 degrees andmuggy, but I would not take that shirt off. I wore it






for another ten days—catching—and people thoughtI was crazy.” Former Phillies, Expos, Twins, andAngels manager Gene Mauch never washed his un-derwear or uniform after a win. Perhaps taking a rit-ual to the extreme, Leo Durocher, managing theBrooklyn Dodgers to a pennant in 1941, spent threeand a half weeks in the same gray slacks, blue coat,and knitted blue tie.

Former Oakland A’s manager Art Howe oftenwouldn’t wash his socks after the A’s were victori-ous; and he would also write the lineup card withthe same pen and tape the pregame radio show inthe same place on the field. In the words of one vet-eran, “It all comes down to the philosophy of notmessing with success—or deliberately messing withfailure.” Losing can produce the opposite effect, suchas the Oakland A’s players who went out and boughtnew street clothes in an attempt to break a 14-gamelosing streak.

Like most everything else, baseball’s superstitions,change over time. Many of the rituals and beliefs ofearly baseball are no longer observed. In the 1920s-30s sportswriters reported that a player who trippeden route to the field would often retrace his steps andcarefully walk over the stumbling block for “insur-ance.” A century ago players spent time on and offthe field intently looking for items that would bringthem luck. To find a hairpin on the street, for exam-ple, assured a batter of hitting safely in that day’sgame. A few managers were known to strategicallyplace a hairpin on the ground where a slumpingplayer would be sure to find it. Today few womenwear hairpins—a good reason the belief has diedout. In the same era, Philadelphia Athletics managerConnie Mack hoped to ward off bad luck by employ-ing a hunchback as a mascot. Hall of Famer Ty Cobbtook on a young black boy as a good luck charm,even taking him on the road during the 1908 season.It was not uncommon then for players to rub thehead of a black child for good luck.

To catch sight of a white horse or a wagonload ofbarrels was also a good omen. In 1904 the managerof the New York Giants, John McGraw, hired a driverwith a team of white horses to drive past the PoloGrounds around the time his players were arrivingat the ballpark. He knew that if his players saw whitehorses, they would have more confidence and thatcould only help them during the game. Belief in the

power of white horses survived in a few backwatersuntil the 1960s. A gray-haired manager of a team Iplayed for in Drummondville, Quebec, would drivearound the countryside before important games andduring the playoffs looking for a white horse. Whenhe was successful, he would announce it to everyonein the clubhouse.

One belief that appears to have died out recentlyis a taboo about crossed bats. Some of my Latinoteammates in the 1960s took it seriously. I still recallone Dominican player becoming agitated when an-other player tossed a bat from the batting cage and itlanded on top of his bat. He believed that the top batmight steal hits from the lower one. In his view, batscontained a finite number of hits. It was once com-monly believed that when the hits in a bat were usedup, no amount of good hitting would produce anymore. Hall of Famer Honus Wagner believed eachbat contained only 100 hits. Regardless of the qualityof the bat, he would discard it after its 100th hit. Thisbelief would have little relevance today, in the era oflight bats with thin handles—so thin that the typicalmodern bat is lucky to survive a dozen hits withoutbeing broken. Other superstitions about bats do sur-vive, however. Position players on the Class AAsheville Tourists would not let pitchers touch orswing their bats, not even to warm up. Poor-hittingplayers, as most pitchers are, were said to pollute orweaken the bats.

While the elements in many rituals have changedover time, the reliance of players on them has not.Moreover, that reliance seems fairly impervious toadvances in education.

Way back in the 1890s, in an article I found in thearchives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, oneobserver predicted that the current influx of bettereducated players into the game and the “gradualweeding out of bummers and thugs” would raise theintellectual standard of the game and reduce base-ball’s rampant superstitions. It didn’t. I first re-searched baseball magic in the late 1960s; when I re-turned 30 years later to study the culture of baseball,I expected to find less superstition. After all, I rea-soned, unlike in my playing days most of today’splayers have had some college. I did find thattoday’s players are less willing to admit to havingsuperstitions, but when I asked instead about their“routines” they described rituals and fetishes littledifferent from my teammates in the ’60s.




Uncertainty and Magic

The best evidence that players turn to rituals, taboos,and fetishes to control chance and uncertainty isfound in their uneven application. They are associ-ated mainly with pitching and hitting—the activitieswith the highest degree of chance—and not fielding. Imet only one player who had any ritual in connectionwith fielding, and he was an error-prone shortstop.Unlike hitting and pitching, a fielder has almost com-plete control over the outcome of his performance.Once a ball has been hit in his direction, no one can in-tervene and ruin his chances of catching it for an out(except in the unlikely event of two fielders colliding).Compared with the pitcher or the hitter, the fielderhas little to worry about. He knows that in better than9.7 times out of 10 he will execute his task flawlessly.With odds like that there is little need for ritual.

Clearly, the rituals of American ballplayers arenot unlike those of the Trobriand Islanders studiedby Malinowski many years ago. In professional base-ball, fielding is the equivalent of the inner lagoonwhile hitting and pitching are like the open sea.

While Malinowski helps us understand howballplayers respond to chance and uncertainty, be-havioral psychologist B. F. Skinner sheds light onwhy personal rituals get established in the first place.With a few grains of seed Skinner could get pigeonsto do anything he wanted. He merely waited for thedesired behavior (e.g., pecking) and then rewarded itwith some food. Skinner then decided to see whatwould happen if pigeons were rewarded with foodpellets regularly, every fifteen seconds, regardless ofwhat they did. He found that the birds associate the

arrival of the food with a particular action, such astucking their head under a wing or walking in clock-wise circles. About ten seconds after the arrival of thelast pellet, a bird would begin doing whatever it as-sociated with getting the food and keep doing it untilthe next pellet arrived. In short, the pigeons behavedas if their actions made the food appear. Theylearned to associate particular behaviors with the re-ward of being given seed.

Ballplayers also associate a reward—successfulperformance—with prior behavior. If a playertouches his crucifix and then gets a hit, he may de-cide the gesture was responsible for his good fortuneand touch his crucifix the next time he comes to theplate. Unlike pigeons, however, most ballplayers arequicker to change their rituals once they no longerseem to work. Skinner found that once a pigeon as-sociated one of its actions with the arrival of food orwater, only sporadic rewards were necessary to keepthe ritual going. One pigeon, believing that hoppingfrom side to side brought pellets into its feeding cup,hopped ten thousand times without a pellet beforefinally giving up. But, then, didn’t Wade Boggs eatchicken before every game, through slumps andgood times, for seventeen years?

Obviously the rituals and superstitions of base-ball do not make a pitch travel faster or a batted ballfind the gaps between the fielders, nor do the Tro-briand rituals calm the seas or bring fish. What bothdo, however, is give their practitioners a sense ofcontrol, and with that, added confidence. And we allknow how important that is. If you really believe eat-ing chicken or hopping over the foul lines will makeyou a better hitter, it probably will.


Suggested Readings

Bowen, Elenore Smith [Laura Bohannan]1964 Return to Laughter. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Colby, Benjamin N., and Lore M. Colby1981 The Daykeeper: The Life and Discourse of an Ixil Diviner. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press.

Douglas, Mary, ed.1970 Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations. London: Tavistock.





Kapferer, Bruce1997 The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Orion, Loretta1995 Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revived. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press.

Peek, Philip, ed.1991 African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Winkelman, Michael and Philip M. Peek, eds.2004 Divination and Healing: Potent Vision. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.


8. Ghosts, Souls, and Ancestors: Power of the Dead


328

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ghosts, Souls,and Ancestors:Power of theDead

Religions universally promise believers that there is life after death. Although the worshipof ancestors is not universal, a belief in the immortality of the dead occurs in all cultures.There is variation among cultures in the degree of interaction between the living and thedead, however, as well as in the intensity and concern a people may have for the deceased.Eskimos are never free of anxieties about ghosts, whereas Pueblo Indians are seldom both-ered by them; the Plains Indians of North America constructed elaborate ghost beliefs,whereas the Siriono of South America, although believing in ghosts, paid little attention tothem.

Perhaps humans have some basic need that causes us to believe in ghosts and to worshipancestors: to seek verification that, although the mortal body may die, the soul survivesafter death. The nineteenth-century sociologist Herbert Spencer speculated that the begin-nings of religion were in ancestor worship—the need for the living to continue an emotionalrelationship with their dead relatives. A major problem with Spencer’s argument is thatmany societies at the hunting-and-gathering level do not practice ancestor worship. TheArunta of Australia, for example, worshipped their totemic plants and animals, but nottheir human ancestors. This objection to Spencer’s belief notwithstanding, ancestor wor-ship does remind the living of a vital continuing link between the living and the dead.“Ritually, the most important category of animistic beings was the ancestors of the band,village, and clan or other kinship groups whose members believed they were bonded bycommon descent” (Harris 1989: 399).

One writer has pointed out that two major attitudes are widely held about the dead: thatthey either have left the society or remain as active members (Malefijt 1968: 156–59). In so-cieties that separate the dead from the living social group, any possibility of the dead re-turning is regarded as undesirable because they could disrupt the social order and the dailyroutine of life. In such cultures, Annemarie de Waal Malefijt believes, the dead are likely tobe greatly feared, and an elaborate belief system—a cult of the dead—is constructed andpracticed in order to separate them from the living. The primary function of cults of the

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INTRODUCTION | 329

dead is to aid the survivors in overcoming the grief they may feel about the dead. Such cultsare not found in societies where the dead are seen as active members of the group; instead,funeral ceremonies are undertaken with the hope the deceased will return to society in theirnew status. These beliefs, according to Malefijt, result in the development of ancestor cultsinstead of cults of the dead. S. C. Humphreys’s Comparative Perspectives on Death (1981) setsout the great variety of belief concerning the fate of the dead, as does M. Bloch and J. Parry’swork Death and the Regeneration of Life (1982).

Ancestor cults and the ritual that surrounds them may also be seen as an elaboration ofcults of the dead. The Bantu of Africa, for example, outline distinct ancestral deities for eachlineage and clan. All of these ancestral gods are gods to their living relatives, but not to in-dividuals who belong to other kinship organizations. Further elaboration of Bantu ancestorworship may be seen in Bantu beliefs about the supernatural beings believed to head theirroyal clans. Gods of such royal clans are worshipped by the entire kingdom, not just theroyal clan itself.

The study of ancestor worship conducted by American and British anthropologists hasemphasized the connection between the identity and behavioral characteristics of the dead,on one hand, and the distribution and nature of their authority in both domestic and polit-ical domains of the society, on the other (Bradbury 1966: 127). Although the belief in ghostsof ancestors is universal, the functions ancestors play vary greatly among societies. It is alsoclear that variations in ancestor worship are directly related to social structure and that thisrelationship is not based on mere common religious interests alone: rather, the structure ofthe kin group and the relationships of those within it serve as the model of ancestor worship(Bradbury 1966: 128). Among the Sisala of Ghana, for example, only a select number ofSisala elders, based on their particular status and power within the group, can effectivelycommunicate with the ghosts of ancestors (Mendonsa 1976: 63–64). In many other partsof the non-Western world, non-elder ritual specialists, such as heads of households, are re-sponsible for contacting the ancestors. A cross-cultural study of fifty societies found that,where important decisions are made by the kin group, ancestor worship is a high probabil-ity (Swanson 1964: 97–108).

Many, but certainly not all, non-Western societies believe ancestors play a strong andpositive role in the security and prosperity of their group, and anthropological data offermany of these kinds of examples. It is important, however, to recognize that ancestors arebut one of several categories of spirits whose actions directly affect society. John S. Mbiti’sstudy of East and Central Africa shows that the status of spirits may change through time.Ancestor spirits, the “living dead,” are those whose memory still exists in the minds of theirkin and who are primarily beneficial to the surviving relatives. When the living dead areforgotten in the memory of their group and dropped from the genealogy as a result of thepassing of time (four or five generations), they are believed to be transformed into “name-less spirits,” non-ancestors, characterized as malicious vehicles for misfortune of all kinds(1970). In keeping with Mbiti’s model, the Lugbara of Uganda recognize two types of dead.The first group, simply called “ancestors,” comprises nameless, all deceased relatives; theseare secondary in importance to the recently deceased, called “ancestor spirits” or “ghosts,”who can be invoked by the living to cause misfortune to befall those whose acts threaten thesolidarity of the kin group (Middleton 1971: 488).

Clearly spirits, ghosts, and ancestors are often given unique statuses in the afterlife andare viewed as having different functions and effects on the living. In many respects, the re-lationship of fear and responsibility of elders toward ancestors is mirrored by the son-fatherrelationship among the living. The ancestral world in many cases is an extension or a modelof the real world. The supernatural status of the ancestors exhibits major differences, for,




330 | GHOSTS, SOULS, AND ANCESTORS: POWER OF THE DEAD

although one can argue to a point with an elder, no one questions the wisdom and authorityof an ancestor.

The power of the dead is an important aspect of religion and social control. If, for exam-ple, a Lugbara man threatens the solidarity of the clan or lineage in any of a number ofways, the elder may invoke ghosts to punish the troublemaker (Middleton 1971: 488–92).Without doubt this veneration of the ancestors and the fear of their power help controlmany societies. Interestingly, ancestor worship also contributes to the conservative natureof those cultures where it is practiced. Typically, dead ancestors do not smile on any kind ofchange in the cultures of their living relatives. Because ghosts are capable of severely pun-ishing an earthly mortal desirous of change, the force for conformity is strong.

Not all societies assign power to ancestors. In many cultures, North America included, ahigh god (monotheism) or gods (polytheism) exert authority over the living, punishingthose who violate religious tenets, rules that often are duplicated in civil law and serve asthe bases of appropriate social behavior. In these groups, ancestor cults and worship of thedeceased are not found, although the spiritual nature of ancestors and belief in the afterlifepersevere.

Among people where the deceased are believed to take an active role in society, the liv-ing are understandably concerned with the welfare of ancestors. Customs are established toassure the comfort of the dead in their life after death. Most commonly, rituals carried outat funerals, burials, and in some cases reburial or cremation, ensure that loved ones arrivesafely at what the living believe is the proper abode of the dead. The care taken in prepar-ing the deceased for the afterlife is an important reinforcement of the society’s customs andan expression of unity among its members. Participation helps ensure that the same carecan be expected to be given at the time of one’s own death. Beyond this motivation, how-ever, the power to rain down misfortunes is a major reason for carefully following customssurrounding the preparation, interment, and propitiation of the dead. No one wants to besubjected to supernatural punishment by vengeful and angry ghosts.

To most people in Western culture the word ghost brings forth an image of a disembod-ied spirit of a dead person swooping through dark halls, hovering frighteningly over agrave, or perhaps roaming aimlessly through damp woods. Typically, the ghost is observedwearing white sheets—an image that undoubtedly arises from the shroud or winding sheetused to wrap the corpse for its placement in the grave. There is a wide variety of shapesavailable to would-be ghosts, however. Some are transparent; some are lifelike apparitionsof their former selves; others appear with horribly gaunt, empty faces, devoid of eyes andlips. Not all ghosts take a human or even vaguely human shape: horses frequently appearin phantom form, as do dogs and large birds, and ghost lore is full of accounts of ghosttrains, stagecoaches, and, of course, such phantom ships as the Flying Dutchman.

Very few cultures do not support the idea of a separate spirit world—a land of the dead.It is to this other world that souls will travel and, once there, will rest in eternal peace. Atsome point in history, however, the notion arose that not all souls deserve an easy trip to ablissful spiritual world. Murderers, miscreants, and evil people, for example, might becomeghosts doomed to wander the earthly world. Inadequate funerals also might give rise torestless ghosts, thus explaining the attention paid by cultures everywhere to meticulouslypreparing and dressing the corpse for burial and to placing gifts, food, and weapons in thegrave or at the gravesite to enhance the spirit’s journey to the place of eternal rest.

In the first selection, Paul Barber vividly illustrates the fear with which eighteenth-century Europeans regarded vampires.




INTRODUCTION | 331

Karen McCarthy Brown examines the practice of Vodou in Haiti, pointing out that, de-spite the distorted popular version we see all too frequently in the mass media, it is a legit-imate religious practice of 80 to 90 percent of Haitians.

In the third selection, Peter A. Metcalf compares American and Berawan funeral rites. AsMetcalf learned to see Berawan funerary customs as natural, American treatment of thedead began to seem exotic.

In the final article, Stanley Brandes describes the cross-cultural complexities arising fromthe death of an immigrant Guatemalan living in the United States and the individual’s sub-sequent cremation. Brandes notes that the cremation was an unthinkable end for a deceasedperson in the individual’s home village in Guatemala.

References

Bloch, M., and J. Parry, eds.1982 Death and Regeneration of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bradbury, R. E.1966 “Fathers, Elders, and Ghosts in Edo Religion.” In Michael Banton, ed., Anthropological

Approaches to the Supernatural, pp. 127–53. London: Tavistock.

Harris, Marvin1989 Our Kind. New York: Harper and Row.

Humphreys, S. C.1981 Comparative Perspectives on Death. New York: Academic Press.

Malefijt, Annemarie de Waal1968 Religion and Culture: An Introduction to Anthropology of Religion. New York: Macmillan.

Mbiti, John S.1970 African Religions and Philosophies. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Mendonsa, Eugene L.1976 “Elders, Office-Holders and Ancestors Among the Sisala of Northern Ghana.” Africa

46: 57–64.

Middleton, John1971 “The Cult of the Dead: Ancestors and Ghosts.” In William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt,

eds., Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, 3rd ed., pp. 488–92.New York: Harper and Row.

Swanson, Guy A.1964 The Birth of the Gods. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.




332

I saw the Count lying within the box upon theearth, some of which the rude falling from thecart had scattered over him. He was deathlypale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyesglared with the horrible vindictive look which Iknew too well. . . .

The eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look ofhate in them turned to triumph.

But, on the instant, came the sweep and flashof Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw itshear through the throat; whilst at the samemoment Mr. Morris’s bowie knife plunged intothe heart.

It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes,and almost in the drawing of a breath, the wholebody crumbled into dust and passed from oursight.

—Bram Stoker, Dracula

If a typical vampire of folklore were to come to yourhouse this Halloween, you might open the door to

39

The Real VampirePaul Barber

Tales of the undead in eighteenth-century Europe were preeminent in establishing the folklore of thevampire, a figure whose bloodlust struck stark terror into the hearts of believers of that day. Imagesof evil of such magnitude die hard. Bram Stoker’s novel introduced the horrors of vampiric attack tothe rest of the world through the character of Count Dracula, later immortalized on the Americanscreen in the 1930s by Bela Lugosi. However, to many eighteenth-century Europeans, vampires werenot fictional; they were real and accounted for deaths due to contagion in a world that had no theoryof communicable disease. Paul Barber’s forensic evidence provides a physiological basis for the beliefthat the dead could return from the grave, for Europeans then believed that any corpse having whatthey considered an abnormal or peculiar condition was most certainly a vampire. But the sociologi-cal explanations for the existence of vampires and the techniques for protecting themselves from themare equally provocative. One protective measure was the act of consuming the blood of a vampire,thereby invoking the elementary concept of similia similiis curantur (similar things are cured bysimilar things), a rationale commonly found in folklore.

Personal characteristics attributed to those with the potential to become vampires are amazing,like the characteristics of those accused of witchcraft today—for example, in Africa. Like the witchesof Africa, vampires of Europe had the ability to leave the body and attack their victims unseen and,like witches, vampires were responsible for a wide variety of everyday, rather pedestrian misfortunes.Clearly, the human propensity to create monstrous mental images, such as vampires, responsible formisfortunes of such an extreme caliber as death, was and is common and functions as an explanationof the unexplainable. The negative effects on society, however, of the dysfunctional aspects of fear andaccusation resulting from these mystical types of explanations cannot be discounted.

“The Real Vampire” from VAMPIRES, BURIAL AND DEATHby Paul Barber. Copyright © 1988. Reprinted by permission ofYale University Press.




BARBER • THE REAL VAMPIRE | 333

encounter a plump Slavic fellow with long finger-nails and a stubbly beard, his mouth and left eyeopen, his face ruddy and swollen. He would wear in-formal attire—a linen shroud—and he would lookfor all the world like a disheveled peasant.

If you did not recognize him, it would be becauseyou expected to see—as would most people today—a tall, elegant gentleman in a black cloak. But thatwould be the vampire of fiction—the count, the vil-lain of Bram Stoker’s novel and countless modernmovies, based more or less on Vlad Tepes, a figure inRomanian history who was a prince, not a count;ruled in Walachia, not Transylvania; and was neverviewed by the local populace as a vampire. Norwould he be recognized as one, bearing so little re-semblance to the original Slavic revenant (one whoreturns from the dead)—the one actually called upiror vampir. But in folklore, the undead are seeminglyeverywhere in the world, in a variety of disparatecultures. They are people who, having died beforetheir time, are believed to return to life to bring deathto their friends and neighbors.

We know the European version of the vampirebest and have a number of eyewitness accountstelling of the “killing” of bodies believed to be vam-pires. When we read these reports carefully andcompare their findings with what is now knownabout forensic pathology, we can see why people be-lieved that corpses came to life and returned towreak havoc on the local population.

Europeans of the early 1700s showed a great dealof interest in the subject of the vampire. According tothe Oxford English Dictionary, the word itself enteredthe English language in 1734, at a time when manybooks were being written on the subject, especiallyin Germany.

One reason for all the excitement was the Treatyof Passarowitz (1718), by which parts of Serbia andWalachia were turned over to Austria. The occupy-ing forces, which remained there until 1739, beganto notice, and file reports on, a peculiar local prac-tice: exhuming bodies and “killing” them. Literateoutsiders began to attend such exhumations. Thevampire craze was an early “media event,” in whicheducated Europeans became aware of practices thatwere by no means of recent origin.

In the early 1730s, a group of Austrian medical of-ficers were sent to the Serbian village of Medvegia toinvestigate some very strange accounts. A number of

people in the village had died recently, and the vil-lagers blamed the deaths on vampires. The first ofthese vampires, they said, had been a man namedArnold Paole, who had died some years before (byfalling off a hay wagon) and had come back to hauntthe living.

To the villagers, Paole’s vampirism was clear:When they dug up his corpse, “they found that hewas quite complete and undecayed, and that freshblood had flowed from his eyes, nose, mouth, andears; that the shirt, the covering, and the coffin werecompletely bloody; that the old nails on his hands andfeet, along with the skin, had fallen off, and that newones had grown; and since they saw from this that hewas a true vampire, they drove a stake through hisheart, according to their custom, whereby he gave anaudible groan and bled copiously.”

This new offensive by the vampires—the one thatdrew the medical officers to Medvegia—included anattack on a woman named Stanacka, who “lay downto sleep fifteen days ago, fresh and healthy, but atmidnight she started up out of her sleep with a terri-ble cry, fearful and trembling, and complained thatshe had been throttled by the son of a Haiduk by thename of Milloe, who had died nine weeks earlier,whereupon she had experienced a great pain in thechest and became worse hour by hour, until finallyshe died on the third day.”

In their report, Visum et Repertum (Seen and Dis-covered), the officers told not only what they hadheard from the villagers but also, in admirable clini-cal detail, what they themselves had seen when theyexhumed and dissected the bodies of the supposedvictims of the vampire. Of one corpse, the authorsobserved, “After the opening of the body there wasfound in the cavitate pectoris a quantity of fresh ex-travascular blood. The vasa [vessels] of the arteriaeand venae, like the ventriculis cordis, were not, as isusual, filled with coagulated blood, and the wholeviscera, that is, the pulmo [lung], hepar [liver],stomachus, lien [spleen], et intestina were quite freshas they would be in a healthy person.” But whilebaffled by the events, the medical officers did notventure opinions as to their meaning.

Modern scholars generally disregard such ac-counts—and we have many of them—because theyinvariably contain “facts” that are not believable,such as the claim that the deadArnold Paole, exhumedforty days after his burial, groaned when a stake was




driven into him. If that is untrue—and it surelyseems self-evident that it must be untrue—then therest of the account seems suspect.

Yet these stories invariably contain detail thatcould only be known by someone who had exhumeda decomposing body. The flaking away of the skindescribed in the account of Arnold Paole is a phe-nomenon that forensic pathologists refer to as “skinslippage.” Also, pathologists say that it is no surprisethat Paole’s “nails had fallen away,” for that too is anormal event. (The Egyptians knew this and dealtwith it either by tying the nails onto the mummifiedcorpse or by attaching them with little golden thim-bles.) The reference to “new nails” is presumably theinterpretation of the glossy nail bed underneath theold nails.

Such observations are inconvenient if the vam-pire lore is considered as something made up out ofwhole cloth. But since the exhumations actually tookplace, then the question must be, how did oursources come to the conclusions they came to? Thatissue is obscured by two centuries of fictional vam-pires, who are much better known than the folkloricvariety. A few distinctions are in order.

The folklore of the vampire comes from peasantcultures across most of Europe. As it happens, thebest evidence of actual exhumations is from EasternEurope, where the Eastern Orthodox church showeda greater tolerance for pagan traditions than theCatholic church in Western Europe.

The fictional vampire, owing to the massive influ-ence of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, moved away from itshumble origin. (Imagine Count Dracula—in formalevening wear—undergoing his first death by fallingoff a hay wagon.)

Most fiction shows only one means of achievingthe state of vampirism: people become vampires bybeing bitten by one. Typically, the vampire loomsover the victim dramatically, then bites into the neckto suck blood. When vampires and revenants in Eu-ropean folklore suck blood—and many do not—theybite their victims somewhere on the thorax. Amongthe Kashubes, a Slavic people of northern Europe,vampires chose the area of the left breast; amongthe Russians, they left a small wound in the area ofthe heart; and in Danzing (now Gdansk), they bit thevictim’s nipples.

People commonly believed that those who weredifferent, unpopular, or great sinners returned from

the dead. Accounts from Russia tell of people whowere unearthed merely because while alive theywere alcoholics. A more universal category is the sui-cide. Partly because of their potential for returningfrom the dead or for drawing their nearest and dear-est into the grave after them, suicides were refusedburial in churchyards.

One author lists the categories of revenants bydisposition as “the godless [people of different faithsare included], evildoers, suicides, sorcerers, witches,and werewolves; among the Bulgarians the group isexpanded by robbers, highwaymen, arsonists, pros-titutes, deceitful and treacherous barmaids and otherdishonorable people.”

A very common belief, reported not only fromEastern Europe but also from China, holds that aperson may become a revenant when an animaljumps over him. In Romania there is a belief that abat can transform a corpse into a vampire by flyingover it. This circumstance deserves remark if onlybecause of its rarity, for as important as bats are inthe fiction of vampires, they are generally unimpor-tant in the folklore. Bats came into vampire fiction bya circuitous route: the vampire bat of Central andSouth America was named after the vampire of folk-lore, because it sucks (or rather laps up) blood afterbiting its victim. The bat was then assimilated intothe fiction: the modern (fictional) vampire is apt totransform himself into a bat and fly off to seek hisvictims.

Potential revenants could often be identified atbirth, usually by some defect, as when (among thePoles of Upper Silesia and the Kashubes) a child wasborn with teeth or a split lower lip or featuresviewed as somehow bestial—for example, hair or ataillike extension of the spine. A child born with ared caul, or amniotic membrane, covering its headwas regarded as a potential vampire.

The color red is related to the undead. Decompos-ing corpses often acquire a ruddy color, and this wasgenerally taken for evidence of vampirism. Thus, thefolkloric vampire is never pale, as one would expectof a corpse; his face is commonly described as floridor of a healthy color or dark, and this may be attrib-uted to his habit of drinking blood. (The Serbians, re-ferring to a redfaced, hard-drinking man, assert thathe is “blood red as a vampire.”)

In various parts of Europe, vampires, or revenants,were held responsible for any number of untoward






events. They tipped over Gypsy caravans in Serbia,made loud noises on the frozen sod roofs of housesin Iceland (supposedly by beating their heels againstthem), caused epidemics, cast spells on crops,brought on rain and hail, and made cows go dry. Allthese activities attributed to vampires do occur:storms and scourges come and go, crops don’t al-ways thrive, cows do go dry. Indeed, the vampire’scrimes are persistently “real-life” events. The issueoften is not whether an event occurred but why itwas attributed to the machinations of the vampire,an often invisible villain.

Bodies continue to be active long after death, butwe moderns distinguish between two types of activ-ity: that which we bring about by our will (in life)and that which is caused by other entities, such asmicroorganisms (in death). Because we regard onlythe former as “our” activity, the body’s posthumousmovements, changes in dimension, or the like arenot real for us, since we do not will them. For themost part, however, our ancestors made no such dis-tinction. To them, if after death the body changed incolor, moved, bled, and so on (as it does), then it con-tinued to experience a kind of life. Our view of deathhas made it difficult for us to understand earlierviews, which are often quite pragmatic.

Much of what a corpse “does” results from mis-understood processes of decomposition. Only indetective novels does this process proceed at a pre-dictable rate. So when a body that had seeminglyfailed to decompose came to the attention of the pop-ulace, theories explaining the apparent anomalywere likely to spring into being. (Note that when asaint’s body failed to decompose it was a miracle,but when the body of an unpopular person failed todecompose it was because he was a vampire.) Butwhile those who exhumed the bodies of suspectedvampires invariably noted what they believed wasthe lack of decomposition, they almost always pre-sented evidence that the body really was decompos-ing. In the literature, I have so far found only twoinstances of exhumations that failed to yield a “vam-pire.” (With so many options, the body almost cer-tainly will do something unexpected, hence scary,such as showing blood at the lips.) Our natural bias,then as now, is for the dramatic and the exotic, sothat an exhumation that did not yield a vampirecould be expected to be an early dropout from thefolklore and hence the literature.

But however mythical the vampire was, thecorpses that were taken for vampires were very real.And many of the mysteries of vampire lore clear upwhen we examine the legal and medical evidencesurrounding these exhumations. “Not without as-tonishment,” says an observer at the exhumation of aSerbian vampire in 1725, “I saw some fresh blood inhis mouth, which, according to the common obser-vation, he had sucked from the people killed byhim.” Similarly, in Visum et Repertum, we are toldthat the people exhuming one body were surprisedby a “plumpness” they asserted had come to thecorpse in the grave. Our sources deduced a cause-and-effect relationship from these two observations.The vampire was larger than he was because he wasfull to bursting with the fresh blood of his victims.

The observations are clinically accurate: as acorpse decomposes, it normally bloats (from thegases given off by decomposition), while the pres-sure from the bloating causes blood from the lungsto emerge at the mouth. The blood is real, it justdidn’t come from “victims” of the deceased.

But how was it that Arnold Paole, exhumed fortydays after his death, groaned when his exhumersdrove a stake into him? The peasants of Medvegiaassumed that if the corpse groaned, it must still bealive. But a corpse does emit sounds, even when it isonly moved, let alone if a stake were driven into it.This is because the compression of the chest cavityforces air past the glottis, causing a sound similar inquality and origin to the groan or cry of a living per-son. Pathologists shown such accounts point out thata corpse that did not emit such sounds when a stakewas driven into it would be unusual.

To vampire killers who are digging up a corpse,anything unexpected is taken for evidence of vam-pirism. Calmet, an eighteenth-century French eccle-siastic, described people digging up corpses “to seeif they can find any of the usual marks which leadsthem to conjecture that they are the parties whomolest the living, as the mobility and supplenessof the limbs, the fluidity of the blood, and the fleshremaining uncorrupted.” A vampire, in other words,is a corpse that lacks rigor mortis, has fluid blood,and has not decomposed. As it happens, these dis-tinctions do not narrow the field very much: Rigormortis is a temporary condition, liquid blood is notat all unusual in a corpse (hence the “copious bleed-ing” mentioned in the account of Arnold Paole), and




burial slows down decomposition drastically (by afactor of eight, according to a standard textbook onforensic pathology). This being the case, exhuma-tions often yielded a corpse that nicely fit the localmodel of what a vampire was.

None of this explains yet another phenomenon ofthe vampire lore—the attack itself. To get to his vic-tim, the vampire is often said to emerge at night froma tiny hole in the grave, in a form that is invisibleto most people (sorcerers have made a good livingtracking down and killing such vampires). The mod-ern reader may reject out of hand the hypothesis thata dead man, visible or not, crawled out of his graveand attacked the young woman Stanacka as relatedin Visum et Repertum. Yet in other respects, theseaccounts have been quite accurate.

Note the sequence of events: Stanacka is asleep,the attack takes place, and she wakes up. SinceStanacka was asleep during the attack, we can onlyconclude that we are looking at a culturally condi-tioned interpretation of a nightmare—a real eventwith a fanciful interpretation.

The vampire does have two forms: one of themthe body in the grave; the other—and this is the mo-bile one—the image, or “double,” which here ap-pears as a dream. While we interpret this as an eventthat takes place within the mind of the dreamer, innonliterate cultures the dream is more commonlyviewed as either an invasion by the spirits of what-ever is dreamed about (and these can include thedead) or evidence that the dreamer’s soul is taking anocturnal journey.

In many cultures, the soul is only rather casuallyattached to its body, as is demonstrated by its habitof leaving the body entirely during sleep or uncon-sciousness or death. The changes that occur duringsuch conditions—the lack of responsiveness, thecessation or slowing of breathing and pulse—areattributed to the soul’s departure. When the soul isidentified with the image of the body, it may makeperiodic forays into the minds of others when theydream. The image is the essence of the person, andits presence in the mind of another is evidence thatbody and soul are separated. Thus, one reason thatthe dead are believed to live on is that their imagecan appear in people’s dreams and memories evenafter death. For this reason some cultures consider itunwise to awaken someone suddenly: he may bedreaming, and his soul may not have a chance to

return before he awakens, in which case he will die.In European folklore, the dream was viewed as avisit from the person dreamed about. (The vampireis not the only personification of the dream: theSlavic mora is a living being whose soul goes out ofthe body at night, leaving it as if dead. The mora firstputs men to sleep, and then frightens them withdreams, chokes them, and sucks their blood. Etymo-logically, mora is cognate with the mare of nightmare,with German Mahr, and with the second syllable ofthe French cauchemar.)

When Stanacka claimed she was attacked byMilloe, she was neither lying nor even making an es-pecially startling accusation. Her subsequent death(probably from some form of epidemic disease; oth-ers in the village were dying too) was sufficient proofto her friends and relatives that she had in fact beenattacked by a dead man, just as she had said.

This is why our sources tell us seemingly contra-dictory facts about the vampire. His body does nothave to leave the grave to attack the living, yet theevidence of the attack—the blood he has suckedfrom his victims—is to be seen on the body. At oneand the same time he can be both in the grave in hisphysical form and out of it in his spirit form. Like thefictional vampire, the vampire of folklore must re-main in his grave part of the time—during the day—but with few exceptions, folkloric vampires do nottravel far from their home towns.

And while the fictional vampire disintegratesonce staked, the folkloric vampire can prove muchmore troublesome. One account tells that “in orderto free themselves from this plague, the people dugthe body up, drove a consecrated nail into its headand a stake through its heart. Nonetheless, that didnot help: the murdered man came back each night.”In many of these cases, vampires were cremated aswell as staked.

In Eastern Europe the fear of being killed by avampire was quite real, and the people devised waysto protect themselves from attacks. One of thesources of protection was the blood of the supposedvampire, which was baked in bread, painted on thepotential victim, or even mixed with brandy anddrunk. (According to Visum et Repertum, ArnoldPaole had once smeared himself with the blood ofa vampire—that is, a corpse—for protection.) Therationale behind this is a common one in folklore,expressed in the saying “similia similiis curantur”






(similar things are cured by similar things). Even so,it is a bit of a shock to find that our best evidence sug-gests that it was the human beings who drank theblood of the “vampires,” and not the other wayaround.

Perhaps foremost among the reasons for the ur-gency with which vampires were sought—andfound—was sheer terror. To understand its intensitywe need only recall the realities that faced our infor-mants. Around them people were dying in clusters,by agencies that they did not understand. As theywere well aware, death could be extremely conta-gious: if a neighbor died, they might be next. Theywere afraid of nothing less than death itself. Foramong many cultures it was death that was thoughtto be passed around, not viruses and bacteria. Conta-gion was meaningful and deliberate, and its patternswere based on values and vendettas, not on geneticpredisposition or the domestic accommodations ofthe plague-spreading rat fleas. Death came fromthe dead who, through jealousy, anger, or longing,

sought to bring the living into their realm. And to pre-vent this, the living attempted to neutralize or propi-tiate the dead until the dead became powerless—notonly when they stopped entering dreams but alsowhen their bodies stopped changing and were re-duced to inert bones. This whole phenomenon ishard for us to understand because although deathis as inescapable today as it was then, we no longerpersonify its causes.

In recent history, the closest parallel to this situa-tion may be seen in the AIDS epidemic, which hascaused a great deal of fear, even panic, among peoplewho, for the time being at least, know little about thenature of the disease. In California, for instance, therewas an attempt to pass a law requiring the quarantineof AIDS victims. Doubtless the fear will die down ifwe gain control over the disease—but what would itbe like to live in a civilization in which all diseaseswere just as mysterious? Presumably one wouldlearn—as was done in Europe in past centuries—toshun the dead as potential bearers of death.




338

From ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION 2nd edition, by KarenMcCarthy Brown, Thomson Gale © 2005, Thomson Gale.Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.

Vodou is a sometimes misleading, but neverthelesscommon, name for the religious practices of the ma-jority of Haitians. Outsiders have given the nameVodou to the complex web of traditional religiouspractices followed in Haiti. Only recently, and still toa limited extent, have Haitians come to use the termas others do. Haitians prefer a verb to identify theirreligion: they speak of “serving the spirits.”

A mountainous, poverty-stricken, largely agricul-tural country of approximately eight million people,Haiti has a land area of 10,700 square miles and oc-cupies the western third of the island of Hispaniola,which it shares with the Dominican Republic.

This is where Caribbean Vodou began, but Haitiis not the only place Vodou is practiced. Vodou is

also a central part of everyday life in Haitian dias-pora communities in New Orleans and Santiago,Cuba, both products of the upheaval caused by theHaitian Revolution (1791–1804). More recent politi-cal and economic struggles in Haiti have also led toVodou communities in New York City, Miami,Montreal, and Paris.

In Haiti, vodou originally referred to one ritualstyle among many in their syncretic religious sys-tem, the style most closely connected to Dahomeyand the Fon language. The word vodou is derivedfrom the Fon vodun, which means “god” or “spirit.”Hoodoo is a related term from the same Fon word,yet, in the United States, it is almost always used as aderogatory term that focuses on black magic spellsand charms.

Sensationalized novels and films, as well as spuri-ous travelers’ accounts, have painted a negative pic-ture of Haitian religion. Vodou has been depictedas primitive and ignorant. Vodou rituals have been

40

VodouKaren McCarthy Brown

It is likely that no other topic in this book is as misunderstood as the religious practices of Haitiknown as Vodou. Sensationalized popular culture and travelers’ accounts have been merciless indelivering to the public a highly distorted picture of Haitian religious life. In this article, KarenMcCarthy Brown explains that Vodou, often misspelled as Voodoo, is an African-based religion thatserves several categories of spiritual beings through elaborate ceremonies and a loosely organizedpriesthood of both men and women. The country’s dominant Roman Catholicism co-exists withVodou, and a majority of Haitians comfortably follow both religions. Several prominent Haitian po-litical leaders of the 20th century have been known for their strong involvement with Vodou, and asBrown explains here, Vodou plays a vital role in the large Haitian immigrant communities of NorthAmerica.

Haiti, Vodou, and other examples of African-based culture in the Americas have received lively at-tention from anthropologists. Exemplary ethnographic works include E. Wade Davis’s account of se-cret Vodou societies, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985), and Karen McCarthy Brown’s ownstudy of an individual healer-priestess in New York, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn(1991, 2001).




BROWN • VODOU | 339

described as arenas for uncontrolled orgiastic behav-ior, and even cannibalism. The same writers stir upfear of Vodou and suggest that if whites get too closeto a Vodou ceremony terrible things could happen.These distortions are attributable to the fear that theHaitian slave revolution sparked in whites. Haitiachieved independence in 1804, and thus became thefirst black republic in the Western Hemisphere at atime when the colonial economy was still heavilydependent on slave labor.

In Vodou there are three (not always clearly dis-tinguished) categories of spiritual beings: lemò,lemistè, and lemarasa (respectively, “the dead,” “themysteries,” and “the sacred twins”). While certainVodou prayers, songs, and invocations preserve frag-ments of West African languages, Haitian Creole isthe primary language of Vodou. Creole is the firstand only language of more than one half the pop-ulation of Haiti. It has a grammatical structure fa-miliar to speakers of West African languages and aneighteenth-century French vocabulary mixed with asmattering of English words and expressions.

Although individuals and families regularlyserve the Vodou spirits without recourse to religiousprofessionals, throughout most of Haiti there is aloosely organized priesthood open to both men andwomen. The male priest is known as an oungan andthe female priest is a manbo. There is a wide spec-trum of Vodou ritualizing. There are individual actsof piety, such as lighting candles to petition particu-lar spirits, and elaborate feasts, sometimes lastingdays and including the sacrifice of several animals aspart of the meals offered to the spirits. Energeticsinging, dancing, and polyrhythmic drumming ac-company the larger rituals. In the countryside, ritu-als often take place outdoors, on family land setaside for the spirits, and there is often a small culthouse on that land where the family’s altars are kept.Urban Vodou rituals tend to take place in an ounfò(“temple”). Urban altars, dense with sacrificial foodand drink, sacred stones, and chromolithographs ofthe Catholic saints and other images, are maintainedin jèvo (“altar rooms”) off the central dancing and rit-ualizing space of the temple, the peristyl. In the cities,those who serve the spirits also tend to keep moremodest altars in their own homes.

The goal of Vodou drumming, singing, and danc-ing is to chofè, to “heat up,” the situation sufficientlyto bring on possession by the spirits. As a particular

spirit is summoned, a devotee enters a trance andbecomes that spirit’s chwal (“horse”), thus providingthe means for direct communication between humanbeings and the spirits. The spirit is said to ride thechwal. Using the person’s body and voice, the spiritsings, dances, and eats with the people and alsodeals out advice and chastisement. The people inturn offer the spirit a wide variety of gifts and acts ofobeisance, the goal being to placate the spirit andensure his or her continuing protection.

There are marked differences in Vodou as it ispracticed throughout Haiti, but the single most im-portant distinction is that between urban and ruralVodou. Haitian society is primarily agricultural, andthe manner in which peasants serve the spirits isdetermined by questions of land tenure and ances-tral inheritance. Urban Vodou is not tied to specificplots of land, but the family connection persists inanother form. Urban temple communities becomesubstitutes for the extended families of the country-side. The priests are called “papa” and “mama”; theinitiates, who are called “children of the house” or“little leaves” refer to one another as “brother” and“sister.” In general, urban Vodou is more institution-alized and often more elaborate in its rituals than itsrural counterpart.

African Influence

Haiti’s slave population was built up in the eigh-teenth century, a period in which Haiti supplied alarge percentage of the sugar consumed in WesternEurope. Vodou was born on sugar, sisal, cotton andcoffee plantations out of the interaction amongslaves who brought with them a variety of Africanreligious traditions, but due to inadequate records,little is known about this formative period inVodou’s history. It has been argued by Haitian schol-ars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot that the religiondid not coalesce until after the revolution, but otherssuggest it had an effective presence, particularly innorthern Haiti, during the latter part of the eigh-teenth century. James G. Leyburn in The Haitian Peo-ple (1941) and Carolyn Fick in The Making of Haiti(1990) argue that Vodou played a key role in the or-ganization of the slave revolt.

Among the African ethnic groups brought toHaiti as slave laborers, the most influential in shap-ing Haitian culture, including Vodou, were the Fon,




Mahi, and Nago from old Dahomey (the presentRepublic of Benin), those who came to be known asthe Yoruba (Nigeria), and Kongo peoples (Angola,and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Many ofthe names of Vodou spirits are easily traceable totheir African counterparts; however, the spirits haveundergone change in the context of Haiti’s social andeconomic history. For example, Ogun among theYoruba is a spirit of ironsmithing and other activitiesassociated with metal, such as hunting, warfare, andmodern technology. Neither hunting nor moderntechnology plays much of a role in the lives ofHaitians. Haiti, however, does have a long and com-plex military history. Thus, the Haitian spirit Ogou isfirst and foremost a soldier whose rituals, iconogra-phy, and possession-performance explore both theconstructive and destructive uses of military power,as well as its analogues with human relations—anger, self-assertion, and willfulness.

Africa itself is a powerful concept in Vodou.Haitians speak of Ginen (“Guinea”) both as theirancestral home, the Guinea coast of West Africa, andas the watery subterranean home of the Vodou spir-its. Calling a spirit franginen (“fully and completelyAfrican”) is a way of indicating that the spirit isgood, ancient, and proper. The manner in which anindividual or a group serves the spirits may alsobe called franginen, with similar connotations ofapproval and propriety.

Roman Catholic Influence

For the most part, the slaveholders were Catholicsand baptism for slaves was mandatory by Frenchlaw. Many have argued that slaves used a veneer ofCatholicism to hide their traditional religious prac-tices from the authorities. While Catholicism maywell have functioned in this utilitarian way forslaves on plantations, it is also true that the religionsof West Africa from which Vodou was derived, al-ready had a tradition of borrowing the deities ofneighbors and enemies alike. Whatever Catholicismrepresented in the slave world, it was most likelyalso used as a means to expand Vodou’s ritual vo-cabulary and iconography, thus helping captive la-borers function in a nominally Catholic world. In1804, immediately after Haiti declared its liberation,the Catholic Church withdrew all of its clergy fromthe new republic. Yet Catholicism survived in Haiti

for fifty years without contact with Rome and it didso through the imitative ritualizing of a Vodou figureknown as prêtsavan (“bush priest”) as well as thecompetitive market for healing charms and talis-mans that was kept going by defrocked Catholicpriests and the self-appointed “clergy” who endedup in Haiti in the early nineteenth century.

Catholicism has had the greatest influence on thetraditional religion of Haiti at the level of rite andimage rather than theology. This influence works intwo ways. First, those who serve the spirits callthemselves Catholic, attend Mass, and undergo bap-tism and first communion. Because these Catholicrituals at times function as integral parts of largerVodou rites, they can be even directed to participateby their Vodou spirits. Second, Catholic prayers,rites, images, and saints’ names are integrated intothe common ritualizing of Vodou temples. The prêt-savan is an active figure in Vodou. He achieves histitle by knowing the proper, that is the Latin orFrench, form of Catholic prayers.

Over the years, a system of parallels has been de-veloped between the Vodou spirits and the Catholicsaints. For example, Dambala, the ancient and vener-able snake deity of the Fon people, is venerated inHaiti both as Dambala and as St. Patrick, who is pic-tured in the popular chromolithograph with snakesclustered around his feet. In addition, the Catholicliturgical calendar dominates in much Vodou rituali-zing. Thus the Vodou spirit Ogou is honored in Haitiand in the Haitian diaspora on July 25, the feast dayof his Catholic counterpart.

Bondye, “the good God” is identified with theChristian God, and is said to be the highest, indeedthe only, god. The spirits are said to have been angelsin Lucifer’s army whom God sent out of heaven anddown to Ginen. Although the Vodou spirits may ex-hibit capricious behavior, they are not evil. Rather,they are seen as intermediaries between the peopleand the high god, a role identical to the one playedby the so-called lesser deities in the religions of theYoruba and Fon. Bondye is remote and unknowable.Although evoked daily in ordinary speech (almostall plans are made with the disclaimer si dye vle (“ifGod wills”), Bondye’s intervention is not sought forhelp with life’s problems. That is the work of thespirits.

Both the Catholic Church in Haiti and the govern-ment of Haiti have participated energetically in the






persecution of those who serve the Vodou spirits.The last “antisuperstition campaign” was in the1940s, but clerical and upperclass disdain for the re-ligion has persisted much longer. In the twentiethcentury, Catholic clergy routinely preached againstserving the spirits, and those who served them re-marked, “That is the way priests talk.” ManyCatholic holy days have a Vodou dimension thatchurch officials routinely manage to ignore.

For years Catholicism was the only religion inHaiti with official approval. Thus, the degree to whichVodou has been attacked, oppressed, tolerated, oreven encouraged through the years has been largely afunction of local politics. Presidents Dumarsais Estime(1946–1950) and Francois Duvalier (1957–1971) standout from other Haitian heads of state because of theirsympathy with Vodou. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whowas first elected president in 1990, was also a supporterof Vodou; in fact he changed the balance of religiouspower. On April 5, 2003, President Aristide fully rec-ognized and fully empowered Vodou as a Haitianreligion that could legally exercise its influencethroughout Haiti according to the constitution andthe laws of the republic.

Vodou Spirits

The Vodou spirits are known by various names: lwa,a common name with an uncertain origin; sen,“saints”; mistè, “mysteries”; envizib, “invisibles”; andmore rarely, zanj, “angels.” At some point in thedevelopment of Vodou the spirits were sorted intonanchon, “nations.” The nanchon at an early point intheir development appear to have functioned pri-marily as ethnic slave categories. The majority of thenation names are easily traceable to places in Africa:Rada, Ibo, Nago, Kongo. Later, however, these so-called nations became religious categories, diverseritual styles of drumming, dancing, and honoringthe Vodou spirits.

The Rada spirits (named after the Dahomeanprincipality Allada, once a busy slave depot) com-prise a collection of ancient, sweet-tempered, wise,and usually patient lwa. Then there are the fiery andpowerful Petwo spirits. The origin of the name“Petwo” is contested, but the strong Kongo influenceis not. The home of the Ogou, also hot spirits, is theNago nanchon, a Dahomean name for Ketu Yoruba.Most big feasts end with the playful Gede, inveterate

rule breakers, who insist they are a fami (“family”),not a nanchon. In rural Vodou, a person may inheritresponsibilities to one or more of these nanchonthrough maternal or paternal kin. Familial connec-tions to the land, where the lwa are said to reside intrees, springs, and wells, may determine which par-ticular spirits are served. In urban Vodou, there are afew important spirit nanchon that make their appear-ance, according to seniority and importance, in mostmajor rituals. In Port-au-Prince, two nanchon, theRada and the Petwo, have emerged as dominantlargely by absorbing other nanchon. Rada and Petwospirits contrast sharply. The Rada are dous, “sweet,”and the Petwo, cho, “hot.” When an individual, fam-ily, or temple is described as ritualizing in a modethat is Rada net (“straight Rada”), a great deal isbeing said about how that person or group functionssocially as well as ritualistically. Each spirit has drumrhythms, dances, and food preferences that relateto its identifying characteristics. For example, Dan-bala, the gentle Rada snake spirit, is said to love orja,thick sugary almond syrup. His devotees perform agraceful spine-rippling dance called yanvalu. By con-trast, the Petwo rhythm played for rum-drinkingspirits is energetic and pounding, and the accompa-nying dance is characterized by fast, strong bodymovements.

The Vodou View of Person

In Vodou teachings the human being is composed ofvarious parts: the body, that is, the gross physical di-mension of the person who perishes after death, inaddition to two to four souls, of which the mostwidely acknowledged are the gwo bonanj, and tibonanj. The gwo bonanj (“big guardian angel”) isroughly equivalent to consciousness or personality.When a person dies the gwo bonanj lingers, and im-mediately after death it must be protected because itis most vulnerable to capture and misuse by sorcer-ers. During possession, it is the gwo bonanj who isdisplaced by the spirit and sent to wander awayfrom the body, as it does routinely during sleep. Theti bonanj (“little guardian angel”) may be thought ofas the spiritual energy reserve of a living person and,at times, as the ghost of a dead person.

Each person has one special lwa who is their mèt-tet, “master of the head.” (The top of the head andthe back of the neck are places where spirits may





enter and leave.) The mèt-tet is the most importantlwa served by a particular person and it reflects thatperson’s personality to some degree.AHaitian whosefamily serves the spirits may inherit spiritual respon-sibilities to a deceased family member’s mèt-tet. Thatis a big responsibility, but there are also things thatcan be gained. If the mèt-tet is conscientiously fed andhonored, good luck and protection from both ances-tor and lwa will be gained. In addition to the so-calledmasters of the head, most people who serve the spiritshave a small number of other lwa with whom similarreciprocity has been established.

Unlike Catholic saints who are usually knownthrough formulaic hagiography, Vodou lwa haverichly developed histories, personalities, needs, de-sires, character strengths, and flaws, and even tastein food and drink. Because the lwa are fully devel-oped characters and interact so intimately withvivan-yo, “the living,” the practice of Vodou alsofunctions as a system for categorizing and analyzinghuman behavior, in the individual and in the group.One of the characteristics of virtually all CaribbeanAfrican-based religions is the great amount of caregiven to analyzing social behavior and dealing withthe results of that behavior.

Vodou and the Dead

Cemeteries are major ritual centers in both urbanand rural Haiti. The first male buried in any ceme-tery is known as Bawon Samidi. Bawon’s wife (orsister) is Gran Brijit, the first woman buried in thecemetery. Most cemeteries have a cross for Bawon ei-ther in the center of the cemetery or near its gate.Lakwa Bawon (“Bawon’s Cross”) marks the site’s rit-ual center. Lighted candles and food offerings are leftat the base of this cross. People stand with theirhands on the cross praying aloud. Rituals for heal-ing, love, or luck performed in rural cult houses orurban temples are not considered complete untilphysical remnants of the “work” are deposited atcrossroads or at Bawon’s Cross, which is itself a kindof crossroads marking the intersection of the land ofthe living and the land of the dead.

Haitians who serve the lwa usually make a cleardistinction between the dead and the spirits. Yet afew of the ancestors, particularly if they were excep-tional people when alive, actually evolve into spiritsor lwa. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint L’Ouver-ture, and John Kennedy have all been reported mak-

ing cameo appearances through possession in Vodouceremonies. The group of spirits, known as the Gede,have Bawon as their leader and are spirits of thedead as might be expected, but they are not ancestralspirits. Instead, they stand in for the entire commu-nity of human beings now deceased and in this con-text, Gede’s crude comic performances make somesense. They are designed to bring the naughty totheir knees and convince them that in the end,human beings all face the same fate. The Gede areinclusive, with no limits, and therefore almost anyimage will work on a Gede altar. Statues of theBuddha, Lao Tzu, King Kong, St. Gerard, and ElvisPresley have all been sighted on Vodou altars. In andaround Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti and itslargest city, the Gede are the object of elaborate ritu-alizing in the cemeteries and Vodou temples duringthe season of the Feast of All Souls, Halloween.

The Gede are not only spirits of death but alsoboosters of human sexuality, protectors of children,and irrepressible social satirists. Dances for Gedetend to be boisterous affairs, and new Gede spiritsappear every year. The satirical, and often explicitlysexual, humor of the Gede levels social pretense.The Gede use humor to deal with new social rolesand to challenge alienating social structures. Throughpossession-performance, they not only appear asauto mechanics and doctors, they also critique gov-ernment bureaucrats, military figures, and Protestantmissionaries.

Vodou Ceremonies

In some parts of rural Haiti, the ideal Vodou cere-mony is one that serves the spirits as simply as possi-ble because simplicity is said to reflect discrete butstrong spiritual power, the African way of doingthings (Larose, 1977). In practice, rural ritualizingtends to follow the fortunes of extended families. Badtimes are often attributed to the displeasure of familyspirits. When it is no longer possible to satisfy thespirits with small conciliatory offerings, the familywill hold a large drumming and dancing feast thatincludes animal sacrifice. Urban Vodou, by contrast,has a more routine ritualizing calendar, and eventstend to be larger and more elaborate. Ceremoniesin honor of major spirits take place annually on oraround the feast days of their Catholic counter-parts and usually include sacrifice of an appropriateanimal—most frequently a chicken, a goat, or a cow.





In both rural and urban settings, a rich variety ofceremonies meet specific individual and communityneeds: For example, healing rites, dedications of newtemples and new ritual regalia, and spirit marriagesin which a devotee is wed to a spirit usually of theopposite sex and must pledge sexual restraint onenight each week, when he or she receives that spiritin dreams. There is also a cycle of initiation ritualsthat has both public segments and segments re-served for initiates. The latter include the kanzorituals, which mark the first stage of initiation intoVodou, and those in which the adept takes the ason,the beaded gourd rattle symbolizing Vodou priest-hood. Certain rituals performed during the initiationcycle, such as the bule zen (“burning the pots”) andthe chirè ayzan (“shredding the palm leaf”) may alsobe used in other ritual contexts. Death rituals includethe desounen, in which the soul is removed from thecorpse and sent under the waters of Ginen, which isfollowed by the wète mò nan dlo (“bringing the deadfrom the waters”), a ritual that can occur only after aperson has been dead for one year and one day.Herbal good-luck baths are routinely administeredduring the Christmas and New Year season. ElizabethMcAlister’s 2002 book on Rara has convinced schol-ars, in the habit of dismissing Rara as an entertainingaspect of Carnival, of the deeply religious characterof these irreverent parades that pour from the Vodoutemples into the cemeteries and streets during theCatholic Lent.

Annual pilgrimages draw thousands of urbanand rural followers of Vodou. The focal point ofthese Catholic-Vodou events is often a church situ-ated near some striking feature of the natural land-scape that is sacred to the lwa. The two largestpilgrimages are one held for Ezili Danto (Our Ladyof Mount Carmel) in mid-July in the small town ofSaut d’Eau, named for its spectacular waterfall, andone held for Ogou (St. James the Elder) in the latterpart of July in the northern town of Plain du Nord,where a shallow, muddy pool adjacent to theCatholic church is dedicated to Ogou.

Vodou and Magic

Serge Larose (1977) has demonstrated that magic isnot only a stereotypic label that outsiders have ap-plied to Vodou, but also a differential term internalto the religion. Thus an in-group among the follow-ers of Vodou identifies its own ritualizing as

“African” while labeling the work of the out-groupas maji (“magic”). Generally speaking, this perspec-tive provides a helpful way to grasp the concept ofmagic within Vodou. There are, however, those indi-viduals who, in search of power and wealth, self-consciously identify themselves with traditions ofwhat Haitians would call “the work of the lefthand.” This includes people who deal in pwen achte(“purchased power points”), which means spirits orpowers that have been bought rather than inherited,and people who deal in zonbi. A zonbi may be eitherthe disembodied soul of a dead person whose pow-ers are captured and used for magical purposes, or asoulless body that has been raised from the grave todo drone labor in the fields. Also included in thecategory of the left hand are secret societies knownby such names as Champwel, Zobop, Bizango, andZanglando. In urban settings in the late twentiethcentury secret societies began to operate as if theywere a branch of the Mafia, but their deep history isquite different: They once represented religiouslyenforced rural law and order. The secret societieswere groups of elders who used their power not forpersonal gains but to enforce social sanctions. Forexample, Wade Davis (1985) says that zonbi laborerswere created by secret society tribunals who votedto use zonbi powder against a sociopath in theircommunity.

The “work of the left hand” should not be con-fused with more ordinary Vodou ritualizing that canhave a magical flavor, such as divination, herbal heal-ing, and the manufacture of wanga, charms for love,luck, or health, or for the protection of the home, land,or person. Much of the work of Vodou priests is atthe level of individual client-practitioner interac-tions. Theirs is a healing system that treats problemsof love, health, family, and work. Unless a problem isunderstood as coming from God, in which case theVodou priest can do nothing, the priest will treat it asone caused by a spirit or by a disruption in human re-lationships, including relations with the dead. Gener-ally speaking, Vodou cures come about through ritualadjustment of relational systems.

Vodou in the Haitian Diaspora

Drought and soil erosion, poverty, high urban unem-ployment, and political oppression have led to mas-sive emigrations from Haiti in the last half-century.Vodou has gone along with the Haitians who, in




search of a better life, have come to major urban cen-ters of North America. In New York, Miami, andMontreal, the cities with the greatest concentrationsof Haitian immigrants, Vodou ceremonies are car-ried on in storefronts, rented rooms, high-rise apart-ments, and basement storage areas. North Americanrituals are often somewhat truncated versions oftheir Haitian counterparts. There may be no drums,and the only animals sacrificed may be chickens.

However it is possible to consult a manbo or ounganin immigrant communities with ease, and the fullrepertoire of rituals can be followed there, in oneform or another. Even the pilgrimages are dupli-cated. On 16 July, rather than going to the mountaintown of Saut d’Eau to honor Ezili Danto, New YorkVodou practitioners take the subway to the Italian-American Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel inEast Harlem.





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The popular view of anthropology is that it is con-cerned with faraway places, strange peoples, andodd customs. This notion was neatly captured by anineteenth-century wit who described the field as“the pursuit of the exotic by the eccentric.” In recentdecades many anthropologists have tried to shakethis image. They see the exotic as dangerously closeto the sensational and, therefore, a threat to the re-spectability of a serious academic discipline. Theyargue that anthropology has solid theoretical bases,and that some anthropologists routinely work incities right here in America. And they are right. Nev-ertheless, anthropologists are as much involved withthe exotic as ever, and I think that this concern actu-ally works to scholarship’s advantage.

This continuing involvement is a result of thecharacteristic modus operandi of anthropologists.First, we seek out the exotic, in the sense of some-thing originating in another country or something“strikingly or excitingly different,” as my Webster’sputs it. Second, we try to fit this alien item—culturetrait, custom, piece of behavior—into its social and cul-turalcontext, thereby reducing it to a logical, sensible,

even necessary element. Having done that, we feelthat we can understand why people do or say orthink something instead of being divorced fromthem by what they say, think, or do.

Sir James Frazer, whose classic study of primitivereligions, The Golden Bough, was first published in1890, provides an excellent example of the eccentricin pursuit of the exotic. For him, the process of re-ducing the mysterious to the commonplace was thevery hallmark of scientific progress. Like many an-thropologists of his time, Frazer assumed that somesocieties were superior and others inferior, and thatanthropology’s main task was to describe how thelatter had evolved into the former. To Frazer, Eu-rope’s technological achievements were proof ofsocial, intellectual, and moral superiority. The domi-nance of the West represented the triumph of science,which in Frazer’s evolutionary schema, supersededeven the most rational of world religions. Science’sclear light was to shine far and wide, driving super-stition, the supernatural, and even God himself backinto shadows and dimly lit corners.

But Frazer might have found a second aspect ofthe anthropological modus operandi less to his taste.In the course of making sense of someone else’s be-havior or ideas, we frequently begin to observe ourown customs from a new angle. Indeed, this reflex-ive objectivity is often acclaimed as one of the great

41

Death Be Not StrangePeter A. Metcalf

In this article, Peter A. Metcalf compares American and Berawan funeral and mortuary rites andshows why Western practices so shocked the Berawan. To the Berawan, we trap the deceased in a sus-pended condition between life and death, producing evil, not beneficent spirits. “For the Berawan,America is a land carpeted with potential zombies.” Metcalf’s fieldwork not only explains the fate ofthe Berawan dead and demonstrates their beliefs to be as coherent and reasonable as any but alsodraws attention to the exotic nature of American funerary practices. His comparison reminds us thatour level of ethnocentrism both leads us to view the beliefs of others as illogical and sometimes repre-hensible and causes us to ignore our own death rituals and practices.

“Death Be Not Strange” by Peter A. Metcalf reprinted fromNATURAL HISTORY, June–July 1978, pp. 6–12; copyright ©Natural History Magazine, Inc., 1978.





advantages of our methods and cited as a major jus-tification for the long, expensive physical and psy-chic journeys that we make, seeking out societies farremoved from our own cultural traditions. Lessoften remarked upon, however, is that the exoticpossesses its own reflexive quality. As we learn tothink of other people’s ways as natural, we simulta-neously begin to see our own as strange. In thissense, anthropologists import the exotic, and that,I suppose, puts us on the side of the angels.

An incident that occurred about four years agoduring my field work in north-central Borneobrought home to me the depth and subtlety of an-thropologists’ involvement with the exotic. I wasworking with the Berawan, a small tribe comprisingfour communities, each made up of several hundredpeople living in a massive wooden longhouse. Thefour longhouses stand beside the great rivers that arethe only routes into the interior of Borneo. Berawancommunities live on fish and on rice planted in clear-ings cut anew in the rain forest each year. In the latenineteenth century, which was a stormy period oftribal warfare, each longhouse was a fortress as wellas a home, and the Berawan look back with pride onthe military traditions of that era.

Among the things that interested me about theBerawan were their funeral rites, which involvewhat anthropologists call “secondary burial,” al-though the Berawan do not usually bury the dead atall. Full rites consist of four stages: the first and thirdinvolve ritual preparation of the corpse; the secondand fourth make up steps in storage of the remains.The first stage, lasting two to ten days, consists ofrites performed immediately after death. During thesecond stage, the bereaved family stores the corpsein the longhouse or on a simple platform in thegraveyard. This storage lasts at least eight monthsand sometimes for several years if the close kin can-not immediately afford to complete the expensivefinal stages. Third, if the corpse has been in thegraveyard, the family brings it back to the long-house, where it is kept for six to ten days, while thefamily lavishly entertains guests who have beensummoned from far and wide. Finally, the remainsare removed to a final resting place, an impressivelyproportioned mausoleum.

Within this four-part plan, details of the corpse’streatment vary considerably. During the first storagestage, the family may place the corpse in a large

earthenware jar or in a massive coffin hewn froma single tree trunk. For secondary storage, the fam-ily may use a valuable glazed jar or the coffin leftover from the first stage. During the third-stage rites,the family may take out the bones of the deceasedand clean them. As the corpse decomposes, its secre-tions may be collected in a special vessel. Someneighbors of the Berawan reportedly consume liq-uids of decomposition mixed with rice—a variety ofendocannibalism.

For anthropologists, this intimate interaction withthe corpse is certainly exotic. For Americans notprofessionally trained in the niceties of cultural rel-ativism, Berawan burial is no doubt disgusting:keeping corpses around the house, shuttling thembetween the graveyard and the longhouse, storingthem above ground instead of burying them, manip-ulating the bones, and, to Western eyes, payingmacabre attention to the process of decay itself. MyBerawan informants were aware that some phases oftheir ritual bothered Europeans. They soon learned,moreover, that I had a lot of questions about their fu-nerals. One of the pleasures of working in Borneo isthat people soon begin to cross-examine their inter-viewer. They are as curious about the stranger as heor she is about them. So before long, they began toquiz me about the death ways of my country.

On one memorable occasion, during a lull in rit-ual activity, I responded to one of these questions byoutlining American embalming practices—the treat-ment of the corpse with preservative fluids and itsdisplay in an open coffin. I was well into my story,concentrating on finding the right words to describethis unfamiliar topic, when I became aware that asudden silence had fallen over my audience. Theyasked a number of hesitant questions just to be surethat they had understood me correctly and drewaway from me in disgust when they found that theyhad. So shocked were they that I had to backtrackrapidly and change my story. The topic was neverbroached again.

At the time, I did not understand why Americanembalming practices had so unnerved the Berawan.Now, having thought about the meaning of Berawandeath rituals, I think that I do understand.

The death rituals of central Borneo early attractedthe interest of explorers and ethnologists. In 1907,Robert Hertz, a young student of French sociologistEmile Durkheim, wrote an essay about these rites




METCALF • DEATH BE NOT STRANGE | 347

and guests were chatting casually beside a coffin thatwas being displayed on the longhouse veranda inpreparation for primary storage. Suddenly there wasa tapping sound, apparently from inside the coffin.The noise could have come from the house timbers,contracting in the cool of the evening, but the peoplepresent saw a different explanation. After a momentof shock, the women fled, carrying their children.Some panic-stricken men grabbed up what weaponswere handy, while others tied up the coffin lid withyet more bands of rattan. Calm was not restoreduntil later in the evening when a shaman investi-gated and declared that nothing was amiss.

We can now see why American mortuary prac-tices so shock the Berawan. By delaying the decom-position of corpses, we commit a most unnatural act.First, we seem to be trying to trap our nearest anddearest in the unhappiest condition possible, neitheralive nor in the radiant land of the dead. Second, andeven more perverse and terrifying, we keep an armyof undecomposed corpses, each and every one sub-ject to reanimation by a host of evil spirits. For theBerawan, America is a land carpeted with potentialzombies.

After a couple of years of field work, and an ap-plication of the ideas of Hertz and others, I can offera relatively full account of Berawan death ways:what they express about Berawan notions of life anddeath; how they are manipulated by influential menin their struggles for power; how they relate to theirsense of identity, art forms, and oral history. Mean-while, I have also explored the literature on Ameri-can death ways—and have found it wanting. For themost part, it is restricted to consideration of psycho-logical variables—how people react to death, eitherthe possibility of their own or that of close relativesand friends. None of these studies begins to explainwhy American funerals are the way they are; whythey differ from British funerals, for instance.

Jessica Mitford, author of The American Way ofDeath, tried to explain the form that American funer-als take by arguing that they are a product of thedeath industry’s political power. But Mitford’s the-ory does not explain the tacit support that Americansgive to this institution, why successive immigrantgroups have adopted it, or why reform movementshave failed.

I have tried to relate American practices to pop-ular ideas about the nature of a fulfilling life and a

that has become a classic. Never having set foot inBorneo, Hertz relied on the accounts of travelers.Had he not been killed during the First World War,he might well have undertaken firsthand researchhimself. Nevertheless, his analysis is still routinelycited in discussions and comparisons of funeral cus-toms. Yet, oddly, Hertz’s central thesis has receivedvery little attention. Hertz hypothesized that peopleswho practice secondary burial have certain beliefsabout the afterlife, namely, that the fate of the bodyprovides a model for the fate of the soul.

Since Hertz did not know of the Berawan, theyprovided me with an appropriate test case for hishypothesis. I collected data on everything related toBerawan death rites: the people involved, mourningpractices, related rituals, myths and beliefs, and soon. I also pressed my informants for interpretationsof rituals. All the material I accumulated revealed aconsistent set of ideas very similar to those describedby Hertz. The Berawan believe that after death thesoul is divorced from the body and cannot reanimatethe already decaying corpse. However, the soul can-not enter the land of the dead because it is not yet aperfect spirit. To become one of the truly dead, itmust undergo a metamorphosis. As the body rotsaway to leave dry bones, so the soul is transformedslowly into spirit form. As the corpse is formless andrepulsive until putrefaction is completed, so the soulis homeless. It lurks miserably on the fringes ofhuman habitation and, in its discomfort, may affectthe living with illness. The third stage of the mortu-ary sequence, which Hertz called the “great feast,”marks the end of this miserable period. The soul fi-nally passes to the land of the dead, and the mortalremains of the deceased join those of its ancestors inthe tomb.

But before this happy conclusion is reached, thehovering soul is feared because it may cause moredeath. Even more dread surrounds the body itself,caused not by the process of rotting, for that releasesthe soul of the deceased from the bonds of the flesh,but by the possibility that some malignant spirit ofnonhuman origin will succeed in reanimating thecorpse. Should this occur, the result will be a monsterof nightmarish mien, invulnerable to the weapons ofmen, since it is already dead.

I once witnessed an incident that dramaticallydemonstrated how real is the Berawan fear of reani-mated corpses. Toward sunset, a group of mourners





proper death. Despite these intellectual efforts, I amleft with a prickly sense of estrangement. For, in fact,I had spared my Berawan friends the more gruesomedetails of embalming: replacement of the blood withperfumed formaldehyde and other chemicals; re-moval of the soft organs of the chest and abdomenvia a long hollow needle attached to a vacuumpump; injection of inert materials. I did not mentionthe American undertaker’s elaborate restorativetechniques: the stitching up of mutilated corpses,plumping out of emaciated corpses with extra injec-tions of waxes, or careful cosmetic care of hands and

face. Nor did I tell the Berawan about the paddedcoffins, grave clothes ranging in style from businesssuits to negligees, and other funeral paraphernalia.Had I explained all this, their shock might have beentransformed into curiosity, and they might have re-versed our roles of social scientist and informant.

In the meantime, something of their reaction hasrubbed off on me. I have reduced the celebrated mor-tuary rites of remote and mysterious Borneo to akind of workaday straightforwardness, only to bestruck by the exotic character of an institution in ourvery midst.




Stories about the commodification of dead bodiesare generally sad and this one is no exception. Thebody in question belongs to a 31-year-old Latino

migrant to the San Francisco Bay Area. On the nightof 11 December 1994, in the city of Brisbane and forstill unclear motives, the man strolled onto a busyhighway, where he was hit by a car and instantlykilled. His body was brought to the San MateoCounty Morgue and was identified as that of AxelFlores, my pseudonym for this Guatemalan, whohad come to the USA, among other reasons, to es-cape from dangers presented him by the civil war

42

The Cremated Catholic:The Ends of a DeceasedGuatemalanStanley Brandes

In this selection, Stanley Brandes describes the cross-cultural complexities arising from the accidentaldeath of an immigrant Guatemalan living in the San Francisco Bay Area. The deceased, given the pseu-donym “Axel Flores” by Brandes, could be buried in the Bay Area, cremated with the ashes disposed lo-cally, or cremated with the ashes shipped to Guatemala. The most expensive option was to send thecorpse back home for burial. Axel’s father in Guatemala immediately rejected cremation, believing itwas necessary to have his son’s recognizable presence at the wake. A disintegrated body was unthink-able. The father insisted that his son’s corpse be returned home and given the traditional ceremonies ofhis native village and those sanctioned by the Catholic Church. The story quickly became further com-plicated when Axel’s sister, living in San Francisco, discovered not only that the San Mateo countycoroner had confused her brother’s body with that of another recently deceased man but also that thebody had been sent to a funeral home and cremated. Because of his knowledge of Latino cultures, Pro-fessor Brandes was hired as a researcher and consultant by the lawyer representing Axel’s family.Brandes discusses the ensuing legal suit by Axel’s family against San Mateo County and the funeralhome, observing that the complex legal proceedings demonstrate the globalization of liability claimsand the monetary value of a mishandled corpse. As part of his research on the case, Brandes visitedAxel’s village in Guatemala and learned why the family so strongly resented cremation, noting espe-cially the family’s concern over the deceased’s destiny in the afterlife and their own status within thevillage. Further complications discussed by Brandes involve the differing beliefs about cremation heldby Roman Catholic teachings, the Guatemalan Catholic clergy, and village parishioners.

Stanley Brandes, “The Cremated Catholic: The Ends of aDeceased Guatemalan,” BODY AND SOCIETY, vol. 7 (2–3),2001, pp. 111–20. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications,Incorporated.

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travel to California for deposition. Until Axel’saggrieved relatives can make their depositions, thecase can come to no final resolution.

The lawsuit of Axel’s family against a funeral par-lor and a California county morgue demonstratesglobalization of liability claims as well as the po-tential monetary value of a mishandled corpse. USlawyers representing the family have asked for atotal of $300,000 from the two defendant agencies.The plaintiffs’ mediation brief states that:

Under California law, a decedent’s family and heirshave sole authority over the disposition of theremains following a death. Plaintiffs’ authority inthis regard was violated through a chain of errors,oversight and insufficient safeguards. . . . Beyond adoubt, the law holds that persons situated such asplaintiffs have standing to assert a claim fordamages due to the mishandling of a corpse.Quesada v. Oak Hill Improvement Co. (1989) . . .establishes that individuals, entities and businessesengaged in the practice of handling a decedent’sremains owe a duty to persons such as plaintiffs,and can be held liable for the negligent mishandlingof a decedent’s remains.

The monetary claims of Axel’s family are, nonethe-less, somewhat unusual. As the plaintiffs’ mediationbrief itself explains, “We are presented with a situa-tion that is relatively rare in our practice—a casewhere the sole damages are for emotional distress.”

The plaintiffs,Axel’s father and siblings, claim thathis accidental cremation has caused undue hardshipand suffering. They harbor two interrelated concerns:first, Axel’s destiny in the afterlife, and, second, theirown status within Nahualtenango. Consider firstAxel’s presumed destiny. In Guatemala, say familymembers, the very idea of cremation is repulsive. “It’sthe way you treat a dog,” states Axel’s older brother,Genaro. Moreover, it is “a sin,” says one of Axel’s sis-ters; it is sinful not only for those who carried out thedeed, but also for Axel himself, despite his innocencein the matter. There is no doubt in the minds of Axel’sentire family that he will be barred forever fromheaven. “Está sufriendo el alma”—“His soul is suffer-ing,” they claim. In the body’s cremated state, the soulcan never find release. Cremation itself is sufficient toprevent salvation.

The family adheres strongly to this belief, eventhough it controverts Roman Catholic teachings.In fact, since the Second Vatican Council in the

then raging in his native land. At the time of hisdeath, Axel had already established a police record innorthern California, a circumstance which facilitatedhis ready identification through fingerprints.

Axel’s sister, residing in San Francisco, was im-mediately notified of the accident. She consultedwith her parish priest, who reviewed her optionsand informed her that cremation was the least ex-pensive choice. She then telephoned her father inNahualtenango—the name I give to the small villagenear the southwest coast of Guatemala, where mostof Axel’s family still resides—to explain the alterna-tives to him and find out how he wanted her to dis-pose of the body. Axel could be buried in the SanFrancisco Bay Area, cremated with the remainsshipped to Guatemala for burial, or cremated andthe ashes disposed of locally. By far the most expen-sive alternative was to send Axel’s corpse to Nahual-tenango for burial.

When presented these alternatives, Axel’s fatherimmediately rejected cremation as utterly unthink-able. Despite the enormous cost, he insisted that thecorpse should be returned to Nahualtenango intactso that his son could undergo the proper mortuaryceremonies—that is, ceremonies traditional toNahualtenango and those commonly believed to besanctioned by the Church. In order to follow throughon this decision, Axel’s father mortgaged his simplehouse and borrowed money at high interest from amoneylender in order to secure the necessary fundson short notice. Back in San Francisco, Axel’s sisterarranged to collect the body from the morgue andship it to Guatemala. When she arrived to identifythe body, however, she was presented first with one,then another cadaver, neither of which was Axel’s.Investigation revealed that the County Coroner hadconfused Axel’s body with that of another recentlydeceased man. (The Coroner’s office explained fee-bly that both men were heavy and dark-skinned.)Axel’s body, released to a funeral parlor severaldays earlier under the incorrect name, was acciden-tally cremated before the error could be detected. Athoroughly irreversible mistake had occurred. Thiscase precipitated a legal suit by Axel’s family againstboth San Mateo County and the funeral parlor. Thefuneral parlor settled with the family out of court.The complaint against San Mateo County, however,remains unresolved because the US embassy hasrefused to issue visas to the deceased’s family to




mid-1960s, cremation has been permitted. It is alsofair to say, however, that it has never been encour-aged. The extreme infrequency of cremation in LatinAmerica perhaps explains why clergy themselvesare uncertain about its legitimacy. When Axel’sfamily approached their parish priest with the confi-dential news that he had been cremated, the priestwas stymied and forced to display his ignorance ofChurch policy. Catholic law requires that a misa delcuerpo presente—a Mass of the Present Body—becelebrated the day after a person dies. But, in theabsence of the intact body, could the Mass of the Pre-sent Body be recited? The family had held a wakein Axel’s father’s home. However, it was a highlyunconventional wake, taking place several weeksafter death had occurred and in the absence of acorpse. Unwilling to risk making a decision contraryto Church teachings, the parish priest decidedagainst celebrating the Mass of the Present Body.Subsequently, however, he did celebrate two additio-nal customary Masses: one commemorating 40 daysafter death, the other commemorating the first an-niversary of the death.

As a researcher on this legal case, I consulted withthe two parish priests of Santo Tomás in nearbyChichicastenango, who agreed that, despite the con-cerns of Axel’s family, cremation would not auto-matically bar the deceased from entering heaven.One of them replied matter-of-factly, “How can weever know who will enter heaven and who not?” Norhad the priests heard of a single instance of crema-tion in all of Guatemala, despite the incontrovertiblepresence of crematoriums. In fact, crematoriums, arecent introduction into the country, advertise onGuatemalan television and radio. To promote busi-ness, they use the airwaves to combat popular claimsthat the Catholic Church opposes cremation.

Padre Alberto, the older of the two Chichicaste-nango priests, vigorously denounced these com-mercials as false advertising. At the beginning ofour interview, he steadfastly maintained that theChurch always has and still does oppose cremation.Only after being challenged by Padre Rodolfo, hisyounger, more learned colleague, did he waver. “Asfar as I know,” said Padre Alberto, “the Church nei-ther opposes nor approves of cremation. It has neversaid anything about the matter.” Padre Roberto iswell informed about Church policy; as we sit heretoday he is in Rome, probably being groomed for a

high-level Church post. Even he, however, is beset byuncertainty. For example, he was wrong about his es-timation of when cremation became legal. “Surely itcame in with the present Pope,” he said. Nor can hedefine authoritatively proper mortuary proceedingsin a case like Axel’s. He would only speculate that,when cremation occurs, the Mass of the Present Bodyshould be celebrated prior to actual incineration.

If this interview indicates the general state of affairsin provincial Guatemala, is it any wonder that Axel’sfamily flatly rejects cremation? In 1997—exactly34 years after the Vatican legitimized cremation—theGuatemalan clergy still shows utter unfamiliaritywith how the cremated body should be treated. Thiscircumstance clearly undermines the time-honoredanthropological distinction between religious or-thodoxy and popular belief (Badone, 1990). A “two-tiered” approach to religion (Brown, 1981), in whichthe unreflective beliefs of the superstitious but devoutmasses are distinguished from the religious teach-ings of an erudite clergy, is entirely inapplicable tothe case. With regard to cremation, the Guatemalanclergy seem as ignorant about procedure as do theirpoorly educated parishioners.

But, according to Axel’s family, his destiny in theafterlife depends upon more than adherence toproper ritual. The very disintegration of his body,that his body has lost its wholeness, is equally threat-ening. During my brief visit to Nahualtenango,Axel’s brother Genaro reiterated numerous times thestatement from the Creed, which is recited in everyMass: “Se levantarán los muertos,” “The dead shall riseagain.” Genaro shrugs his shoulders and throws outhis arms in despair as he asks, “How can Axel be res-urrected if there is no body?” Genaro is not alone inhis desperation. The anxiety provoked by the mater-ial discontinuity of the body is a familiar theme inRoman Catholic tradition, a tradition in which ven-erated body parts—foreskins and fingernails andstrands of hair—nonetheless populate churchesthroughout Christendom.

Practically from the time of Saint Augustine, saysCaroline Walker Bynum, “Scholastic theologiansworried not about whether body was crucial tohuman nature, but about how part related to whole—that is, how bits could and would be reintegratedafter scattering and decay” (Bynum, 1992: 253–54). Inthe 2nd and 3rd centuries, Christians fretted over thepower of God to reinstate the divided body so

BRANDES • THE CREMATED CATHOLIC: THE ENDS OF A DECEASED GUATEMALAN | 351




that it could be properly resurrected (Bynum, 1992:267–68). Although educated writers expressed confi-dence that the maimed bodies of saints wouldachieve salvation, “Ordinary believers . . . often wentto extraordinary lengths to collect and reassemblethe dismembered pieces of the martyrs for burial”(Bynum, 1992: 268). By the Middle Ages, statesBynum (1992: 272), “So highly charged was bodilypartition that torturers were forbidden to effect it;they were permitted to squeeze and twist and stretchin excruciating ways, but not to sever or divide.” Bod-ily fragmentation was so horrifying that theologiansopposed cremation and physicans ‘tried to preservecorpses forever from crumbling and putrefaction’(1992:280).“Drawingandquartering,orburning(thatis reduction to the smallest possible particles: ashes),were punishments reserved for treason, witchcraftand heresy” (1992: 276). Remarkably, these concernsendure to the present day. They are what inform con-temporary Guatemalan mortuary beliefs and are thecause of Axel’s family unremitting suffering.

But the family is tormented about more thanAxel’s fate. Concerned about their social status withinNahualtenango, they have struggled to keep Axel’sshameful cremation a secret. Even I was implicated inthis ultimately futile effort. While watching a soccermatch one Sunday morning, Axel’s brother introducedme to the village pharmacist, his closest friend andconfidant in Nahualtenango. When the pharmacistasked why I had come so far, I almost confessed mytrue mission: to gather information on behalf of thelawyer representing Axel’s family. Stopping short inmy reply, I simply stated that I knew Axel’s sister inCalifornia and she suggested that on my visit toGuatemala I stop at Nahualtenango personally to con-vey her greetings. By hiding my real motive, I was at-tempting to protect the family reputation. Only laterdid I discover that the pharmacist also knows aboutthe cremation and was disguising his knowledge. Aformer neighbor and close friend of the family is in-formed too, and has been sworn to secrecy. One canonly guess the extent to which the community at largeis aware of what happened to their native son, Axel,during his self-imposed California exile. In recountingthe reaction of the community to Axel’s death, Genaroclaims that everyone asked the family, “And the body?Where is the body? When will it arrive?” The familyhad recourse to only one excuse: they could not affordthe expense of bringing Axel home. To make such anadmission, in the context of Nahualtenango, is itself

shameful. And yet the family saw no alternative. Thecremated remains might have been transported easilyand inexpensively to Guatemala for burial. But this isan option that neither the family nor the communitywould find even minimally acceptable. A disinte-grated body, in their view, is not only unworthy ofChristian burial, it is unidentifiable. “How would weknow that those ashes are Axel’s?,” the family asked.Their skepticism is entirely understandable. After all,if rich, powerful Californians could be so careless as tocremate the wrong corpse, there is little hope that theycan properly sort human ashes.

To understand why cremation is an unacceptablealternative to the people of Nahualtenango, morethan religious conviction and social status must betaken into account. After all, the family admits, withsome reluctance but unmistakable certainty, thateven without cremation, Axel might never have en-tered heaven. He had lived in an unmarried statewith several women, two of whom gave birth to hischildren. This circumstance is sufficient to havecompromised his destiny. The real crime of the SanMateo County Morgue is to have deprived his sur-viving relatives of his bodily presence. His recogniz-able presence was needed at the wake, during whichvillagers would have gathered at his home to helpthe family mourn the loss. His recognizable presencewas needed for the Mass of the Present Body and forthe burial that would have followed. His recogniz-able presence was even more urgently necessary forhis mother, ailing at home in Nahualtenango in anadvanced state of cancerous decay. When she died,only a few months after Axel, her quick demise wasattributed to the fact that she never got to viewAxel’s corpse, rather than to her son’s passing. Forthose who have survived the loss of mother and son,the greatest agony of all is Axel’s absence from thevillage cemetery. Without his bodily presence, thereis no way of relieving one’s grief by visiting his graveand praying for his eternal soul. In Nahualtenango,visits to deceased relatives are normal on three occa-sions: 40 days after the death, a year after the death,and annually during All Souls and All Saints days,on 1 and 2 November. It is primarily in order to cele-brate these occasions, to be near his son, that Axel’sfather was willing to go to such financial sacrifice toreturn the body to its proper resting place.

It is 20 July 1997, two and a half years after Axel’sdeath. I walk with Axel’s father, with his common-lawson, with his siblings and their respective families






from one end of the village to the other until we ar-rive at the Nahualtenango cemetery. As we enter holyground, Axel’s brother stops short, looks at me withpenetrating eyes, and says, “Esta es nuestra últimamorada. Aquí es donde venimos a parar todos [los delpueblo]. Esten donde esten, aquí vienen a parar”—“Thisis our final abode. Here is where all of us from thevillage come to rest. Wherever we may be, here wecome to rest.” Indeed, the cemetery has the aspect ofa miniature village, filled with hundreds of smallhouses decorated with miniature towers and gables.The graves stretch out in long, evenly spaced, parallelrows, a virtual replica of the grid plan town of the liv-ing residents of Nahualtenango. The graves them-selves are brightly colored crypts, painted in thevivid purples, yellows, blues, oranges and maroonsof the village houses themselves. The deceased lie,not below ground, but in cement sepulchers, many ofthem piled on top of one another, resting adjacent toone another, like so many cramped living quarters, inthe fashion of pueblo houses. Nahualtenango tombsare reminiscent of small apartment buildings, wheredeceased members of a family congregate in eternalcompanionship. They bear nothing of the somberquality of most graves in Europe and the USA.

Axel’s brother walks me to his mother’s lonelygrave, a low-lying concrete structure painted sky blue.Poking up out of each corner are tall steel constructionpoles, evidence that yet another crypt is meant to lie ontop of this one. “Axel would have been here,” says thebrother, pointing to his mother’s tomb. “She’s dead,”he says, “but at least she is here. We can come to visither.” His following statement is disarming: “Esta pan-teón es alegría”—“This cemetery is happiness.”

At that moment, Robert Hertz’s (1960) classic in-sights assumed immediate significance. Death doesnot occur when the heart stops beating; rather, thedeceased retains a presence among the living foryears after the actual physical demise. In Nahualte-nango, the intact corpse is an enduring presence, abeing that enjoys its own happy home in holyground, forever accompanied by loving relatives,both dead and alive. Cremation, the drastic fragmen-tation of the body into its most minimal parts, de-prives both the deceased and the survivors of ever-lasting companionship. The dead body which retainsits wholeness remains connected to others, inte-grated within society. Societal integrity dependsupon the integrity of the cadaver. It is the crematedbody that is doomed forever to exist alone and that

provokes a tragic separation from the survivors. Thisirremediable loneliness constitutes the true agony ofAxel and his family. It is the reason why, years afterhis death, there seems no sign of solace, nor is solacelikely soon to come.

There is no doubt that Axel’s death has exacted asteep emotional price from his family. And yet, it pro-duced an immediate economic impact as well. Axelfathered a son by a woman from whom he is sepa-rated and whom he never legally married. With nei-ther parent able to care for the child, Axel placed theboy in his father’s care. The father, himself recentlywidowed, received regular payments from Axel,which he used to sustain both the boy and himself.These payments terminated abruptly upon Axel’sdeath, thereby leaving the father with the responsibil-ity of caring for his grandson but without adequatemeans to do so. “The situation doesn’t allow me tosupport the son,” says Axel’s father gravely. Notonly did Axel’s father suddenly cease to receive re-mittances from abroad, in order to adhere to his com-munity’s religious guidelines, he was also forced tosacrifice his limited assets in order to bring Axel’sbody home. On the day we first met, he stated to me:

When this terrible news [of Axel’s death] arrived,I was filled with pain [from his wife’s mortalillness]. . . . Well, there was no longer any money,señor. I mortgaged my house, because I desperatelywanted to bring him home. . . . I had to put myselfin debt, míster, I had to put myself in debt in orderto wait for my son’s arrival. I had to find the wayto borrow money, Axel’s mother was gravely ill.

To add to these financial problems, Axel’s father be-came gravely ill. The cause for this illness is no doubtcomplex. It is safe to say, however, that the stress ofhis wife and son’s almost simultaneous deaths musthave aggravated his already poor state of health. Atleast he is convinced that Axel’s death has had an ad-verse effect. As proof of his frailty, within minutes ofmeeting me he pulled out a large bag of medicineand counted the items one by one: 22 cardboardboxes, glass bottles and plastic containers in all.“This medicine costs a lot of money as well,” he said.

Axel’s death therefore exacted a high price fromhis Guatemalan relatives. The cremated corpsewould cause eternal suffering for Axel’s soul, foreverunable to find heavenly peace. It would produceshame beyond anyone’s imagining for Axel’s family,unable to explain to the community of Nahualte-nango the corpse’s mysterious disappearance. Also,





Suggested Readings

Ahern, Emily M.1973 The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Danforth, Loring M.1982 The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

knowledge of the cremation was held responsiblefor hastening the mother’s departure from thisworld. But Axel’s cremated body, precisely becauseit received treatment contrary to the family’s wishes,might justify the kind of monetary compensationthat instantaneously would confer fabulous wealthupon any member of the family, in local terms.Indeed, the family might reasonably expect finan-cial compensation. In recent years, in the SanFrancisco Bay Area alone, at least 62 people havewon between $10,000 and $250,000 in lawsuitsinvolving the careless mixing of ashes in local cre-matoriums (Anonymous, 1996; Holding, 1996).According to a newspaper report:

The plaintiffs claimed that Pleasant Hill [CemeteryInc.] had caused them severe emotional distress bycremating their relatives’ bodies with those ofothers, dumping remains in existing graves andfailing to return all the ashes. They also accused thecemetery of trying to hide its mistakes. (Holding,1996: A12)

In one case alone—Hansell v. Pleasant Hill Cemetery—plaintiffs’ attorney Kevin McInerney was reported toseek more than $2.5 million in fees. “You do thesecases, and you hope to make a lot of money,” statedMcInerney, whose earnings in class action suitsagainst crematoriums already amount to $25 million(Fried, 1998). In further cases, disclosure was madein 1997 of a small aircraft company in northernCalifornia which failed to honor hundreds of con-tracts with deceased clients and their relatives toscatter ashes over sea and countryside. According toone report, two hikers in Amador County, Californiaaccidentally stumbled across the unidentified bonesof some 5,000 people.

Turned out the bones were part of the crematedremains that a pilot named B.J. Elkin was supposedto scatter over the Sierra and elsewhere. But

instead of doing the job he was paid to do, he hadmerely dumped the remains onto his property.(Elias, 1997)

The resulting lawsuit involved dozens of crema-toriums and mortuaries in settlements exceeding$32 million. According to reporter Paul Elias, thiscase “exposed a new and lucrative area for plaintiffs’lawyers to mine” (1997). It seems that burnt bodiesare big business in California.

The California lawsuits against mortuary parlorsand crematoriums revolve mainly around the dis-posal of remains. In all these instances, cremationwas at least the families’ preferred way to treat theirrelatives’ corpses. In Axel’s case, however, the familyissued an explicit order not to cremate. The acciden-tal cremation undoubtedly has caused terrible suf-fering for Axel’s family—even, depending on one’sreligious beliefs, to Axel’s soul. And yet the crematedbody, abomination though it might be in terms ofreligious beliefs and community standing, mightmore than compensate the father for the loss ofmeagre remittances which the son provided whilealive. The cremated body also has potential financialvalue to the rest of his relatives in Nahualtenango,who have suffered the social and emotional conse-quences of what they believe to be a sacrilegioustreatment of his corpse.

Though Axel’s cremated body might well leavehis soul beyond heavenly salvation, it has become insome sense the hope for earthly salvation for hisfamily. At first (and still) a sinful aberration, a hor-rific deviation from sacred norms, Axel’s ashes havesuddenly attained extravagant monetary value. Inthe hands of the US legal system, they have beenconverted into a commodity, a chip on the bar-gaining table, the hope for financial security for hisfamily—and a source of income for lawyers andanthropologist alike.




Green, James W. 2008 Beyond the Good Death: The Anthropology of Modern Dying. Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press.

Huntington, Richard, and Peter Metcalf1979 Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Kopytoff, Igor1971 “Ancestors and Elders in Africa.” Africa 43 (2): 129–42.

Meyer, Richard E.1992 Cemeteries and Gravemarkers: Voices of American Culture. Logan: Utah State University Press.

Robben, Antonius C. G. M., ed. 2004 Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Santino, Jack, ed.1994 Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Vitebsky, Piers1993 Dialogues with the Dead: The Discussion of Mortality Among the Sora of Eastern India.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



9. Old and New Religions: The Changing Spiritual Landscape


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CHAPTER NINE

Old and NewReligions: TheChanging SpiritualLandscape

Anthropologists agree that all cultures experience continuous change. However, in thepast, anthropology often emphasized cultural stasis among non-Western peoples andaddressed change only as acculturation—the process by which populations adjust to lifeunder a dominant power, usually colonial and Western. By the late 20th century, however,anthropologists had increasingly acknowledged cultural change as a continuous and uni-versal process. Such change has accelerated and intensified on a global scale since the dawnof the industrial era, due to expanding economic structures, rapid innovations in technol-ogy, worldwide movements of populations, and new ways of relating to the natural envi-ronment. The end of the colonial era, around the mid 20th century for many countries,marked shifts in patterns of power as formerly colonized people gained political, thoughfrequently not economic, independence. For the anthropologist interested in religion, theseoften interconnected social, economic, and environmental changes yield a wealth of fasci-nating subjects. This chapter includes articles addressing religious change and stability pri-marily within the confines of specific societies or communities.

Religion both shapes and is affected by larger changes, in a number of ways. As thearticles here illustrate, in some cases religious practices are profoundly altered by radical,top-down transformations in politics, or the domination of one society by another (forexample, in response to intrusive control by the state or under the persuasive influence ofmissionaries). In other cases, religion is a conservative force, such as when communitiesstrive to maintain a lifestyle based on the past, validated by religious beliefs, or seek toreestablish a perceived golden age from the culture’s past. Michael Lambek (2002) notesthis contradictory pull of religious changes, commenting that, while the state and otherpowerful institutions may attempt to shape religion for their own ends, individuals andcommunities may use religion as a way to exercise power and control in their own lives;this may occur through intensified religious commitment—perhaps fundamentalism—orthrough various forms of ethical engagement, such as the human rights movement orenvironmentalism (p. 511).

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INTRODUCTION | 357

One of the most dramatic examples of how a social group might actively attempt totransform its life through religious means is what, in a classic anthropological contribution,Anthony F. C. Wallace termed a revitalization movement: “a deliberate, organized, con-scious effort by members of society to construct a more satisfying culture by rapid accep-tance of a pattern of multiple innovations” (1956: 265). Wallace (1956) outlined severalmajor types of revitalization movements that are clearly religious in nature and can coexistwithin a given society at any time. Key to the idea of revitalization movements is that theychallenge what participants perceive as unacceptable conditions, such as poverty, disease,oppression, or, most commonly, the disruptive impact of a dominant, power-holding group.In Wallace’s view, revitalization movements intially spring up around the inspiration ofcharismatic leaders but, under the right conditions, may become established, routinizedreligions.

Wallace’s categories and definitions have been broadly accepted. Nativistic movementsare characterized by a strong emphasis on the elimination of alien persons, customs, values,and material from the “mazeway,” which Wallace defined as the mental image an individ-ual has of the society and its culture, as well as of his or her own body and its behavior reg-ularities, in order to act in ways to reduce stress at all levels of the system. Revivalisticmovements emphasize the readoption of customs, values, and even aspects of nature in themazeway of previous generations. Cargo cults emphasize the importation of alien values,customs and material into the mazeway, these being expected to arrive, metaphorically, asa ship’s cargo. Vitalistic movements also emphasize the importation of alien elements intothe mazeway, although not via a cargo mechanism. Millenarian movements emphasizechanges in the mazeway through an apocalyptic world transformation engineered by thesupernatural. Messianic movements emphasize the actual participation of a divine savior inhuman flesh in bringing about desired changes in the mazeway (1956: 267). (This catego-rization of revitalization movements, however, is only one of many schemes used by ethno-graphers, and, as John Collins has noted, “Any such scheme, basically, is merely a device toinitiate thought and comparison” [1978: 137].)

The religious nature of revitalization in the non-Western world, particularly in Melanesia,is made clear not only by the expectation of a messiah and the millennium in some of themovements but also by the very structure of movement phenomena, in which prophetsplay an indispensable role. I. C. Jarvie maintains that the religious character of these move-ments can be explained by the fact that traditional institutions are not able to adopt andrespond to social changes, and that the only new organizational system offered these soci-eties by European colonialists is Christianity. Melanesians, for example, have learned moreabout organization from religion than from any other foreign institution, and it is logical forthem to mold revitalization movements in religious form in order to accommodate, indeedcombat, the impact of European society (1970: 412–13).

Revitalization in the broad sense of bringing new vigor and happiness to society is cer-tainly not restricted to traditional groups or to the religious realm. Edward Sapir (1924), forexample, spoke of cultures “genuine” and “spurious”: in the former, individuals felt wellintegrated into their culture, and in the latter they experienced alienation from the main-stream of society. Examples of attempts to change Western cultures abound. Political andeconomic conditions have frequently moved modern prophets to seek power to change,sometimes radically, the institutional structure and goals of society.

Throughout the readings in this chapter, reference is frequently made to churches, cults,and sects. These terms have been used by scholars as well as the lay public to describeparticular types of religious organizations, particularly in the context of Christianity. Typi-cally, the word church is applied to the larger community’s view of the acceptable type of




religious organization, whereas the term sect is used to refer to a protest group. Sects representdissent from the established or mainstream form of a religion, and they generally involvesmaller numbers of people. The word cult is not as clearly defined as sect and church and ap-pears to refer to a more casual, loosely organized group. Cults seem to have a fluctuatingmembership whose allegiance can be shared with other religious organizations. Of thethree, cult has taken on such a perjorative character that the term is almost useless (Barkun1994: 43). What is a church to one person may be viewed as a sect or cult by outsiders.

During the last few decades, there has been an immense growth in the number of reli-gious groups in the United States; many of these groups have received substantial attentionin the media. The Children of God, the Hare Krishna movement, the followers of BhagwanShree Rajneesh, and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church are a few exam-ples of groups that have attracted thousands of adherents who apparently were disen-chanted with more traditional religious options. Even within Christianity—the dominantreligion of North America—countless organizations have arisen independently or splin-tered off from more established denominations, ranging from neighborhood storefrontchurches to such large, public relations– and media-savvy organizations as Vineyard Chris-tian Fellowships and Promisekeepers. World history is replete with examples of new reli-gious groups springing to life as people who are spiritually, politically, or economically dis-satisfied seek alternatives to traditional religious organizations.

What is the appeal of these movements? What social forces underlie the developmentand rapid growth of religious movements? Many sociological and psychological analyseshave attempted to answer these important questions (see especially Glock and Stark 1965;Eister 1972; Talmon 1969; Zaretsky and Leone 1974). Briefly, these studies draw a picture ofpeople who have become attracted to new movements because of such lures as love, secu-rity, acceptance, and improved personal status.

Charles Y. Glock (1964) has listed five types of deprivation that may result in the estab-lishment of a new sect or that may lead individuals to join one: (1) economic deprivation, whichis suffered by people who make less money, have fewer material goods, and are financiallybeholden to others; (2) organismic deprivation, which applies to those who may exhibit physi-cal, mental, and nutritional problems; (3) ethical deprivation, which grows out of a perceiveddiscrepancy between the real and the ideal; (4) psychic deprivation, which can result in thesearch for meaning and new values (and which is related to the search for closure and sim-plicity); and (5) social deprivation, which results from a society’s valuation of some individu-als and their attributes over others. Established religions have tremendous staying power,and “it is certainly premature to conclude that religions as forces in the world and as forces inindividual lives are a thing of the past” (Reynolds and Tanner 1994: 44). This is not to say thatthe so-called great faiths (such as Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) do not lose followers; theydo. “It seems to be mainly in the northwest of Europe, in Scandinavia, and in parts of theUnited States that religion remains in the doldrums” (Reynolds and Tanner 1994: 44).

In the opening article, Anthony F. C. Wallace builds on his earlier analysis of revitaliza-tion movements, here emphasizing five distinct stages of such movements and some of thepsychological aspects of participation.

The next two articles provide intriguing examples of revitalization movements. AliceBeck Kehoe discusses a short-lived movement that drew together Native Americans andothers during a time of profound hardship. Peter M. Worsley describes a form of revitaliza-tion movement found in the Pacific region. Such cults blossomed in response to the rapidintrusion of foreign military installations during World War II.

Just as revitalization movements can be interpreted as responses to oppression anddeprivation, more established religious movements can also be forms of protest. Focusing

358 | OLD AND NEW RELIGIONS: THE CHANGING SPIRITUAL LANDSCAPE




on three men in Kingston, Jamaica, William F. Lewis brings to life some of the beliefs andpractices of Rastafari, a faith that voices dissent against the status quo, including racialinequality.

The fifth article emphasizes the relationship between language and religion, as Susan F.Harding painstakingly examines her encounter with an evangelical preacher during the1980s, when fundamentalist Christianity was moving into political and public view in theUnited States.

In the sixth article, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban introduces Islamic law, emphasizing changesand reinterpretations over time.

References

Barkun, Michael1994 “Reflections After Waco: Millennialists and the State.” In James R. Lewis, ed., From the

Ashes: Making Sense of Waco, pp. 41–49. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.

Collins, John J.1978 Primitive Religion. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield.

Eister, Allen1972 “An Outline of a Structural Theory of Cults.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

11: 319–33.

Glock, Charles Y.1964 “The Role of Deprivation in the Origin and Evolution of Religious Groups.” In R. Lee

and M. E. Marty, eds., Religion and Social Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press.

Glock, Charles, Y., and Rodney Stark1965 Religion and Society in Tension. Chicago: Rand McNally.

Jarvie, I. C.1970 “Cargo Cults.” In Richard Cavendish, ed., Man, Myth and Magic, pp. 409–12. New

York: Marshall Cavendish.

Lambek, Michael, ed.2002 A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Boston: Blackwell.

Reynolds, Vernon, and Ralph Tanner1994 The Social Ecology of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sapir, E.1924 “Culture, Genuine and Spurious.” American Journal of Sociology 29: 401–29.

Talmon, Yonina1969 “Pursuit of the Millennium: The Relation Between Religious and Social Change.” In

Norman Birnbaum and Gertrude Lenzer, eds., Sociology and Religion: A Book ofReadings. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

Wallace, A. F. C.1956 “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58: 264–81.

Zaretsky, Irving S., and Mark P. Leone, eds.1974 Religious Movements in Contemporary America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

INTRODUCTION | 359




During periods of stable moving equilibrium, the so-ciocultural system is subject to mild but measurableoscillations in degree of organization. From time totime, however, most societies undergo more violentfluctuations in this regard. Such fluctuation is of pe-culiar importance in culture change because it oftenculminates in relatively sudden change in culturalGestalt. We refer, here, to revitalization movements,which we define as deliberate and organized at-tempts by some members of a society to construct amore satisfying culture by rapid acceptance of a pat-tern of multiple innovations (Wallace 1956b; Mead1956).

The severe disorganization of a sociocultural sys-tem may be caused by the impact of any one or com-bination of a variety of forces that push the system

beyond the limits of equilibrium. Some of theseforces are climatic or faunal changes, which destroythe economic basis of its existence; epidemic disease,which grossly alters the population structure; wars,which exhaust the society’s resources of manpoweror result in defeat or invasion; internal conflictamong interest groups, which results in extreme dis-advantage for at least one group; and, very com-monly, a position of perceived subordination and in-feriority with respect to an adjacent society. Thelatter, by the use of more or less coercion (or even nocoercion at all, as in situations where the mere exam-ple set by the dominant society raises too-high levelsof aspiration), brings about uncoordinated culturalchanges. Under conditions of disorganization, thesystem, from the standpoint of at least some of itsmembers, is unable to make possible the reliablesatisfaction of certain values that are held to be es-sential to continued well-being and self-respect.The mazeway of a culturally disillusioned person,

43

Revitalization MovementsAnthony F. C. Wallace

Wallace’s article shows how people use religious principles to cope with a cultural crisis that hasprevented them from achieving a more satisfying culture. Revitalization movements have been wit-nessed frequently in diverse geographic regions, and each displays variation of expression that maybe explained by the culturally specific conditions under which they are formed. As a social process,they have the goal of reconstituting a way of life that has been destroyed for one reason or another.Wallace helps us understand the phenomenon of revitalization by describing five overlapping but dis-tinct stages. A revitalization movement, unlike cultural evolution and historical change, is a rela-tively abrupt culture change that frequently completes itself in the span of a few years.

During the middle decades of the 20th century, Wallace was one of the most prominent anthro-pologists working in the areas of cognition and psychology. He was particularly interested in the psy-chological effects of acculturation and rapid technological change. These interests are clearly appar-ent in the present article when he discusses “mazeway resynthesis” and “hysterical conversion,”concepts that highlight the psychological aspects of abrupt social change. Wallace (b. 1923) has beena prolific author. His most acclaimed book is Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village inthe Industrial Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1978).

Reprinted from Anthony F. C. Wallace, CULTURE ANDPERSONALITY, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1970),pp. 188–99, by permission of the publisher and the author.

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accordingly, is an image of a world that is unpre-dictable, or barren in its simplicity, or both, and is aptto contain severe identity conflict. His mood (de-pending on the precise nature of the disorganization)will be one of panic-stricken anxiety, shame, guilt,depression, or apathy.

An example of the kind of disorganization towhich we refer is given by the two thousand or soSeneca Indians of New York at the close of the eigh-teenth century. Among these people, a supremevalue is attached to the conception of the absolutelyfree and autonomous individual, unconstrained byand indifferent to his own and alien others’ pain andhardship. This individual was capable of free indul-gence of emotional impulses but, in crisis, freely sub-ordinated his own wishes to the needs of his com-munity. Among the men, especially, this ego-idealwas central in personality organization. Men definedthe roles of hunting, of warfare, and of statesman-ship as the conditions of achievement of this value;thus the stereotypes of “the good hunter,” “the bravewarrior,” and “the forest statesman” were the im-ages of masculine success. But the forty-three yearsfrom 1754, when the French and Indian War began,to 1797, when the Seneca sold their last huntinggrounds and became largely confined to tiny, iso-lated reservations, brought with them changes intheir situation that made achievement of these idealsvirtually impossible. The good hunter could nolonger hunt: the game was scarce, and it was almostsuicidally dangerous to stray far from the reserva-tion among the numerous hostile white men. Thebrave warrior could no longer fight, being under-supplied, abandoned by his allies, and his womenand children threatened by growing military mightof the United States. The forest statesman was an ob-ject of contempt, and this disillusionment was per-haps more shattering than the rest. The Iroquoischiefs, for nearly a century, had been able to play offBritish and French, then Americans and British,against one another, extorting supplies and guaran-tees of territorial immunity from both sides. Theyhad maintained an extensive system of alliances andhegemonies among surrounding tribal groups. Sud-denly they were shorn of their power. White men nolonger spoke of the League of the Iroquois with re-spect; their western Indian dependents and allies re-garded them as cowards for having made peace withthe Americans.

The initial Seneca response to the progress of so-ciocultural disorganization was quasipathological:many became drunkards; the fear of witches in-creased; squabbling factions were unable to achievea common policy. But a revitalization movement de-veloped in 1799, based on the religious revelationsreported by one of the disillusioned forest statesmen,one Handsome Lake, who preached a code of pat-terned religious and cultural reform. The drinking ofwhiskey was proscribed; witchcraft was to bestamped out; various outmoded rituals and preva-lent sins were to be abandoned. In addition, varioussyncretic cultural reforms, amounting to a reorienta-tion of the socioeconomic system, were to be under-taken, including the adoption of agriculture (hith-erto a feminine calling) by the men, and the focusingof kinship responsibilities within the nuclear family(rather than in the clan and lineage). The general ac-ceptance of Handsome Lake’s Code, within a fewyears, wrought seemingly miraculous changes. Agroup of sober, devout, partly literate, and techno-logically up-to-date farming communities suddenlyreplaced the demoralized slums in the wilderness(Wallace 1970).

Such dramatic transformations are, as a matter ofhistorical fact, very common in human history, andprobably have been the medium of as much culturechange as the slower equilibrium processes. Further-more, because they compress into such a short spaceof time such extensive changes in pattern, they aresomewhat easier to record than the quiet serialchanges during periods of equilibrium. In general,revitalization processes share a common processstructure that can be conceptualized as a pattern oftemporally overlapping, but functionally distinct,stages:

I. Steady State. This is a period of moving equilib-rium of the kind discussed in the preceding section.Culture change occurs during the steady state, butis of the relatively slow and chainlike kind. Stresslevels vary among interest groups, and there issome oscillation in organization level, but disorga-nization and stress remain within limits tolerable tomost individuals. Occasional incidents of intolera-ble stress may stimulate a limited “correction” ofthe system, but some incidence of individual ill-health and criminality are accepted as a price soci-ety must pay.

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II. The Period of Increased Individual Stress. The so-ciocultural system is being “pushed” progressivelyout of equilibrium by the forces described earlier: cli-matic and biotic change, epidemic disease, war andconquest, social subordination, acculturation, inter-nally generated decay, and so forth. Increasinglylarge numbers of individuals are placed under whatis to them intolerable stress by the failure of the sys-tem to accommodate the satisfaction of their needs.Anomie and disillusionment become widespread, asthe culture is perceived to be disorganized and inad-equate; crime and illness increase sharply in fre-quency as individualistic asocial responses. But thesituation is still generally defined as one of fluctua-tion within the steady state.

III. The Period of Cultural Distortion. Some mem-bers of the society attempt, piecemeal and inef-fectively, to restore personal equilibrium by adopt-ing socially dysfunctional expedients. Alcoholism,venality in public officials, the “black market,”breaches of sexual and kinship mores, hoarding,gambling for gain, “scapegoating,” and similar be-haviors that, in the preceding period, were stilldefined as individual deviances, in effect become in-stitutionalized efforts to circumvent the evil effectsof “the system.” Interest groups, losing confidence inthe advantages of maintaining mutually acceptableinterrelationships, may resort to violence in order tocoerce others into unilaterally advantageous behav-ior. Because of the malcoordination of culturalchanges during this period, they are rarely able to re-duce the impact of the forces that have pushed thesociety out of equilibrium, and in fact lead to a con-tinuous decline in organization.

IV. The Period of Revitalization. Once severe cul-tural distortion has occurred, the society can withdifficulty return to steady state without the insti-tution of a revitalization process. Without revital-ization, indeed, the society is apt to disintegrate asa system: the population will either die off, splin-ter into autonomous groups, or be absorbed intoanother, more stable, society. Revitalization de-pends on the successful completion of the follow-ing functions:

1. Formulation of a code. An individual, or agroup of individuals, constructs a new, utopianimage of sociocultural organization. This model is a

blueprint of an ideal society or “goal culture.” Con-trasted with the goal culture is the existing culture,which is presented as inadequate or evil in certain re-spects. Connecting the existing culture and the goalculture is a transfer culture: a system of operationsthat, if faithfully carried out, will transform the exist-ing culture into the goal culture. Failure to institutethe transfer operations will, according to the code,result in either the perpetuation of the existing mis-ery or the ultimate destruction of the society (if not ofthe whole world). Not infrequently in primitive soci-eties the code, or the core of it, is formulated by oneindividual in the course of a hallucinatory revela-tion; such prophetic experiences are apt to launch re-ligiously oriented movements, since the source ofthe revelation is apt to be regarded as a supernaturalbeing. Nonhallucinatory formulations usually arefound in politically oriented movements. In eithercase, the formulation of the code constitutes a refor-mulation of the author’s own mazeway and oftenbrings to him a renewed confidence in the future anda remission of the complaints he experienced before.It may be suggested that such mazeway resynthesisprocesses are merely extreme forms of the reorganiz-ing dream processes that seem to be associated withREM (rapid-eye-movement) sleep, which are neces-sary to normal health.

2. Communication. The formulators of the codepreach the code to other people in an evangelisticspirit. The aim of the communication is to make con-verts. The code is offered as the means of spiritualsalvation for the individual and of cultural salvationfor the society. Promises of benefit to the target pop-ulation need not be immediate or materialistic, forthe basis of the code’s appeal is the attractiveness ofidentification with a more highly organized system,with all that this implies in the way of self-respect.Indeed, in view of the extensiveness of the changesin values often implicit in such codes, appeal to cur-rently held values would often be pointless. Reli-gious codes offer spiritual salvation, identificationwith God, elect status; political codes offer honor,fame, the respect of society for sacrifices made in itsinterest. But refusal to accept the code is usually de-fined as placing the listener in immediate spiritual,as well as material, peril with respect to his existingvalues. In small societies, the target population maybe the entire community; but in more complex soci-eties, the message may be aimed only at certain





groups deemed eligible for participation in the trans-fer and goal cultures.

3. Organization. The code attracts converts. Themotivations that are satisfied by conversion, and thepsychodynamics of the conversion experience itself,are likely to be highly diverse, ranging from themazeway resynthesis characteristic of the prophet,and the hysterical conviction of the “true believer,”to the calculating expediency of the opportunist. Asthe group of converts expands, it differentiates intotwo parts: a set of disciples and a set of mass fol-lowers. The disciples increasingly become the execu-tive organization, responsible for administering theevangelistic program, protecting the formulator,combatting heresy, and so on. In this role, the disci-ples increasingly become full-time specialists in thework of the movement. The tri-cornered relationshipbetween the formulators, the disciples, and the massfollowers is given an authoritarian structure, evenwithout the formalities of older organizations, by thecharismatic quality of the formulator’s image. Theformulator is regarded as a man to whom, from a su-pernatural being or from some other source of wis-dom unavailable to the mass, a superior knowledgeand authority has been vouchsafed that justifies hisclaim to unquestioned belief and obedience from hisfollowers.

In the modern world, with the advantages ofrapid transportation and ready communication, thesimple charismatic model of cult organization is notalways adequate to describe many social and reli-gious movements. In such programs as Pentecostal-ism, Black Power, and the New Left, there is typi-cally a considerable number of local or special issuegroups loosely joined in what Luther Gerlach hascalled an “acephalous, segmentary, reticulate organi-zation” (1968). Each segment may be, in effect, a sep-arate revitalization organization of the simple kinddescribed above; the individual groups differ in de-tails of code, in emotional style, in appeal to differentsocial classes; and, since the movement as a wholehas no single leader, it is relatively immune to re-pression, the collapse of one or several segments inno way invalidating the whole. This type of move-ment organization is singularly well adapted topredatory expansion; but it may eventually fallunder the domination of one cult or party (as was thecase, for instance, in Germany when the SS took overthe fragmented Nazi party, which in turn was heir to

a large number of nationalist groups, and as is thecase when a Communist party apparatus assumescontrol of a revolutionary popular front).

4. Adaptation. Because the movement is a revolu-tionary organization (however benevolent and hu-mane the ultimate values to which it subscribes), itthreatens the interests of any group that obtains ad-vantage, or believes it obtains advantage, from main-taining or only moderately reforming the status quo.Furthermore, the code is never complete; new inade-quacies are constantly being found in the existingculture, and new inconsistencies, predicative fail-ures, and ambiguities discovered in the code itself(some of the latter being pointed out by the opposi-tion). The response of the code formulators and dis-ciples is to rework the code, and, if necessary, to de-fend the movement by political and diplomaticmaneuver, and, ultimately, by force. The general ten-dency is for codes to harden gradually, and for thetone of the movement to become increasingly na-tivistic and hostile both toward nonparticipating fel-low members of society, who will ultimately be de-fined as “traitors,” and toward “national enemies.”

True revolutions, as distinguished from merecoups d’état, which change personnel withoutchanging the structure, require that the revitalizationmovement of which they are the instrument add toits code a morality sanctioning subversion or evenviolence. The leadership must also be sophisticatedin its knowledge of how to mobilize an increasinglylarge part of the population to their side, and of howto interfere with the mobilization of the populationby the establishment. The student of such processescan do no better than to turn to the works of contem-porary practitioners such as Che Guevara and MaoTse Tung for authoritative explications and examplesof the revolutionary aspect of revitalization.

5. Cultural transformation. If the movement isable to capture both the adherence of a substantialproportion of a local population and, in complexsocieties, of the functionally crucial apparatus (suchas power and communications networks, water sup-ply, transport systems, and military establishment),the transfer culture and, in some cases, the goal cul-ture itself, can be put into operation. The revital-ization, if successful, will be attended by the drasticdecline of the quasi-pathological individual symp-toms of anomie and by the disappearance of thecultural distortions. For such a revitalization to be





accomplished, however, the movement must be ableto maintain its boundaries from outside invasion,must be able to obtain internal social conformitywithout destructive coercion, and must have a suc-cessful economic system.

6. Routinization. If the preceding functions aresatisfactorily completed, the functional reasons forthe movement’s existence as an innovative force dis-appear. The transfer culture, if not the goal culture, isoperating of necessity with the participation of alarge proportion of the community. Although themovement’s leaders may resist the realization ofthe fact, the movement’s function shifts from the roleof innovation to the role of maintenance. If the move-ment was heavily religious in orientation, its legacyis a cult or church that preserves and reworks thecode, and maintains, through ritual and myth, thepublic awareness of the history and values thatbrought forth the new culture. If the movement wasprimarily political, its organization is routinized intovarious stable decision-making and morale-and-order-maintaining functions (such as administrativeoffices, police, and military bodies). Charisma can, toa degree, be routinized, but its intensity diminishesas its functional necessity becomes, with increasingobviousness, outmoded.

V. The New Steady State. With the routinization ofthe movement, a new steady state may be said toexist. Steady-state processes of culture change con-tinue; many of them are in areas where the move-ment has made further change likely. In particular,changes in the value structure of the culture may laythe basis for long-continuing changes (such as thetrain of economic and technological consequencesof the dissemination of the Protestant ethic afterthe Protestant Reformation). Thus in addition to thechanges that the movement accomplishes during itsactive phase, it may control the direction of the sub-sequent equilibrium processes by shifting the valuesthat define the cultural focus. The record of themovement itself, over time, gradually is subject todistortion, and eventually is enshrined in myths andrituals which elevate the events that occurred,and persons who acted, into quasi- or literally divinestatus.

Two psychological mechanisms seem to be ofpeculiar importance in the revitalization process:

mazeway resynthesis (Wallace 1956a) and hystericalconversion. The resynthesis is most dramatically ex-emplified in the career of the prophet who formu-lates a new religious code during a hallucinatorytrance. Typically, such persons, after suffering in-creasing depreciation of self-esteem as the result oftheir inadequacy to achieve the culturally ideal stan-dards, reach a point of either physical or drug-induced exhaustion, during which a resynthesis ofvalues and beliefs occurs. The resynthesis is, likeother innovations, a recombination of preexistingconfigurations; the uniqueness of this particularprocess is the suddenness of conviction, the trance-like state of the subject, and the emotionally centralnature of the subject matter. There is some reason tosuspect that such dramatic resyntheses depend on aspecial biochemical milieu, accompanying the “stageof exhaustion” of the stress (in Selye’s sense) syn-drome, or on a similar milieu induced by drugs. Butcomparable resyntheses are, of course, sometimesaccomplished more slowly, without the catalytic aidof extreme stress or drugs. This kind of resynthesisproduces, apparently, a permanent alteration ofmazeway: the new stable cognitive configuration, is,as it were, constructed out of the materials of earlierconfigurations, which, once rearranged, cannot read-ily reassemble into the older forms.

The hysterical conversion is more typical of themass follower who is repeatedly subjected to sug-gestion by a charismatic leader and an excitedcrowd. The convert of this type may, during conver-sion display various dissociative behaviors (rage,speaking in tongues, rolling on the ground, weeping,and so on). After conversion, his overt behavior maybe in complete conformity with the code to which hehas been exposed. But his behavior has changed notbecause of a radical resynthesis, but because of theadoption under suggestion of an additional socialpersonality which temporarily replaces, but does notdestroy, the earlier. He remains, in a sense, a case ofmultiple personality and is liable, if removed fromreinforcing symbols, to lapse into an earlier socialpersonality. The participant in the lynch mob or in thecamp meeting revival is a familiar example of thistype of convert. But persons can be maintained inthis state of hysterical conversion for months or years,if the“trance” iscontinuouslymaintained by the sym-bolic environment (flags, statues, portraits, songs,and so on) and continuous suggestions (speeches,





rallies, and so on). The most familiar contemporaryexample is the German under Hitler who partici-pated in the Nazi genocide program, but reverted toGemütlichkeit when the war ended. The differencebetween the resynthesized person and the convertedone does not lie in the nature of the codes to whichthey subscribe (they may be the same), but in theblandness and readiness of the hysterical convert torevert, as compared to the almost paranoid intensityand stability of the resynthesized prophet. A success-ful movement, by virtue of its ability to maintainsuggestion continuously for years, is able to hold thehysterical convert indefinitely, or even to work a realresynthesis by repeatedly forcing him, after hysteri-cal conversion, to reexamine his older values andbeliefs and to work through to valid resynthesis,sometimes under considerable stress. The ChineseCommunists, for instance, apparently have becomedisillusioned by hysterical conversions and have usedvarious techniques, some coercive and some not, butall commonly lumped together as “brain-washing”in Western literature, to induce valid resynthesis.The aim of these communist techniques, like those ofthe established religions, is, literally, to produce a“new man.”

It is impossible to exaggerate the importanceof these two psychological processes for culturechange, for they make possible the rapid substitutionof a new cultural Gestalt for an old, and thus therapid cultural transformation of whole populations.Without this mechanism, the cultural transformationof the 600,000,000 people of China by the Commu-nists could not have occurred; nor the Communist-led revitalization and expansion of the USSR; nor theAmerican Revolution; nor the Protestant Reforma-tion; nor the rise and spread of Christianity, Mo-hammedanism, and Buddhism. In the written histor-ical record, revitalization movements begin withIkhnaton’s ultimately disastrous attempt to establisha new, monotheistic religion in Egypt; they are

found, continent by continent, in the history of allhuman societies, occurring with frequency propor-tional to the pressures to which the society is sub-jected. For small tribal societies, in chronically ex-treme situations, movements may develop every tenor fifteen years; in stable complex cultures, the rate ofa societywide movement may be one every two orthree hundred years.

In view of the frequency and geographical diver-sity of revitalization movements it can be expectedthat their content will be extremely varied, corre-sponding to the diversity of situational contexts andcultural backgrounds in which they develop. Majorculture areas are, over extended periods of time, as-sociated with particular types: New Guinea andMelanesia, during the latter part of the nineteenthand the twentieth centuries, have been the home ofthe well-known “cargo cults.” The most prominentfeature of these cults is the expectation that the an-cestors soon will arrive in a steamship, bearing acargo of the white man’s goods, and will lead anativistic revolution culminating in the ejection ofEuropean masters. The Indians of the eastern halfof South America for centuries after the conquest setoff on migrations for the terre sans mal where autopian way of life, free of Spaniards and Por-tuguese, would be found; North American Indiansof the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wereprone to revivalistic movements such as the GhostDance, whose adherents believed that appropriateritual and the abandonment of the sins of the whiteman would bring a return of the golden age beforecontact; South Africa has been the home of the hun-dreds of small, enthusiastic, separatist churches thathave broken free of the missionary organizations. Asmight be expected, a congruence evidently exists be-tween the cultural Anlage and the content of move-ment, which, together with processes of direct andstimulus diffusion, accounts for the tendency formovements to fall into areal types (Burridge 1960).





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Reprinted by permission of Waveland Press, Inc., from Kehoe,THE GHOST DANCE: ETHNOHISTORY ANDREVITALIZATION, 2/e. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press,Inc., 2006). All rights reserved. Originally published in 1989.

44

The Ghost Dance ReligionAlice Beck Kehoe

During the late 1860s, a Northern Paiute Indian named Wodziwob (“white hair”) experienced sev-eral visions telling him to create the Ghost Dance religion. By following Wodziwob’s vision-revealedinstructions, the Indians would hasten the day when white people would disappear, dead Indianswould live again, and the old Indian way of life would return. The movement experienced early suc-cess and quickly expanded from the Great Basin area into California and Oregon but eventually fal-tered. In 1889, years after Wodziwob’s religion had died, a second and more extensive Ghost Dancemovement began, this time led by another Paiute Indian, Jack Wilson, or, in the Paiute language,Wovoka (“the woodcutter”). In this selection, Alice Beck Kehoe describes Wovoka’s early life withDavid Wilson, an Anglo rancher, and his family, as well as his preaching as a young adult and his1889 vision that resulted in his becoming a prophet. Kehoe believes that the Ghost Dance religion wasa complete religion and that its basic message, though aimed primarily at Indians, was applicable toall people of goodwill. Wovoka’s gospel was especially appealing to the Indians, who in 1889 weresuffering from persecution by the whites, epidemics, loss of their economic resources and lands, andcontinuing attempts to eradicate their customs and beliefs. The Ghost Dance religion spread to thetribes of the Northwest, eventually reaching the plains from Oklahoma to Canada. The religion cameto a violent end for the Sioux in late December 1890, with the killing of 370 Indians at WoundedKnee.

New Year’s Day, 1892. Nevada.A wagon jounces over a maze of cattle trails criss-

crossing a snowy valley floor. In the wagon, JamesMooney, from the Smithsonian Institution in far-away Washington, D.C., is looking for the Indianmessiah, Wovoka, blamed for riling up the Sioux,nearly three hundred of whom now lie buried byWounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. The men inthe wagon see a man with a gun over his shoulderwalking in the distance.

“I believe that’s Jack now!” exclaims one ofMooney’s guides. “Jack Wilson,” he calls to the mes-siah, whose Paiute name is Wovoka. Mooney’s other

guide, Charley Sheep, Wovoka’s uncle, shouts to hisnephew in the Paiute language. The hunter comesover to the wagon.

“I saw that he was a young man,” Mooneyrecorded, “a dark full-blood, compactly built, andtaller than the Paiute generally, being nearly 6 feet inheight. He was well dressed in white man’s clothes,with the broad-brimmed white felt hat common inthe west, secured on his head by means of a beadedribbon under the chin. . . . He wore a good pair ofboots. His hair was cut off square on a line below thebase of the ears, after the manner of his tribe. Hiscountenance was open and expressive of firmnessand decision” (Mooney [1896] 1973: 768–69).

That evening, James Mooney formally inter-viewed Jack Wilson in his home, a circular lodge tenfeet in diameter, built of bundles of tule reeds tied toa pole frame. In the middle of the lodge, a bright fire




of sagebrush stalks sent sparks flying out of the widesmoke hole. Several other Paiutes were with Jack,his wife, baby, and little son when Mooney arrivedwith a guide and an interpreter. Mooney noticed thatalthough all the Paiutes dressed in “white man’s”clothes, they preferred to live in traditional wicki-ups. Only Paiute baskets furnished Jack Wilson’shome; no beds, no storage trunks, no pots or pans,nothing of alien manufacture except the hunting gunand knife lay in the wickiup, though the familycould have bought the invaders’ goods. Jack hadsteady employment as a ranch laborer, and from hiswages he could have constructed a cabin and livedin it, sitting on chairs and eating bread and beef frommetal utensils. Instead, Jack and Mary, his wife,wanted to follow the ways of their people as well asthey could in a valley overrun with Euro-Americansettlement. The couple hunted, fished, and gatheredpine nuts and other seeds and wild plants. Theypracticed their Paiute religion rather than the Pres-byterian Christianity Jack’s employer insisted onteaching them. Mooney was forced to bring a Euro-American settler, Edward Dyer, to interpret for himbecause Jack would speak only his native Paiute,though he had some familiarity with English. Thiswas Mason Valley, in the heart of Paiute territory,and for Jack and Mary it was still Paiute.

Jack Wilson told Mooney that he had been bornfour years before the well-remembered battle be-tween Paiutes and American invaders at PyramidLake. The battle had been touched off by miners seiz-ing two Paiute women. The men of the Paiute com-munity managed to rescue the two women. No harmwas done to the miners, but they claimed they werevictims of an “Indian outrage,” raised a large partyof their fellows, and set off to massacre the Paiutes.Expecting trouble, the Paiute men ambushed themob of miners at a narrow pass, and although armedmostly with only bows and arrows, killed nearlyfifty of the mob, routing the rest and saving the fam-ilies in the Indian camp. Jack Wilson’s father, Tavibo,was a leader of the Paiute community at that time.He was recognized as spiritually blessed—giftedand trained to communicate with invisible powers.By means of this gift, carefully cultivated, Tavibowas said to be able to control the weather.

Tavibo left the community when his son Wovokawas in his early teens, and the boy was taken on byDavid Wilson, a Euro-American rancher with sons of

his own close in age to the Paiute youth. Thoughemployed as a ranch hand, Wovoka was strongly en-couraged to join the Wilson family in daily prayersand Bible reading, and Jack, as he came to be called,became good friends with the Wilson boys. Throughthese years with the Wilsons, Jack’s loyalty to, andpride in, his own Paiute people never wavered.When he was about twenty, he married a Paiutewoman who shared his commitment to the Paiuteway of life. With his wages from the ranch, Jack andMary bought the hunting gun and ammunition,good-quality “white man’s” clothes, and ornamentssuited to their dignity as a respected younger couplein the Mason Valley community.

As a young adult, Jack Wilson began to develop areputation as a weather doctor like his father. Paiutebelieve that a young person lacks the maturity andinner strength to function as a spiritual agent, butJack was showing the self-discipline, sound judg-ment, and concern for others that marked Indiansgifted as doctors in the native tradition. Jack led thecircle dances through which Paiute opened them-selves to spiritual influence. Moving always alongthe path of the sun—clockwise to the left—men,women, and children joined hands in a symbol of thecommunity’s living through the circle of the days. Asthey danced they listened to Jack Wilson’s songscelebrating the Almighty and Its wondrous manifes-tations: the mountains, the clouds, snow, stars, trees,antelope. Between dances, the people sat at Jack’s feet,listening to him preach faith in universal love.

The climax of Jack’s personal growth came dur-ing a dramatic total eclipse of the sun on January 1,1889. He was lying in his wickiup very ill with afever. Paiute around him saw the sky darkening al-though it was midday. Some monstrous force wasovercoming the sun! People shot off guns at the ap-parition, they yelled, some wailed as at a death. JackWilson felt himself losing consciousness. It seemedto him he was taken up to heaven and brought be-fore God. God gave him a message to the people ofearth, a gospel of peace and right living. Then he andthe sun regained their normal life.

Jack Wilson was now a prophet. Tall, handsome,with a commanding presence, Jack already was re-spected for his weather control power. (The unusualsnow blanketing Mason Valley when James Mooneyvisited was said to be Jack’s doing.) Confidencein his God-given mission further enhanced Jack

KEHOE • THE GHOST DANCE RELIGION | 367




Wilson’s reputation. Indians came from other dis-tricts to hear him, and even Mormon settlers inNevada joined his audiences. To carry out his mis-sion, Jack Wilson went to the regional Indian agencyat Pyramid Lake and asked one of the employees toprepare and mail a letter to the President of theUnited States, explaining the Paiute doctor’s holymission and suggesting that if the United Statesgovernment would send him a small regular salary,he would convey God’s message to all the people ofNevada and, into the bargain, make it rain wheneverthey wished. The agency employee never sent theletter. It was agency policy to “silently ignore”Indians’ efforts toward “notoriety.” The agent wouldnot even deign to meet the prophet.

Jack Wilson did not need the support of officials.His deep sincerity and utter conviction of his mis-sion quickly persuaded every open-minded hearerof its importance. Indians came on pilgrimages toMason Valley, some out of curiosity, others seekingguidance and healing in that time of afflictions beset-ting their peoples. Mormons came too, debatingwhether Jack Wilson was the fulfillment of aprophecy of their founder, Joseph Smith, Jr., that theMessiah would appear in human form in 1890. JackWilson himself consistently explained that he was amessiah like Jesus but not the Christ of the Chris-tians. Both Indians and Euro-Americans tended toignore Jack’s protestations and to identify him as“the Christ.” Word spread that the Son of God waspreaching in western Nevada.

Throughout 1889 and 1890, railroads carried del-egates from a number of Indian nations east of theRockies to investigate the messiah in Mason Valley.Visitors found ceremonial grounds maintained be-side the Paiute settlements, flat cleared areas withlow willow-frame shelters around the open dancingspace. Paiutes gathered periodically to dance andpray for four days and nights, ending on the fifthmorning shaking their blankets and shawls to sym-bolize driving out evil. In Mason Valley itself, JackWilson would attend the dances, repeating his holymessage and, from time to time, trembling andpassing into a trance to confirm the revelations. Del-egates from other reservations were sent back homewith tokens of Jack Wilson’s holy power: bricks ofground red ocher dug from Mount Grant south ofMason Valley, the Mount Sinai of Northern Paiutereligion; the strikingly marked feathers of the magpie;

pine nuts, the “daily bread” of the Paiutes; and robesof woven strips of rabbit fur, the Paiutes’ traditionalcovering. James Mooney’s respectful interest in theprophet’s teachings earned him the privilege of car-rying such tokens to his friends on the Cheyenneand Arapaho reservations east of the mountains.

Jack Wilson told Mooney that when “the sundied” that winter day in 1889 and, dying with it, hewas taken up to heaven,

he saw God, with all the people who had diedlong ago engaged in their oldtime sports andoccupations, all happy and forever young. It was apleasant land and full of game. After showing himall, God told him he must go back and tell hispeople they must be good and love one another,have no quarreling, and live in peace with thewhites; that they must work, and not lie or steal;that they must put away all the old practices thatsavored of war; that if they faithfully obeyed hisinstructions they would at last be reunited withtheir friends in this other world, where there wouldbe no more death or sickness or old age. He wasthen given the dance which he was commanded tobring back to his people. By performing this danceat intervals, for five consecutive days each time,they would secure this happiness to themselves andhasten the event. Finally God gave him control overthe elements so that he could make it rain or snowor be dry at will, and appointed him his deputy totake charge of affairs in the west, while “GovernorHarrison” [President of the United States at thetime] would attend to matters in the east, and he,God, would look after the world above. He thenreturned to earth and began to preach as he wasdirected, convincing the people by exercising thewonderful powers that had been given him.(Mooney [1896] 1973: 771–72)

Before Mooney’s visit, Jack Wilson had repeatedhis gospel, in August 1891, to a literate young Ara-paho man who had journeyed with other Arapahoand Cheyenne to discover the truth about this fabledmessiah. Jack instructed his visitors, according to theArapaho’s notes:

When you get home you make dance, and willgive you the same. . . . He likes you folk, you givehim good, many things, he heart been sitting feelgood. After you get home, will give good cloud,and give you chance to make you feel good. andhe give you good spirit. and he give you all agood paint. . . .





Grandfather said when he die never no cry. nohurt anybody. no fight, good behave always, it willgive you satisfaction, this young man, he is a goodFather and mother, dont tell no white man. Jueses[Jesus?] was on ground, he just like cloud. Every-body is alive agin, I dont know when they will [be]here, may be this fall or in spring.

Everybody never get sick, be young again,—(if young fellow no sick any more,) work for whitemen never trouble with him until you leave, whenit shake the earth dont be afraid no harm any body.

You make dance for six weeks night, and putyou foot [food?] in dance to eat for every body andwash in the water. that is all to tell, I am in to you.and you will received a good words from him sometime, Dont tell lie. (Mooney [1896] 1973:780–81)

Seeing the red ocher paint, the magpie feathers, thepine nuts, and the rabbit skin robes from the mes-siah, his Arapaho friends shared this message withJames Mooney. Jack Wilson himself had trusted thiswhite man. Thanks to this Arapaho document, weknow that Jack Wilson himself obeyed his injunction,“Dont tell lie”: he had confided to the Smithsoniananthropologist the same gospel he brought to hisIndian disciples.

“A clean, honest life” is the core of Jack Wilson’sguidance, summed up seventy years later by aDakota Sioux who had grown up in the Ghost Dancereligion. The circling dance of the congregations fol-lowing Jack Wilson’s gospel symbolized the ingath-ering of all people in the embrace of Our Father, God,and in his earthly deputy Jack Wilson. As the peoplemove in harmony in the dance around the path ofthe sun, leftward, so they must live and work in har-mony. Jack Wilson was convinced that if every In-dian would dance this belief, the great expression offaith and love would sweep evil from the earth, re-newing its goodness in every form, from youth andhealth to abundant food.

This was a complete religion. It had a transcen-dental origin in the prophet’s visit to God, and a con-tinuing power rooted in the eternal Father. Its mes-sage of earthly renewal was universalistic, althoughJack Wilson felt it was useless to preach it to thoseEuro-Americans who were heedlessly persecutingthe Indian peoples. That Jack shared his gospel withthose non-Indians who came to him as pilgrimsdemonstrates that it was basically applicable to allpeople of goodwill. The gospel outlined personal be-havior and provided the means to unite individuals

into congregations to help one another. Its principalceremony, the circling dance, pleased and satisfiedthe senses of the participants, and through thetrances easily induced during the long ritual, it of-fered opportunities to experience profound emo-tional catharsis. Men and women, persons of all agesand capabilities, were welcomed into a faith of hopefor the future, consolation and assistance in the pre-sent, and honor to the Indians who had passed intothe afterlife. It was a marvelous message for peoplesuffering, as the Indians of the West were in 1889,terrible epidemics; loss of their lands, their economicresources, and their political autonomy; malnourish-ment and wretched housing; and a campaign of cul-tural genocide aimed at eradicating their languages,their customs, and their beliefs.

Jack Wilson’s religion was immediately taken upby his own people, the Northern Paiute, by otherPaiute groups, by the Utes, the Shoshoni, and theWasho in western Nevada. It was carried westwardacross the Sierra Nevada and espoused by many ofthe Indians of California. To the south, the religionwas accepted by the western Arizona Mohave, Co-honino, and Pai, but not by most other peoples of theAmerican Southwest. East of the Rockies, the reli-gion spread through the Shoshoni and Arapaho inWyoming to other Arapaho, Cheyenne, Assiniboin,Gros Ventre (Atsina), Mandan, Arikara, Pawnee,Caddo, Kichai, Wichita, Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, Co-manche, Delaware (living by this time in Oklahoma),Oto, and the western Sioux, especially the Tetonbands. The mechanism by which this religion spreadwas usually a person visiting another tribe, observ-ing the new ceremonial dance and becoming in-spired by its gospel, and returning home to urge rel-atives and friends to try the new faith. Leaders ofthese evangelists’ communities would often appointrespected persons to travel to Nevada to investigatethis claim of a new messiah. The delegates fre-quently returned as converts, testifying to the truthof the faith and firing the enthusiasm of their com-munities. Those who remained skeptics did not al-ways succeed in defusing the flame of faith in others.

Never an organized church, Jack Wilson’s religionthus spread by independent converts from Californiathrough Oklahoma. Not all the communities whotook it up continued to practice it, when months oryears passed without the hoped-for earth renewal.Much of Jack Wilson’s religion has persisted, however,

KEHOE • THE GHOST DANCE RELIGION | 369




and has been incorporated into the regular religiouslife of Indian groups, especially on Oklahoma reser-vations. To merge into a complex of beliefs and rituals rather than be an exclusive religion was en-tirely in accordance with Jack Wilson’s respect fortraditional Indian religions, which he saw rein-forced, not supplanted, by his revelations. Thoughthe Sioux generally dropped the Ghost Dance reli-gion after their military defeats following their initialacceptance of the ritual, older people among theSioux could be heard occasionally singing GhostDance songs in the 1930s. The last real congregationof adherents to Jack Wilson’s gospel continued toworship together into the 1960s, and at least onewho survived into the 1980s never abandoned thefaith. There were sporadic attempts to revive theGhost Dance religion in the 1970s, though thesefailed to kindle the enthusiasm met by the originalproselytizers.

“Ghost Dance” is the name usually applied toJack Wilson’s religion, because the prophet foresawthe resurrection of the recently dead with thehoped-for renewal of the earth. Paiute themselves

simply called their practice of the faith “dance in acircle,” Shoshoni called it “everybody dragging”(speaking of people pulling others along as theycircled), Comanche called it “the Father’s Dance,”Kiowa, “dance with clasped hands,” and Caddo,“prayer of all to the Father” or “my [Father’s] chil-dren’s dance.” The Sioux and Arapaho did use theterm “spirit [ghost] dance,” and the English nameseems to have come from translation of the Sioux.The last active congregation, however, referred totheir religion as the New Tidings, stressing its par-allel to Jesus’ gospel.

To his last days in 1932, Jack Wilson served asFather to believers. He counseled them, in personand by letters, and he gave them holy red ocherpaint, symbolizing life, packed into rinsed-outtomato cans (the red labels indicated the contents).With his followers, he was saddened that not enoughIndians danced the new faith to create the surge ofspiritual power that could have renewed the earth,but resurrection was only a hope. The heart of his re-ligion was his creed, the knowledge that a “clean,honest life” is the only good life.





371

“Cargo Cults” by Peter M. Worsley from SCIENTIFICAMERICAN, May 1959. Reprinted with permission. Copyright© 1959 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.

45

Cargo CultsPeter M. Worsley

A cargo cult, one of the several varieties of revitalization movements, is an intentional effort on thepart of the members of society to create a more satisfying culture. Characteristic of revitalizationmovements in Melanesia, but not restricted to that area, cargo cults bring scattered groups togetherinto a wider religious and political unity. These movements are the result of widespread dissatisfac-tion, oppression, insecurity, and the hope for fulfillment of prophecies of good times and abundancesoon to come. Exposure to the cultures and material goods of the Western world, combinations of na-tive myth with Christian teachings of the coming of a messiah, and belief in the white man’s magic—all contributed to the New Guinean’s faith that the “cargo” would soon arrive, bringing with it theend of the present order and the beginning of a blissful paradise. Peter M. Worsley’s article depicts amovement that often was so organized and persistent as to bring government work to a halt.

Patrols of the Australian government venturing intothe “uncontrolled” central highlands of New Guineain 1946 found the primitive people there swept up ina wave of religious excitement. Prophecy was beingfulfilled: The arrival of the Whites was the sign thatthe end of the world was at hand. The natives pro-ceeded to butcher all of their pigs—animals thatwere not only a principal source of subsistence butalso symbols of social status and ritual preeminencein their culture. They killed these valued animals inexpression of the belief that after three days of dark-ness “Great Pigs” would appear from the sky. Food,firewood, and other necessities had to be stockpiledto see the people through to the arrival of the GreatPigs. Mock wireless antennae of bamboo and ropehad been erected to receive in advance the news ofthe millennium. Many believed that with the greatevent they would exchange their black skins forwhite ones.

This bizarre episode is by no means the singleevent of its kind in the murky history of the collisionof European civilization with the indigenous cul-

tures of the southwest Pacific. For more than onehundred years traders and missionaries have beenreporting similar disturbances among the peoplesof Melanesia, the group of Negro-inhabited islands(including New Guinea, Fiji, the Solomons, and theNew Hebrides) lying between Australia and theopen Pacific Ocean. Though their technologies werebased largely upon stone and wood, these peopleshad highly developed cultures, as measured by thestandards of maritime and agricultural ingenuity,the complexity of their varied social organizations,and the elaboration of religious belief and ritual.They were nonetheless ill prepared for the shock ofthe encounter with the Whites, a people so radicallydifferent from themselves and so infinitely morepowerful. The sudden transition from the society ofthe ceremonial stone ax to the society of sailing shipsand now of airplanes has not been easy to make.

After four centuries of Western expansion, thedensely populated central highlands of New Guinearemain one of the few regions where the people stillcarry on their primitive existence in complete inde-pendence of the world outside. Yet as the agents ofthe Australian Government penetrate into ever moreremote mountain valleys, they find these backwatersof antiquity already deeply disturbed by contact




with the ideas and artifacts of European civilization.For “cargo”—Pidgin English for trade goods—haslong flowed along the indigenous channels of com-munication from the seacoast into the wilderness.With it has traveled the frightening knowledge ofthe white man’s magical power. No small element inthe white man’s magic is the hopeful message sentabroad by his missionaries: the news that a Messiahwill come and that the present order of Creation willend.

The people of the central highlands of NewGuinea are only the latest to be gripped in the recur-rent religious frenzy of the “cargo cults.” Howevervariously embellished with details from native myththe Christian belief, these cults all advance the samecentral theme: the world is about to end in a terriblecataclysm. Thereafter God, the ancestors, or somelocal culture hero will appear and inaugurate a bliss-ful paradise on earth. Death, old age, illness, and evilwill be unknown. The riches of the white man willaccrue to the Melanesians.

Although the news of such a movement in onearea has doubtless often inspired similar movementsin other areas, the evidence indicates that these cultshave arisen independently in many places as parallelresponses to the same enormous social stress andstrain. Among the movements best known to stu-dents of Melanesia are the “Taro Cult” of NewGuinea, the “Vailala Madness” of Papua, the “NakedCult” of Espiritu Santo, the “John Frum Movement”of the New Hebrides, and the “Tuka Cult” of the FijiIslands.

At times the cults have been so well organizedand fanatically persistent that they have brought thework of government to a standstill. The outbreakshave often taken the authorities completely by sur-prise and have confronted them with mass opposi-tion of an alarming kind. In the 1930s, for example,villagers in the vicinity of Wewak, New Guinea,were stirred by a succession of “Black King” move-ments. The prophets announced that the Europeanswould soon leave the island, abandoning their prop-erty to the natives, and urged their followers to ceasepaying taxes, since the government station wasabout to disappear into the sea in a great earthquake.To the tiny community of Whites in charge of the re-gion, such talk was dangerous. The authorities jailed

four of the prophets and exiled three others. In yetanother movement, that sprang up in declared oppo-sition to the local Christian mission, the cult leadertook Satan as his god.

Troops on both sides in World War II found theirarrival in Melanesia heralded as a sign of the Apoca-lypse. The G.I.s who landed in the New Hebrides,moving up for the bloody fighting on Guadalcanal,found the natives furiously at work preparingairfields, roads and docks for the magic shipsand planes that they believed were coming from“Rusefel” (Roosevelt), the friendly king of America.

The Japanese also encountered millenarian vi-sionaries during their southward march to Guadal-canal. Indeed, one of the strangest minor militaryactions of World War II occurred in Dutch NewGuinea, when Japanese forces had to be turnedagainst the local Papuan inhabitants of the GeelvinkBay region. The Japanese had at first been receivedwith great joy, not because their “Greater East AsiaCo-Prosperity Sphere” propaganda had made anygreat impact upon the Papuans, but because the na-tives regarded them as harbingers of the new worldthat was dawning, the flight of the Dutch having al-ready given the first sign. Mansren, creator of the is-lands and their peoples, would now return, bringingwith him the ancestral dead. All this had beenknown, the cult leaders declared, to the crafty Dutch,who had torn out the first page of the Bible wherethese truths were inscribed. When Mansren returned,the existing world order would be entirely over-turned. White men would turn black like Papuans,Papuans would become Whites; root crops wouldgrow in trees, and coconuts and fruits would growlike tubers. Some of the islanders now began to drawtogether into large “towns”; others took Biblicalnames such as “Jericho” and “Galilee” for their vil-lages. Soon they adopted military uniforms andbegan drilling. The Japanese, by now highly un-popular, tried to disarm and disperse the Papuans;resistance inevitably developed. The climax of thistragedy came when several canoe-loads of fanaticssailed out to attack Japanese warships, believingthemselves to be invulnerable by virtue of the holywater with which they had sprinkled themselves.But the bullets of the Japanese did not turn to water,and the attackers were mowed down by machine-gun fire.





Behind this incident lay a long history. As longago as 1857 missionaries in the Geelvink Bay regionhad made note of the story of Mansren. It is typical ofmany Melanesian myths that became confoundedwith Christian doctrine to form the ideological basisof the movements. The legend tells how long agothere lived an old man named Manamakeri (“hewho itches”), whose body was covered with sores.Manamakeri was extremely fond of palm wine, andused to climb a huge tree every day to tap the liquidfrom the flowers. He soon found that someone wasgetting there before him and removing the liquid.Eventually he trapped the thief, who turned out tobe none other than the Morning Star. In return for hisfreedom, the Star gave the old man a wand thatwould produce as much fish as he liked, a magic treeand a magic staff. If he drew in the sand andstamped his foot, the drawing would become real.Manamakeri, aged as he was, now magically im-pregnated a young maiden; the child of this unionwas a miracle-child who spoke as soon as he wasborn. But the maiden’s parents were horrified, andbanished her, the child, and the old man. The triosailed off in a canoe created by Mansren (“TheLord”), as the old man now became known. On thisjourney Mansren rejuvenated himself by steppinginto a fire and flaking off his scaly skin, whichchanged into valuables. He then sailed aroundGeelvink Bay, creating islands where he stopped,and peopling them with the ancestors of the present-day Papuans.

The Mansren myth is plainly a creation myth fullof symbolic ideas relating to fertility and rebirth.Comparative evidence—especially the shedding ofhis scaly skin—confirms the suspicion that the oldman is, in fact, the Snake in another guise. Psychoan-alytic writers argue that the snake occupies such aprominent part in mythology the world over be-cause it stands for the penis, another fertility symbol.This may be so, but its symbolic significance is surelymore complex than this. It is the “rebirth” of thehero, whether Mansren or the Snake, that exercisessuch universal fascination over men’s minds.

The nineteenth-century missionaries thought thatthe Mansren story would make the introduction ofChristianity easier, since the concept of “resurrection,”not to mention that of the “virgin birth” and the “sec-ond coming,” was already there. By 1867, however,

the first cult organized around the Mansren legendwas reported.

Though such myths were widespread in Melane-sia, and may have sparked occasional movementseven in the pre-White era, they took on a new sig-nificance in the late nineteenth century, once theEuropean powers had finished parceling out theMelanesian region among themselves. In manycoastal areas the long history of “blackbirding”—theseizure of islanders for work on the plantations ofAustralia and Fiji—had built up a reservoir of hostil-ity to Europeans. In other areas, however, the arrivalof the Whites was accepted, even welcomed, for itmeant access to bully beef and cigarettes, shirts andparaffin lamps, whisky and bicycles. It also meantaccess to the knowledge behind these materialgoods, for the Europeans brought missions andschools as well as cargo.

Practically the only teaching the natives receivedabout European life came from the missions, whichemphasized the central significance of religion in Eu-ropean society. The Melanesians already believedthat man’s activities—whether gardening, sailing ca-noes, or bearing children—needed magical assis-tance. Ritual without human effort was not enough.But neither was human effort on its own. This out-look was reinforced by mission teaching.

The initial enthusiasm for European rule, how-ever, was speedily dispelled. The rapid growth of theplantation economy removed the bulk of the able-bodied men from the villages, leaving women, chil-dren, and old men to carry on as best they could. Thesplendid vision of the equality of all Christiansbegan to seem a pious deception in face of the reali-ties of the color bar, the multiplicity of rival Christianmissions and the open irreligion of many Whites.

For a long time the natives accepted the Europeanmission as the means by which the “cargo” wouldeventually be made available to them. But theyfound that acceptance of Christianity did not bringthe cargo any nearer. They grew disillusioned. Thestory now began to be put about that it was not theWhites who made the cargo, but the dead ancestors.To people completely ignorant of factory production,this made good sense. White men did not work; theymerely wrote secret signs on scraps of paper, forwhich they were given shiploads of goods. On the

WORSLEY • CARGO CULTS | 373




other hand, the Melanesians labored week afterweek for pitiful wages. Plainly the goods mustbe made for Melanesians somewhere, perhaps in theLand of the Dead. The Whites, who possessed thesecret of the cargo, were intercepting it and keepingit from the hands of the islanders, to whom it wasreally consigned. In the Madang district of NewGuinea, after some forty years’ experience of themissions, the natives went in a body one day with apetition demanding that the cargo secret should nowbe revealed to them, for they had been very patient.

So strong is this belief in the existence of a “se-cret” that the cargo cults generally contain some rit-ual in imitation of the mysterious European customswhich are held to be the clue to the white man’s ex-traordinary power over goods and men. The believ-ers sit around tables with bottles of flowers in frontof them, dressed in European clothes, waiting for thecargo ship or airplane to materialize; other cultistsfeature magic pieces of paper and cabalistic writing.Many of them deliberately turn their backs on thepast by destroying secret ritual objects, or exposingthem to the gaze of uninitiated youths and women,for whom formerly even a glimpse of the sacred ob-jects would have meant the severest penalties, evendeath. The belief that they were the chosen people isfurther reinforced by their reading of the Bible, forthe lives and customs of the people in the Old Testa-ment resemble their own lives rather than those ofthe Europeans. In the New Testament they find theApocalypse, with its prophecies of destruction andresurrection, particularly attractive.

Missions that stress the imminence of the SecondComing, like those of the Seventh Day Adventists,are often accused of stimulating millenarian cultsamong the islanders. In reality, however, the Melane-sians themselves rework the doctrines the missionar-ies teach them, selecting from the Bible what theythemselves find particularly congenial in it. Suchmovements have occurred in areas where missionsof quite different types have been dominant, fromRoman Catholic to Seventh Day Adventist. The rea-sons for the emergence of these cults, of course, liefar deeper in the life-experience of the people.

The economy of most of the islands is very back-ward. Native agriculture produces little for theworld market, and even the European plantationsand mines export only a few primary products and

raw materials: copra, rubber, gold. Melanesians arequite unable to understand why copra, for example,fetches thirty pounds sterling per ton one month andbut five pounds a few months later. With no notionof the workings of world-commodity markets, thenatives see only the sudden closing of plantations,reduced wages and unemployment, and are inclinedto attribute their insecurity to the whim or evil in thenature of individual planters.

Such shocks have not been confined to the eco-nomic order. Governments, too, have come andgone, especially during the two world wars: Ger-man, Dutch, British, and French administrationsmelted overnight. Then came the Japanese, only tobe ousted in turn largely by the previously unknownAmericans. And among these Americans theMelanesians saw Negroes like themselves, livinglives of luxury on equal terms with white G.I.’s. Thesight of these Negroes seemed like a fulfillment ofthe old prophecies to many cargo cult leaders. Normust we forget the sheer scale of this invasion.Around a million U.S. troops passed through the Ad-miralty Islands, completely swamping the inhabi-tants. It was a world of meaningless and chaoticchanges, in which anything was possible. New ideaswere imported and given local twists. Thus in theLoyalty Islands people expected the French Com-munist Party to bring the millennium. There is noreal evidence, however, of any Communist influ-ence in these movements, despite the rather hysteri-cal belief among Solomon Island planters that thename of the local “Masinga Rule” movement wasderived from the word “Marxian”! In reality thename comes from a Solomon Island tongue, andmeans “brotherhood.”

Europeans who have witnessed outbreaks in-spired by the cargo cults are usually at a loss to un-derstand what they behold. The islanders throwaway their money, break their most sacred taboos,abandon their gardens, and destroy their preciouslivestock; they indulge in sexual license, or, alterna-tively, rigidly separate men from women in hugecommunal establishments. Sometimes they spenddays sitting gazing at the horizon for a glimpse of thelong-awaited ship or airplane; sometimes theydance, pray and sing in mass congregations, becom-ing possessed and “speaking with tongues.”

Observers have not hesitated to use suchwords as “madness,” “mania,” and “irrationality” to





characterize the cults. But the cults reflect quite logi-cal and rational attempts to make sense out of asocial order that appears senseless and chaotic. Giventhe ignorance of the Melanesians about the widerEuropean society, its economic organization and itshighly developed technology, their reactions form aconsistent and understandable pattern. They wrapup all their yearning and hope in an amalgam thatcombines the best counsel they can find in Christian-ity and their native belief. If the world is soon to end,gardening or fishing is unnecessary; everything willbe provided. If the Melanesians are to be part of amuch wider order, the taboos that prescribe their so-cial conduct must now be lifted or broken in a newlyprescribed way.

Of course the cargo never comes. The cultsnonetheless live on. If the millennium does not ar-rive on schedule, then perhaps there is some failurein the magic, some error in the ritual. New break-away groups organize around “purer” faith and rit-ual. The cult rarely disappears, so long as the socialsituation which brings it into being persists.

At this point it should be observed that cults ofthis general kind are not peculiar to Melanesia. Menwho feel themselves oppressed and deceived havealways been ready to pour their hopes and fears,their aspirations and frustrations, into dreams of amillennium to come or of a golden age to return.All parts of the world have had their counterpartsof the cargo cults, from the American Indian Ghost

Dance to the Communist-millenarist “reign of thesaints” in Münster during the Reformation, frommedieval European apocalyptic cults to African“witch-finding” movements and Chinese Buddhistheresies. In some situations men have been contentto wait and pray; in others they have sought to has-ten the day by using their strong right arms to do theLord’s work. And always the cults serve to bring to-gether scattered groups, notably the peasants andurban plebeians of agrarian societies and the peoplesof “stateless” societies where the cult unites separate(and often hostile) villages, clans, and tribes into awider religio-political unity.

Once the people begin to develop secular politicalorganizations, however, the sects tend to lose theirimportance as vehicles of protest. They begin to rele-gate the Second Coming to the distant future or to thenext world. In Melanesia ordinary political bodies,trade unions and native councils are becoming thenormal media through which the islanders expresstheir aspirations. In recent years continued economicprosperity and political stability have taken some ofthe edge off their despair. It now seems unlikely thatany major movement along cargo-cult lines will recurin areas where the transition to secular politics hasbeen made, even if the insecurity of prewar times re-turned. I would predict that the embryonic national-ism represented by cargo cults is likely in future totake forms familiar in the history of other countriesthat have moved from subsistence agriculture to par-ticipation in the world economy.

WORSLEY • CARGO CULTS | 375




376

Reprinted by permission of Waveland Press, Inc., from WilliamLewis, SOUL REBELS: THE RASTAFARI (Long Grove, IL:Waveland Press, Inc., 1993). All rights reserved.

46

Urban Rastas in Kingston,JamaicaWilliam F. Lewis

William F. Lewis’s anthropological research and publications focused largely on religion and socialmovements, most recently with Rastafari culture. In this selection Professor Lewis describes in richethnographic detail the personalities and attributes of Nigel, Lion, and David, three urban Rastas liv-ing in Kingston, Jamaica. As Lewis describes his interviews with the three Rastas, the reader learnsabout Rastafarian beliefs, rituals, symbols, diet, and language, as well as other aspects of the peoplehe refers to as “Soul Rebels.”

Many Americans think of the Rastafarians as members of a deviant subculture, knowing only thereggae music of the Rastafarian song-prophet Bob Marley, or the Rasta “dreadlocks,” or perhaps theRastafarian reputation as prodigious ganja smokers. The Rastafarian movement began in Jamaica inthe early 1930s. Rastas believe that Haile Ras Tafari Selassi I of Ethiopia is their black Messiah—theKing of Kings and Lord of Lords—and that black true believers will some day dismiss their whiteoppressors and be repatriated to Ethiopia, their spiritual homeland. Although the largest number ofRastas live in Jamaica, there are also followers in the United States, England, Canada, Ethiopia, andother parts of the world.

Nigel

On a sultry day in downtown Kingston a wearywalker might come upon Nigel lounging on his frontsteps, shirtless, with a towel draped around hisshoulders as he carefully dries himself after one ofhis periodic splash baths. That is how I first met him.A careless observer might take Nigel to be mad, astigma with which Jamaican society labels thesolitary life free from the cares of family and thedemands of social responsibility. However, Nigel isaffable, courteous and willing to share his wisdomwith sympathetic listeners. I was one of them.

Nigel’s conversations with passers-by can be-come serious communications. He interprets such a

happy occasion as the result of a mutual conscious-ness that compels people to reason with him. Truecommunication is never mere serendipity. Once amale stranger (Nigel seldom if ever converses seri-ously with a female) demonstrates that his interestsare compatible with Nigel’s, his scrutiny and suspi-cion change to a more relaxed and intimate tone.Then Nigel asks the visitor to remove his shoes, un-burden himself of his baggage, and empty his pock-ets of money, tobacco, and combs, things Nigel findspolluting. He requires all to relieve themselves ofthese demonic influences before any can enter hismansion. I complied.

Nigel’s mansion turns out to be the building thathoused his formerly prosperous clothing boutiquewhich catered to the sartorial demands of theJamaican elite. The quarters are large, two storieshigh, with spacious rooms that are now bereft of fur-niture and decoration. Nigel’s mansion is but a ves-tige of the glamour and prestige he enjoyed as one of




the wealthiest tailors in Jamaica. The yellow clip-pings that hang willy-nilly from the flaking walls ofthe main room bear silent witness to Nigel’s renunci-ation of both his business and family. The Jamaicanmedia once celebrated him as a promising designerof clothes for both the wealthy and the celebrated.That was before his commitment to the principles ofRastafari.

Nigel explains his conversion to Rastafari as anodyssey, a passage that began shortly after his ap-pendectomy operation. Then modern drugs andtreatments were of no avail in restoring his energy,vitality and spirit. However, an encounter with aRasta turned into meetings of mutual communica-tion and disclosure. On the Rasta’s advice, Nigeldrank large amounts of ganja tea and smokedequally large amounts of marijuana. He recoveredhis health. From then on, he affiliated himself withthe ways of Rastafari, and he too hallowed the herbas the healing of nations. Furthermore, he attributesthe restoration and continuance of his health to hisdedication to the Rasta principles of love, medita-tion, reasoning and ital (natural) foods of which mar-ijuana is a part.

Nigel found peace when he embraced Rastafari.His fashion industry and family were the weaponshe created to wage warfare on people. Thus, he di-vested himself of his career and married life.

Shortly after his conversion in 1981, Nigel beganto send funds to Rastas in the rural interior. At thattime, Jamaican businesses were recouping theirlosses suffered under the democratic socialism ofthe Manley government which had threatened theirprofits. Nigel recalls how the bank officials thoughtthat he was donating funds to a subversive groupin the interior. A popular rumor at the time wasthat Manley’s allies had contingents ready in thecountry who would help Cuban communists infil-trate Jamaica. Nigel was under great suspicion. Thebank refused to handle any of his transactions. Thegovernment harassed him on charges of tax eva-sion. His wife tried to commit him to a mental in-stitution. Nigel muses: “Because I was becomingaware of my own identity, I had to go through thissuffering. That’s in the past, the price I paid. Now Iam free.”

Now Nigel is neither an entrepreneur nor anartist but an ascetic. He refuses to touch money, andonly the free will offerings of others sustain him. Hismeatless diet consists only of fruits, vegetables and

an occasional fish. He abhors the eating of animalmeat because dead flesh will only cause sickness forthe person who consumes it. Nor will he accept anyfruit or vegetable whose natural appearance hasbeen altered by any cutting, mashing or peeling.Nigel seems lanky and anorexic. However, his ap-pearance belies his vigor and vitality which areevident in his darting about and enthusiasticallyengaging the visitor in philosophical discussionabout the affairs of the world, the way to health andthe meaning of sexuality.

An aroma of ganja smoke clings to Nigel’s long,unkempt and natural dreads. This slovenliness too isdeceptive because Nigel is particularly fastidiousabout the cleanliness of his body and he meticulouslymonitors its functions. This leads him to administerfrequent purgatives to himself lest the accumulationof toxins within cause harm for the whole body. Hisfrequent cleansings and purgations of the body aswell as the avoidance of contact with any decayingmatter, especially a dead body, are normative inNigel’s life. Were these norms violated, his spiritualand physical health would be imperiled.

Without his regimen, Nigel would be unable tofind the strength to weave his philosophical reflec-tions through his writings, his conversations andsolitary moments of meditation. Esoteric writingsand volumes are scattered throughout his quarters.He has amassed stacks of newspaper clippings andsundry writings whose relationship to the philoso-phy of Rastafari at first glance appears obscure. Nev-ertheless, Nigel can explain every metaphor andsymbol in his literary collection and connect them towhat he believes are the truths of Rastafari. Inc-luded in his assemblage of works are titles such as:“Dread Locks Judgement,” “Anthropology: Races ofMan,” “Radical Vegetarianism,” “Rasta Voice Maga-zine,” “Economy and Business,” “Women as SexObject,” and “Pan African Digest.” His own essaysrange from glosses on Joseph Owens’ Dread andDennis Forsythe’s Healing of Nations to highly ideal-istic writing on a new economic order. Among thesepieces is correspondence from previous English andAmerican visitors to Nigel’s mansion.

Nigel’s own writings have an intense and highlyinvoluted style which gives them an arcane quality, aform somewhat reminiscent of James Joyce’s streamof consciousness. Tolerance and patience are de-manded of the reader who wishes to decipherNigel’s turn of phrase and novel transformation of

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words. Indeed, the uninitiated reader might wonderif the police are not correct in simply shrugging himoff as a Rasta who has had too much ganja. His proseis obscure and agonistic, but, nevertheless, he canelicit sense from every syllable, word and line.Nigel’s deftness in turning his twisted writings intoan articulate message makes him a shaman andmythmaker of sorts, for his vocalizations about therevelation he bears have the rhythm, cadence andtimbre of a person standing outside of the self.

The Upper Room

Nigel’s “Upper Room” is on the second level of thebuilding with two large windows opening to a viewof eastern Kingston and allowing the cool breezesfrom the sea to circulate through the room. It is fur-nished with a few mats, a raggedy sleeping cot overto the side, a square table on which the herb isblessed, and shelves along the wall on which liechillum pipes of various lengths. The chillum pipesare stored for other Rastas who might visit and joinNigel for reasoning. In his Upper Room Nigel un-dergoes his most intense experience with ganja andelaborates ecstatically on Rastafari. In accord withwhat he believes to be Rastas’ tradition, he excludeswomen from these sessions.

When the brethren have gathered in the UpperRoom, Nigel raises his arms toward the East in agrand gesture and blesses the herb with vocaliza-tions resembling glossolalia. “Amharic,” he says asan aside, “the Ethiopian language.” The blessingsare spontaneous and ecstatic, but on listening closelyI detected a word that sounded like mirrikat, theAmharic word for blessing. Later Nigel mentionedthat he learned some Amharic at the Ethiopian Or-thodox Church in Kingston.

After the chillum is filled, and the herb is burn-ing, Nigel is the first to draw deeply from the pipe.His chest expands as smoke fills his lungs. He ex-hales billows of smoke through his nostrils andmouth, and the whiffs frame his lionlike face withtendrils of plumes that seep through his long locksand beard. Through the clouds of smoke, Nigelstares at all in the room with a fierce look, regal, butcutting and penetrating. His demeanor demands aresponse.

“The conquering Lion of Judah shall break everychain,” I acclaim.

Nigel seems pleased with this affirmation of his linkwith the Emperor Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah.

Another’s turn comes to partake of the chalice,and Nigel passes the pipe with a most respectful ges-ture. Kneeling before the next brother with his ownhead bowed low to the floor, his outstretched armsoffer him the chillum. The brother accepts, drawsfrom it, and proclaims, “Jah Rastafari.”

The chillum moves from participant to partici-pant, brother to brother, each honoring the otherwith gestures of deference but never permitting theirflesh to meet. Bodily contact is assiduously avoided.Soon the participants assume unusual bodily pos-tures. The effect is startling. Nigel takes the lead indisplaying great physical agility and dexterity bytwisting his body into yogalike positions. All thebrethren follow suit. They throw their bodies intolionlike leaps. Nevertheless, their bodily deport-ments are undertaken with great concentration andawareness, for not once did their acrobatic featsthreaten to harm anyone in the room.

“What is love?” asks one of the brothers.“Love is where there are no starving people. As

long as there are hungry people, hatred is in power.Caring and supporting . . .”

Their dance continues, and perhaps ten minutespasses.

“Sex is a performance, a duty.”“Women are for pickneys (babies).”Another interval, and more of their dancing.“Burn Babylon.” Some begin chanting the familiar

lyric.“Why the police brutality and why youths beaten

by Babylon? They steal because they are hungry andwant to fill their bellies. No crime in taking foodbecause you are hungry.”

“Africa for the blacks, Europe for the whites,Jamaica for the Arawaks.”

David and Lion

Tourists and Jamaicans alike must cross an unsteady,wooden pier in order to board the ferry that takespassengers from Kingston Harbor to the legendaryPort Royal across the bay. Once celebrated as a hauntfor pirates and a playground for debauchery, PortRoyal now rests quietly on the bay, chastised forever,it seems, by the raging earthquake it suffered in the





late seventeenth century. That cataclysm hurledmuch of the port into the Caribbean.

Near the ramp leading to the pier lazes David, aRasta brother. He is attending his concession standwhich is simply a large crate hoisted on a dolly formaneuverability. From the cart, David sells RedStripe beer, D & G sodas, as well as Benson cigarettesby ones and twos, and, of course, raw sugar cane andcoconut, the most popular items. A sampling fromhis assortment of refreshments often comes as wel-come relief for the overheated traveler after the half-hour trip across the bay.

David and Lion live together in a hovel abouttwenty yards from their stand. The shack rests precari-ously on the side of the pier, supported in part by thehanging branches of a huge tree on which part of italso leans. The roof and sidings are constructed ofhuge pieces of cardboard and plastic sheeting. Nearby,a slipshod folding chair, unworthy of any task, clingsto the pier’s edge and marks out an area that serves asa reception space for guests. The sound of the rushingwater against the piles, the squeaking of the rats, andthe dust from the parched earth fill the place Davidand Lion call home with a romantic irony. They sit be-tween two worlds, perhaps a sign of their liminality.From one viewpoint, Port Royal’s outlines loom acrossthe bay standing witness to wanton living long ago.From another angle stands the symbol of law andorder, a police station, to which the Rastas pay no heed.

Lion and David eat ital food, a healthy low-salt,low-fat and low-cholesterol diet, that consists mainlyof vegetables, plantains and the occasional red snap-per, caught off the pier. At a clearing away from theirhut, they prepare the food on an aluminum cancover some twenty-four inches in diameter. The fareis seasoned with hot pepper and served on tin plates.Sometimes a rat might boldly rush a dish at whatappears to be an opportune moment in an effort towrest a morsel from a distracted diner. The Rastas,however, are generous and share their food with anyof their guests, human and animal alike.

When business is slow at their stand, Lion, Davidand other brethren hustle on the streets of Kingston,selling anything from boxed donuts to belts andtams (knitted headgear which they themselves havecrafted). They are talkative entrepreneurs and quickto prevail upon a prospective customer, especially awhite tourist, to purchase one of their handiworks orproducts.

Reasoning

Toward late afternoon on a hot July day, twobrethren arrive at the pier and exchange greetingswith David. David assures the visiting brethren thatI, the white guest sitting near the hut, have respectand love for Rastafari. Lion emerges from below therafters of the pier where he was resting and lendssupport to David’s assurances that their white visi-tor is trustworthy.

When the group is ready, David places the Bibleon the ground and marks off a few pages from whichhe will draw his inspiration. The spliffs are lit with ashort grace: “Give thanks.” At that moment, how-ever, some youths happen on the scene, probablydrawn by the whiff of ganja smoke overcoming thesalty sea breezes. They ask for some herb. Lion re-bukes the boys and says: “This is high reasoning,boys, and not play.” They run off. The Rastas returnto the matter at hand.

David mulls over the scriptural passage about theNazarites and the proscription on the cutting of hair.“Love is the foundation of Rastafari. The covenant isthe hair, the locks. This is Godly.”

As a group of commuters disembarks from theferry and hurries by the group, scarcely giving them aglance, Lion comments: “Jamaican people cannot seethe truth. They have eyes, hands, feet, but don’t usethem properly for justice and love. They are blinded.”

Rashi holds his spliff and remarks pensively:“Rastas are clever, living for truth. The weed is im-portant. It is healing.”

After reflecting a bit on the wisdom in the herb,the Rastas turn to excoriating the success of reggaemusicians, a discussion that enlivens the group. Fewendearing words are spent on reggae musicians who,the Rastas believe, preach the philosophy of Rasta-fari, give interviews to magazines, enrich themselves,but filter none of their profits into the creation of astronger culture for the rest of the brethren.

“Look how they draw up around Nesta’s place onNew Hope, clean and shining. Burn reggae.”

All agree.Soon the brethren fall into a quiet, meditative

mood. A few reflect in low voices on the similaritybetween the churches and reggae. This promptsDavid to take up a verse from the scriptures andfreely elaborate on it. The verse is: “Let the deadbury the dead.”

LEWIS • URBAN RASTAS IN KINGSTON, JAMAICA | 379




“The churches in Jamaica bury only dead people,and take people’s money to build bigger churchbuildings, instead of providing work and industryfor people. The Rasta never dies but has life eternal,as Christ promised. God cannot lie. To have lifeeternal one must follow the Rasta culture in theBible. Rasta is a new name. It is the new Jerusalemthat Isaiah promised in the prophecy.”

David’s words excite the group, and they all affirmthe equality of people. They denounce the hypocrisyof organized religion, reggae and the government formanipulating the Bible and authority. The more theiranger with society increases, so much the more doesthe spontaneity of the gathering quicken.

David takes the spliff from a Rasta reclining nextto him. Holding it, he prays that the chalice be not asource of condemnation but a guardian of life eternal.He inhales deeply, holds the smoke within, and foralmost a minute after exhalation he gazes intently onme, the white visitor sitting across from him. Then:

“Rasta is not the color of the skin. Blacks hatetheir fellow man, just like white man hates. Evensome Rastas have words on their lips but not in theirhearts.”

As darkness draws closer, and fewer peoplequeue up for the ferry, the Rastas become morevociferous.

“Living is for the Rastas. Moses and the prophetsare not dead, but reign in Zion, a Kingdom that isbetter than the one here. I have life. I will never diebut go to Zion with Ras Tafari Selassie I” [pro-nounced as “aye”].

Interspersed among their exultations of Selassieare monotone chantings expressing a yearning forrepatriation to a land of freedom from which theyhave been exiled.

“Africa yes! But not the Africa of today because itis just as corrupt as Jamaica.”

Silence. The spliffs are lit again, passed aroundand blessed. The mood changes. The brethren be-come serious and playful, ecstatic and earthly. Lionleads this flow of sensuousness. He rolls on theground, smiles, laughs lightly while singing an im-provisation on liberty, freedom and repatriation. Hekisses the roots of a nearby tree and exclaims: “JahRastafari.”

The others participate in his display with theirown paeans on liberation and freedom. Soon theytoo tumble over the ground, enjoying themselves im-

mensely, and encouraging me to “ride the vibes andfeel freedom.”

At dusk, bright lights illumine the decks of aBritish warship that had docked in the harbor earlierin the day. The sharp relief of the ship in the distanceprompts Lion to remark:

“War is against Rastafari. Rastas do what is rightfor life and live forever. Jamaican people love wartoo much. I don’t know why.”

David pursues the thought further. “I-n-I is neverlistened to. We are rejected. They have no culture.They steal, kill and shoot.”

Lion snuggles closer to the roots of the tree whichare bulging from the parched earth. He seems to ca-ress them.

“I-n-I Rastafari are the love in the world. We arevery peaceful, loving and don’t eat poisonousthings, no salt, no liver, no dead animals.”

Rashi adds: “We want wholeness, fullness of jus-tice, fullness of love.”

When asked to identify the source of his power,Rashi responds:

“I-n-I is the bible in the heart. The true bible is yet tobe written. I-n-I moves beyond the bible. It is a wordthat we must move beyond. I-n-I live naturally in thefullness of divinity, don’t have to go to school. Truth isin the heart. I-n-I have to learn our flesh and blood.Then everybody gets food, shelter. This is the truth.”

Popes and priests irritate them. “Burn the pope.Burn the pope man. The Church is a vampire withtheir cars and living in the hills [an area where theelite reside]. The pope is a vampire, wants our blood.Selassie I is the head. The pope is the devil.”

The light fades. More silence. The bay water slapsagainst the pilings. A rat tears across the planks andstartles me. I jump. Lion, however, admonishes mewith a reminder that the rat is only a creature.

“The barber shop is the mark of the beast. Comband razor conquer. The wealth of Jah is with locks, infullness of his company.”

All nod in agreement. I mention that my under-standing is increasing.

“Be careful with words, brother,” Lion says,“overstand not understand. I people are forwardpeople not backward.”

Another interjects: “It is a brand new way of life.The language of I-n-I is forward. I-n-I people willpay no more. For five hundred years, they builtBabylon on us, but they will do it no more.”





381

Dusk had fallen by the time I left Jordan BaptistChurch, but the light bothered my eyes as I looked

around the parking lot for my car. It seemed as ifeverything had moved slightly. The church was onthe outskirts of one of the poorer parts of Lynchburg,and I would have to zigzag across a half dozen bigstreets that bisect the city to get back to my motel. Iknew I was in some kind of daze after my long talk

47

Speaking Is BelievingSusan Friend Harding

After decades of standing aside from political life in America, fundamentalist or born-again Protes-tants moved assertively into public view in the 1980s, in part through leaders such as Jerry Falwell.During that period, Susan Friend Harding did fieldwork with fundamentalist Christians in Lynch-burg, Virginia, the home of Falwell’s movement, with a keen focus on how language is used. In a re-ligion without elaborate rituals or visual symbolism, Harding argues language plays an especiallysignificant role for fundamentalist Christians, whether in sermons, speeches, or witnessing, that is,engaging in persuasive conversations intended to convert. Harding’s understanding of her own roleas ethnographer was challenged by the community’s perception of her as unsaved, with interviewsserving as opportunities for witnessing.

Interviewing-turned-witnessing is just what occurred when Harding spoke with the ReverendMelvin Campbell. In the following material, a chapter from her book-length ethnography, Hardingdoes a close reading of her encounter with Reverend Campbell. While believers and non-believersmight interpret Campbell’s words differently, Harding’s goal is to establish how and why his speechis rhetorically effective. Campbell employs textual features such as personal anecdotes, Biblical nar-ratives, analogies, symbolism, and surface-level details of vocabulary and grammar, to tell stories ina way that persuades the listener of the veracity of the Christian experience.

Harding’s analysis is an excellent example of the language-centered approach within anthropol-ogy, as well as an anthropological contribution to the documentation of evangelical Christianity inthe contemporary United States. Susan Friend Harding is Professor of Anthropology at the Univer-sity of California, Santa Cruz.

To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain assurance areso many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided,and consciously wrong, inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right, superiorand happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities. This at least is what con-version signifies in general terms, whether or not we believe that direct divine operation isneeded to bring such a moral change about.

—William James, 1906

From: THE BOOK OF JERRY FALWELL: FUNDAMENTA-LIST LANGUAGE AND POLITICS. Princeton and Oxford:Princeton University Press, pp. 33–60, 2000.




with the Reverend Melvin Campbell. I usually amafter an interview, and this one had been especiallyintense. Halfway across town, I stopped at a stopsign, then started into the intersection, and was verynearly smashed by a car that seemed to come uponme from nowhere very fast. I slammed on the brakes,sat stunned for a split second, and asked myself“What is God trying to tell me?”

It was my voice but not my language. I had beeninhabited by the fundamental Baptist tongue I wasinvestigating. As the Reverend Campbell might haveput it, the Holy Spirit was dealing with me, speakingto my heart, bringing me under conviction. He wasshowing me that life is a passing thing, that deathcould take me in an instant, no matter how muchcontrol I fancied I had over my life, and that I shouldput my life in the Lord‘s hands before it was too late.

If we conceive of conversion as a process of ac-quiring a specific religious language or dialect, I wasinitiated into the first stage of fundamental Baptistconversion as I sat in my car that evening in Lynch-burg, awash in apprehension and relief. The processstarts when an unsaved listener begins to appropri-ate in his or her inner speech the saved speaker’slanguage and its attendant view of the world. Thespeaker’s language, now in the listener’s voice, con-verts the listener’s mind into a contested terrain, adivided self. At the moment of salvation, which maycome quickly and easily, or much later after great in-ward turmoil, the listener becomes a speaker. TheChristian tongue locks into some kind of central,controlling, dominant place; it has gone beyond thepoint of inhabiting the listener’s mind to occupy thelistener’s identity. The Holy Spirit, the very Word ofGod, has come, as fundamental Baptists say, to in-dwell the heart of the believer, who may now pub-licly display in speech and action a personal, whichis to say, conversational, relationship with God.

Conversion is an inner transformation whichquickens the supernatural imagination as it placesnew believers within the central storied sequence ofthe Christian Bible and enables them to approach theBible as a living reality. Conversion transfers narra-tive authority—the Holy Spirit—to the newly faith-ful as well as the wherewithal to narrate one’s life inChristian terms. As we will see, the keys that unlockthe Kingdom of God include Bible-based interpre-tive practices which Christians experience as the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Among fundamental Baptists, the gospel of JesusChrist is the plan of salvation, the good news, God’sgift to all mankind. Narrowly defined, the gospel is thestory, the message, of Christ’s death, burial, and resur-rection. More broadly, it is the storied sequence thatrenders the Bible whole, unified. How does the lan-guage and performance of fundamental Baptist gospelpreaching (and witnessing, testifying, evangelizing,spreading the Word) convict and convert the unsavedlistener? How does it work as a rhetoric of conversion?Witnessing is rhetorical in two senses, namely, as an ar-gument about the transformation of self that lost soulsmust undergo, and as a method of bringing about thatchange in those who listen to it. Fundamental Baptistwitnessing is not just a monologue that constitutes itsspeaker as a culturally specific person; it is also a dia-logue that reconstitutes its listeners. My focus is on thislatter aspect, on witnessing as the practice, the rite andthe rhetoric, of conversion.

William James speculated that those who experi-enced dramatic conversions might have been bornwith a “melancholy disposition,” a chronically “di-vided” mind, or else they had drunk “too deep of thecup of bitterness.” Contemporary social scientistshave also investigated converts to born-again Chris-tianity for some indication of why they convert. Thenotion is, apparently, that those who convert aresomehow susceptible, vulnerable, in need of some-thing, so the question becomes: “Why? What’swrong? What’s unsettling them?” Or, “What’s set-ting them up? How have they been predisposed toconvert?” Social scientists scrutinize the externalpsychological and social conditions of converts look-ing for clues, patterns, and causes. They have foundevidence in converts’ lives of psychological and so-cial stress (due to marriage problems, loss of a job,imprisonment, adolescence, dating, serious illnessor accidents, encounters with death, “role” transi-tions, moving to a new city, going to college, and soon). They have argued that converts were predis-posed by previous conditioning (religious upbring-ing, education, class, gender), and by patterns ofinterpersonal influence (by converted kin, friends,mentors). These correlations are not satisfying ex-planations, however, because, among other things,none of the circumstances have been found withenough regularity among converts, and the samecircumstances have been found among nonconvertswith too much regularity.





There is also considerable literature, both popularand academic, on how various ritual practices andpsychological techniques trigger experiences that re-sult in a conversion from one worldview, or mind-set,to another.1 Distinct conversion methods (socialseclusion, dramatic enactments, bodily markings,physical stress or pain, fasting, interrogation, chant-ing, silence, immobility, and so on) certainly pavethe way for radical shifts in belief and commitment.However, this approach, at least when plied by thosewho see conversion as a kind of brainwashing, over-looks how persuasive in a quite unsensational waythe recruiting rhetoric is. It overlooks the extent towhich the language of conversion as such “divides”the mind and contributes to bringing about conver-sion. The presumption which I think accounts forthis oversight, and which in more muted form alsoguides many social scientific studies, is that “nobodyin their right mind would believe this stuff.” Since“belief” is irrational, some sort of suspension of nor-mal thinking must have taken place and caused theconvert to lose his or her grip on reality.

Social scientists and professed unbelievers in gen-eral do not let themselves get close enough to “be-lief” to understand it, or, for that matter, even to seewhat it is. Men and women convert to fundamentalChristianity because they become convinced that su-pernatural reality is a fact, that Christ is the literalSon of God, that he did rise from the dead and isalive today, that the Holy Spirit is speaking to them,that Jesus will enter their hearts if they acknowledgetheir sins, that they will have eternal life, that God isreally real. To continue to think otherwise would beirrational; it is disbelief that is false and unthinking.The appropriate question then is: How does this su-pernatural order become real, known, experienced,and absolutely irrefutable?

Among conservative Protestants, and especiallyamong fundamentalists, it is the Word, the gospel ofJesus Christ, written, spoken, heard, and read, thatconverts the unbeliever. The stresses, transitions, in-fluences, conditioning, and techniques scrutinizedby many social scientists do not in themselves “ex-plain,” do not “cause,” conversion to Christ. All they

do is increase the likelihood that a person might lis-ten to the gospel; they may open or “prepare a per-son’s heart.” It is the Word of God, the gospel, and,believers would add, the Holy Spirit, God himself,that converts, that changes the heart.2 We cannot un-derstand fundamental Baptist conversion by lookingonly at what causes a person to listen to the gospel;the causes are innumerable. Rather, we must listen tothe gospel with an open ear, and we must explore theinterpretive practices that enable us to understandand accept what we hear.

Witnessing and preaching are the two main situa-tions in which believers speak the gospel most in-tensely. Preaching—the sermon––is a formal orationaddressed to a body of believers and nonbelievers byan ordained or anointed speaker in church servicesand revivals. Sermons occur in the context of clearritual format, of a collective, sanctifying scenario inwhich the mode of interpretation is enacted. Wit-nessing is more informal and often occurs in thecourse of what appears to be no more than a conver-sation between the witness, who is saved, and an un-saved listener. But it is no mere conversation. The wit-ness and the unsaved “do not share a commonunderstanding––either of the immediate situation orof reality more generally.” Witnesses are “aware ofthis difference in understanding and self-consciouslyset out to change the views of those they address”and to create a “compelling religious reality com-pletely at variance with their [listener’s] experience.”

Witnessing aims to separate novice listeners fromtheir prior, given reality, to constitute a new, previ-ously unperceived or indistinct reality, and to im-press that reality upon them, make it felt, heard,seen, known, undeniably real. The reality, or truth,

HARDING • SPEAKING IS BELIEVING | 383

1. Whitehead (1987) provides an excellent, critical reviewof this literature in her study of conversion amongScientologists.

2. Christian social scientists and theologians have studiedthe secular literature on conversion and generated theirown. Elmer Towns, dean of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty BaptistSeminary and a nationally known researcher in the“science of church growth,” told me that the highest rateof conversion occurred among prisoners, the second high-est among the bankrupt; he also emphasized the impor-tance of personal networks and of reaching people whilethey are “in transition” of some kind. The difference be-tween Towns and secular social scientists is that Townswould never suggest any of these factors really causesconversion; the Holy Spirit convicts sinners and Christsaves them.




constituted in witnessing is, in part, a linguistic one:the supernatural manifests itself as God’s voice andhis spirit is communicated and experienced throughwords. Much collective ritual among orthodoxProtestants is likewise centered on words, on theWord. Especially among fundamentalists, churchservices and revivals are stripped of overt, imagistic,and sacramental material; relatively little happensvisually, and spiritual realities are not communi-cated through sensuous, nonlinguistic means. In away, witnessing is pure fundamentalist ritual, shornof almost all distractions. It is the plainest, most con-centrated method for revealing and transmitting theWord of God, one in which language is intensified,focused, and virtually shot at the unwashed listener.

Fundamentalists are by no means unique in theiruse of oratory to convert others. Their general tech-niques and some of the content of their conversionrhetoric are broadly shared among conservativeProtestants. Indeed, the principal of conversion, ofone person insinuating his or her mode of interpreta-tion in the mind of another, informs all dialogue.3

What distinguishes fundamental Baptists from oth-ers is the degree to which they have formalizedrhetorical techniques for converting others, the pre-cise and distinctly unconscious manner in whichthose techniques appropriate the listener’s dialogicimagination, and the particular transformations ofself evoked in the listener.

As I sat in that intersection contemplating my nearcollision, it was quite specifically the ReverendCampbell’s language, his supernaturalizing mode ofinterpretation, that unfurled itself in my mind. I hadintended to interview him that afternoon, but withinthe first few minutes of our talk, Campbell assumedcontrol of the dialogue and reframed my appoint-ment to interview him into his opportunity to wit-ness to me for an hour and a half.

A witnessing session minimally includes thegospel story (an exegesis of the death, burial, andresurrection of Jesus Christ) and a confrontationbetween the witness and his or her listener in whichthe witness invites or exhorts the listener to receiveChrist as his or her personal savior. Witnesses mayalso tell how they and others came to know the Lordas savior; they may testify (give accounts of encoun-ters between themselves and God, and other narra-tive evidence of God’s intervention in the naturalworld) and deliver other doctrinal exegeses (regard-ing, for example, heaven and hell, the origin andnature of sin, or the ways of Satan).

Witnessing, like evangelistic preaching, “is in-tended to create a spiritual crisis by calling to the foreone’s desperate and lost conditions, which one mayhave been totally unaware of.” This crisis is the onsetof the conversion process, what fundamentalists call“coming under conviction,” and is based on a directexperience of the divine. You know when the HolySpirit convicts you of, or makes you see, your sins.Conviction effects a deep sensation of one’s own im-purity and separation from God, or one’s sinfulness,one’s sin nature. And it engenders a sense that some-thing has to be done about it. We shall see that theinner speech of convicted sinners is transformed asthey are alienated from their previous voices (the oldself, natural man); cast into a limbo (lost, in need,searching), that is to say, somehow in a liminal state,a state of confusion and speechlessness; and begin tohear a new voice (an inaudible voice, the Holy Spirit).

It is a kind of inner rite of passage that is com-pleted when sinners are saved, or born-again, regen-erated, washed in the blood of Christ. Salvation isexperienced as a release from the bondage of sin anda personal reconciliation with God. A new self, or thespiritual man, emerges and the supernatural imagi-nation is cut loose as the newborn Christian acceptsthe meaning of the gospel and begins to speak thelanguage of Christ. In the words of Benetta Jules-Rosette, who studied among, and joined, the Apostlesof John Maranke in Africa, conversion is “a powerfulclash resulting from the shift from one realm ofthought and action to another, a moment of specificshock. Under this shock, the very terms of physicalexistence seem to alter.”

The power of the Reverend Campbell’s rhetoric toinduce liminality was seconded in my case by sev-eral circumstances––I was on a number of margins. It


3. This is how Bakhtin described ordinary dialogue fromthe speaker’s point of view: “The speaker strives to get areading on his own word, and on his own conceptualsystem that determines this word, within the alien concep-tual system of the understanding receiver; he enters intodialogical relationships with certain aspects of this system.The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual horizonof the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien terri-tory, against his, the listener’s, apperceptive background.”




was late in the afternoon, and his church was on theedge of town. We were in a corner of the church, hisstudy, alone, on the edge of propriety. I was begin-ning my fieldwork. And Campbell seemed to me aperipheral character in my study. Having grown upwith Jerry Falwell and trained to be a preacher at hisLiberty Bible Institute, Campbell was in, but notquite of, Falwell’s empire. His congregation ap-peared to consist largely of white, working-class orunemployed men and women and their children.Jordan Baptist Church was, in his words, “a solidwork,” with about 350 members, and it sustained anumber of outreaches, but Campbell and his congre-gation were not engaged in any of the political orcultural activism that earned Jerry Falwell a nationalreputation.

Campbell was a tall, trim, muscular man, his sil-very gray hair piled up from his forehead in waves an inch or two high. He sat at his desk, I in a sidechair, and he looked me in the eye the entire time wetalked. Later I realized that most people who sat inthe chair I was sitting in came to Campbell for spiri-tual help. I also realized he was eager to have metape-record our conversation so that I might listen toit again and again should I prove too hard-heartedthat afternoon to receive the help he offered me.

Born-again believers say that unbelievers cannotunderstand their faith. Jeanne Favret-Saada came toa similar conclusion while studying witchcraft in theBocage region of France. “For anyone who wants tounderstand the meaning of [witchcraft] discourse,there is no solution but to practice it oneself, to be-come one’s informant.” This is so, she tells us,because there are only two “positions” from which aperson speaks or hears speech about witchcraft: be-witched and unwitcher; if you are neither, you willnever hear others speaking the discourse. The situa-tion is, of course, quite different among fundamen-talists. Gospel talk is public and targets outsiders,nonbelievers, but, as in witchcraft, there is no suchthing as a neutral position, no place for an ethnogra-pher who seeks “information.” Either you are lost, oryou are saved.

When I went to Lynchburg, I was naive enough tothink I could be detached, that I could participate inthe culture I was observing without partaking of it. Icould come and stay for months, talk mainly tochurch people, attempt to “learn the culture,” askquestions based on respect and knowledge; and still

remain outside, separate, obscure about what Ibelieved and disbelieved. But there was no suchground. I might think there was, but the church peo-ple did not, no matter what I said. It was inconceiv-able to them that anyone with an appetite for thegospel as great as mine was simply “gathering infor-mation,” was just there “to write a book.” No, I wassearching. God works in mysterious ways. In my case,he seemed to be letting me find my way to himthrough this book I said I was writing about them.Several people told me as much; others just seemedamused when I told them what I was doing and gaveme a look that suggested they knew better. My storyabout what I was doing there, instead of protectingme from “going native,” located me in their world: Iwas a lost soul on the brink of salvation. And theReverend Campbell spoke to me accordingly.

I asked him first how he became a pastor, and hetook fifteen minutes to answer me. I had expected toget something akin to “information” or “facts,” and hegave me a long story of personal transformation, onethat began with how he had been saved and hadserved the Lord before he was called to preach. Henever acknowledged my academic project and seemedto speak to me as if I were what they call a “nominalChristian,” someone who might think she was a Chris-tian but who had never been saved. He could assumeI was not born-again simply because I did not indicateI was, as believers do when they meet, if only by a turnof phrase. Certainly, he was aware of himself as wit-nessing to me, and he had been trained, formally andinformally, in soul-winning techniques, but his man-ner and his method seemed to draw more on uncon-scious intuition than deliberate design.

There were at least five distinct rhetorical move-ments in Campbell’s witnessing talk that afternoon.He equated his present listener––me––with the lis-teners in his stories. He fashioned her as lost. He fash-ioned the gospel speaker––himself and others––assaved. He transformed lost listeners in his storiesinto gospel speakers. And he invited me to undergothe same transformation, the same narrative rite ofpassage, and become a gospel speaker. I will tracethese movements by exhibiting and expanding onsequential pieces of Campbell’s speech, hoping toshow you, as much as tell you, what conversion andbelief are among fundamental Baptists. Unfortu-nately, in words flattened out on a page, we mayhear only suggestions of his Southern, fundamental





Baptist accent, his peculiar cadence, intonation,pausing, pitch, and stress.

I was saved when I was fifteen years old. I was a mem-ber of a Methodist church all of my life as a child. At theage of fifteen I still had not heard the gospel story of JesusChrist and how that he died for our sins. I was instructedas a child coming up in the Methodist movement just tolive a good life, to be morally good and to maintain all ofthose particular statuses, and I would be okay. Now I wasinvited by a friend to visit a Baptist church. . . . And thiswas an independent fundamental Baptist church. And ofcourse they had one of those hell-fire-and-damnationpreachers in there, and he got down on my case that night.And I began to look at things and I realized there wassomething missing in my life. Because, though we’venever seen God, we’re still aware of the fact that he is pres-ent, we know he’s there. And even though I wasn’t savedI knew there was something bombarding my life that wasbeyond my power to see or really understand at the time.And I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t receiving what Ineeded in a Methodist church. So after attending aboutthree of their services––and incidentally they were in re-vival that week––then the spirit of God began to convictme about my place in life and how that I was lost and hadnot yet turned my whole life over to Christ, so I was savedthat week, I went forward and gave my heart to Christ.Now this is a process that some folks misconstrue alongthe highways of life. “I put all the nine yards in that reallybelongs there . . . ,” they think often that this is all that’snecessary. But I realized that night there was a need in mylife and that need was met, and so much the spirit of Godcame to live in my heart. Now this is God’s gift to everyperson that receives Christ. So I joined that particularchurch after about a month of visiting there. But I wasfirst saved and then I followed Christ to baptism, whichI hadn’t been baptized before. Of course the Methodistchurch, they sprinkle, and I don’t have any argument withthem there, other than the fact that I believe the Bibleteaches immersion. And then after this, my life began togrow and materialize into something that was real, some-thing that I could really identify with. That emptiness thatwas there before was now being replaced by somethingthat had meaning and purpose in it. And I began to sensethe need of telling others about what had happened to me.And basically I think perhaps the change could be detectedin my life, as the Bible declares, that when a person issaved, the old man, the old person, or the character thatthey were passes away, and then they become a new cre-ation in Christ Jesus. That is to say, they might be a char-

acter that may be drinking and cutting up and carryingon, and a variety of things that are ill toward God. All ofthese things began to dissolve away. I found that I had nodesires for all these things, but then I began to abhor them.I actually began to hate them. And this was in accordancewith the Scriptures, as I found out later. And then as mylife began to mature in Christ I found that I too could winothers to Christ the same way I was won: by simply tellingthem that there’s a heaven to gain and a hell to shun.

In his conversion narrative, the Reverend Camp-bell defined being “lost” and being “saved” and howhe moved from one position to the other. Lostness,he indicated, is a position from which you listen, andsalvation is one from which you speak. Campbellbegan to pull me in and placed me into his narrativein the position of listener.

Numerous poetic and performance features teemon the surface of Campbell’s speech. There are versemarkers (“and” and “now”), special codes, figurativelanguage, symbolic and metaphoric parallelism, andappeals to tradition. These features mark the text as anoral performance and indicate a special relationshipbetween performer and listener. It is a relationship inwhich the performer assumes responsibility for a dis-play of competence, indirectly instructs the listenerabout how to interpret messages, and invites, elicits,participation. These tactics bind the listener to the per-former in a relationship of dependence and keep thelistener caught up in the display.

Campbell also communicated my relationship tohis speech more directly through his use of pronouns(emphasis added): I still had not heard the gospel story ofJesus Christ and how that he died for our sins. . . . Because,though we’ve never seen God, we’re still aware of the factthat he is present, we know he’s there. Campbell contin-ued to place me in his narrative during the rest of thetime we talked by using the cooptive “we,” and hefrequently shifted his pronouns and at times used“you” ambiguously, as a personal and impersonalpronoun. His listener by these means became thesubject of a whole range of presuppositions positedin such a way that they were difficult to resist.

At one point in this initial speech and at severalpoints subsequently Campbell quite overtly identi-fied me with his narrative listeners. The central,repeated narrative structure in his witnessing was adialogic encounter between person and God, orbetween a lost listener and a saved speaker. The con-text of his witnessing, of course, was also conversa-





tional: Campbell and I were engaged in a dialogue,one in which he, who was saved, was speaking, andI, who was not saved, was listening. Early in his con-version narrative, Campbell began to collapse theseparallel levels of conversational structure and therebyplace me in his stories, in his speech:

Now I was invited by a friend to visit a Baptistchurch . . . and of course this was an independent funda-mental Baptist church. And of course they had one of thosehell-fire-and-damnation preachers in there, and he gotdown on my case that night. In describing his contextthe night he was converted, Campbell called atten-tion to our––his and my—context. He too was a hell-fire-and-damnation preacher, and I, in effect, was in-formed that he would be getting down on my caseand that I might be converted that afternoon. Thiswas no mere innuendo: Campbell was thus aligningme and my encounter with him with the listeningpersons and their encounters with God in his stories.Whenever a saved speaker addressed a wayward lis-tener, the speaker would also be addressing me. I toowould be transfigured, if only by degrees, by thevery act of listening to the Reverend Campbell.

Campbell reminded me of my position in his nar-rative several times. I heard it faintly when he said, Ifound that I too could win others to Christ the same way Iwas won: by simply telling them that there’s a heaven togain and a hell to shun. He was more explicit later,when he told me how he was called to preach.

Now when I had my calling at age twenty-nine, I wasoperating a service station. And I was in the station one af-ternoon, working on a car. And God did not speak to mewith an audible voice, but he spoke to my heart. And therewas a conversation going on much like the one that’s here.I’m doing the talking and you’re listening. And God wasdoing the talking and I was listening. I was down under thecar, changing the oil, and . . . God was just dealing with meabout doing this. And I said, “I can’t do that.” And muchlike Moses when the Word called him to do something, hesaid, “I can’t even talk.” And God said, “Well, I’ll sendyour brother Aaron to help you.” So every excuse I wouldcome up with, he would head me off by instructing me thathe would do something to meet my shortcomings. So I fi-nally surrendered in the sense of the word that afternoon.

If I had any doubt about where I belonged inCampbell’s talk, this story dispelled it. God spoke tohim under his car that afternoon just as Campbell wasspeaking to me in his office. I am the listener; he is thespeaker; that which transpires in his narrated dia-

logues shall somehow transpire between us. Campbellalso introduced and located me within another par-allel level of dialogic structure, between God andbiblical figures. I must listen to Campbell as long agoMoses, and much later Campbell, listened to God.Clues such as these inform or, rather, persuade thelistener that the witness’s words, though they appearto be about the witness and about other characterson the narrative surface, are on a deep level aboutthe listener: you, too, are a character in these stories;these stories are about you.

Keeping in mind that much of what the ReverendCampbell said about himself as he came “under con-viction” also applied to his listener, let us examinehow he fashioned the lost soul, the sinner, the personin need of salvation.

Young Campbell realized there was somethingmissing in his life. There was a need in his life. Hewas lost and had not yet turned his whole life over toChrist. He was cutting up and carrying on, anddoing a variety of things that were ill toward God.He realized his life was empty and lacked meaning; itwas not maturing and growing into something thatwas real. Yet he knew there was something bombard-ing his life beyond his power to see or really under-stand. Campbell was ostensibly describing himselfhere, but because he had put me in his narrative in hisplace, he was also describing me. Indeed, he was re-fashioning me.

Campbell’s language emptied my life, my per-sonality, and erased my past. I was primarily distin-guished by what I lacked and, given my lacking, bywhat I needed. I stood for absence, for void, yet Iwas aware of something more, something missing,unseen, hidden. And I would come to need that, todesire it, having been launched on a quest for affir-mation and revelation which may be achieved onlythrough conversion. All this was accomplished in meby implication and presupposition, not by direct ar-gument. My consent was not sought; I was impli-cated, already enlisted as a collaborator, in my ownmetamorphosis.

As well as constituting the listener as a lost soul,Campbell in his conversion story began to fashionthe speaker, the saved soul, as he narratively movedhimself, you could say converted himself, from lostlistener to a saved speaker of the Word of God.





The hell-fire-and-damnation preacher who gotdown on Campbell’s case shortly became the spiritof God convicting him about his place in life––thathe was lost and had not yet given his whole life overto Christ. He was saved, and he went forward andgave his heart to Christ, and the spirit of God came tolive in his heart. His need was met. His life began togrow and materialize in to something that was real,something that had meaning and purpose in it. Hisold character and its desires passed away. Then hebegan to sense the need of telling others about whathad happened to him and found that he too couldwin others to Christ in the same way that he waswon. The spirit of God first worked on Campbell andbrought him under conviction, then entered andtransformed him, and finally spoke through him tobring others under conviction.

God’s spirit, the Holy Spirit, converts sinners, buthe (the fundamental Baptist Holy Spirit is a maleperson) speaks through those who preach thegospel. Preachers speak the Word of God; Godspeaks through them. Campbell had started a churchin a storefront after God called him, and on the firstday of services, he wondered why anyone wouldcome there to hear him preach. Later he realized itwas the Word of God they must come to hear, and not me.It’s the Word of God that must cause the change. Thechange is caused not by God as an external agent,but by the Word, the spirit, of God, which is internal-ized when a person accepts Christ. By nature, Adamand Eve, you know, they caused the problem, but they in-vested into everyone of us that would be borned a similarnature. Now this nature can be wiped clean, it can bechanged by once again instilling the spirit of God withinus. Here, according to Campbell, is how the HolySpirit works his will.

Now I realize many times when I preach, the Bible sayspreaching is as of foolishness. But there is another agentworking while I’m preaching. And he’s the Holy Spirit.And he’s the one that grips the heart. I could throw a rockat you and you could throw another one at me. But if Imake a statement from the Word of God, and the HolySpirit bears me up, and he begins to deal with your heartabout it, then when we have parted company, he’s stillworking, and I’m gone. Now until we’re saved, he liveswithout us. But when we’re saved, he comes to live withinus, and this is what we mean by receiving the Lord into us.When he comes to live in us he comes in the form of theHoly Spirit. I’ve never seen him. But like a mother with a

child, she’s not seen her unborn baby, but she knows he’sthere. You say, “How does she know?” She feels life andmovement within her. Now the spirit of God is like an-other voice, like another party. And he is not a figment ofthe imagination. But the Bible says, he’s a real personality,a real person. And actually he can catch your next wordand stop it, if you’re sensitive to him. And if you’re not,you put a piece of tape across his mouth, you can fold himback into the innermost rooms of your heart and give himno liberty. But if you let him, he becomes the tutor of yourlife, the instructor, the guide, the teacher. And he tells—now when I use the term “tells,” he speaks to my heartand he gives me—you’ve seen the time when you wouldsense something and you couldn’t really say another per-son was talking to you, but you sense you ought to dosomething. You were impressed to get up and go see some-body or something. All right, this is the way the HolySpirit works with me. He impresses me. He moves uponmy heart to do certain things. And sometimes he gives mespiritual discernment that’s almost like reading anotherperson’s mind. Many times I’ve had people sit down totalk with me, and the Holy Spirit would almost link mymind up with theirs and tell me certain things. And I can-not explain it, but this is because he is a third part of theGodhead. In reality, it’s God living within us. Now oncehe’s in here, the things that I used to love to do—and Imean I had a real passion for some things before I gotsaved—and when he came to live within me, all of a sud-den I found that I hated and despised those things. Well, itwasn’t my flesh; it was Christ living within me that wasdespising those things because they were anti- and alien tohis nature.

Fundamental Baptists, especially preachers, areacutely aware of the power of witnessing and of thegospel, of the rhetoric of conversion in general. Theyattribute its transforming power to the workings ofthe Holy Spirit, that is, to supernatural agencies, butwhen they describe how those agencies work, theyinvariably refer to words, to speaking and hearingand reading. In effect, in a coded way, they recognizelanguage as a medium, even a subject, of religiousexperience, and they coach the unconverted in thelinguistic dimension of conversion.

The Holy Spirit uses Campbell’s speech, as itwere, to remodel his listeners’ inner speech. TheHoly Spirit impresses on Campbell what to say anddeals with the hearts of his listeners, bearing him up,after he’s gone. The heart is contrasted with the headand seems to mark the difference between uncon-





scious and conscious knowledge and belief. TheHoly Spirit, the Word, works on the unconsciousmind to bring the conscious mind under conviction.As listeners appropriate the gospel, the Holy Spiritpenetrates the conscious mind and becomes anothervoice, a real person, who begins to recast their innerspeech. After salvation, the voice of the Holy Spiritguides converts, gives them discernment, and seemsto alter the very chemistry of desire.

The Reverend Campbell spelled out the moment ofsalvation elliptically in his own conversion narra-tive, and he elaborated it in his disquisition on theHoly Spirit. He also posited the moment of salva-tion in highly charged symbolic terms, in biblicalexegeses on birth and death, flesh, spirit, blood, andsacrifice.

Campbell drew on well-established parallels inevangelical culture between narratives of Christ’sdeath, or the gospel story, and conversion narratives,and between the cosmic order outlined in the Biblefrom the Garden of Eden to Calvary and the epic ofeach individual in the face of inevitable death. Thegospel story defines the movement, the passage thatall believers must endure, from suffering and dying(coming under conviction), to burial (silence, ab-sence, void), and resurrection (converting, beingreborn, eternal life). As God restored man to himselfby sacrificing his son on the cross, so the unsavedmay restore themselves to God by dying to their oldselves and being born anew in Christ. All they needdo is acknowledge their sin nature, accept that Christdied for their sins, and ask him into their hearts. It isthese words, once genuinely spoken, that resurrect adead soul, that instill in the newborn believer theHoly Spirit, the very voice of God.

Campbell began to elaborate the connection be-tween the gospel story and salvation, as witnessesoften do, by talking about Nicodemus, who came tovisit Jesus one night and said to him, as Campbellput it, Now you’ve got something that we’ve missed.

Jesus said, “Nicodemus, I’m going to limit my wordsin talking to you. Listen carefully.” He said, “Ye must beborned again. Ye must be borned again.” And Nicode-mus said, “How in the world can a man be born whenhe’s old? Is it possible that I could enter again a secondtime into my mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus said,“No, you didn’t listen. I’m going to repeat one moretime. . . . You must be borned again. . . . That which is

born of flesh is flesh. That which is born of spirit is spirit.Marvel not that I say, you’ve already had one birth, butyou need more. You need the birth that’s going to changeyou from the one you received from Adam, which is a sin-ful nature. You’ve already experienced that first birthand you’re full of yourself. But now you need the secondbirth, the one that will give you this indwelling of thespirit of God.”

Now when I was born, I was born physically of mymother. Jesus said, “You must be borned of the water first,of the spirit second.” . . . When a child is about to be born,it’s first enclosed in the mother’s womb. Is that true?[Yes.] That water must be broke before the child can beborn. Now this is a representation of the first birth. Hesaid, “You must be born of the water first, Nicodemus.You’ve already been born, you’re here.” But then he said,“Now you must be born by the spirit.” Your motherbirthed you the first time. And your mother cannot giveyou this spiritual birth. So this must come from above.Now God gives this second birth. [I ask, “How does thesecond birth change a person?”]

Okay, Susan, you have the characteristics and thetraits of your mother and your father. True? [“Yes.”] Allright. Now the second birth will give you the characteris-tics or the traits of the Father that birthed you. Now thefirst time when you were born, you couldn’t help yourmother. If your life had depended on it, you had to dependupon her strength to bring you into this world. True?[“Yes.”] Now when we’re saved, or borned again, this isabsolutely and totally dependent upon God.

Now where did the birth take place at? It had to be abirth of such a caliber that it had to take care of the wholeworld. And this was a place called Calvary. Jesus, when hewas dying, was shedding his blood, and the Old Testamentsays that without the shedding of blood there is no remis-sion, there can be no forgiveness for sin. So blood—theinnocent—and God typified this in the animal sacrifices ofthe Old Testament. When Adam and Eve sinned. Genesis3:21 said he slew innocent animals. And he took the skinoff these animals, and he covered their nakedness, which isthe type of giving them a covering which is representativeof righteousness, and the blood was used to atone for theirsins. . . . Atonement means to cover, and the blood of theanimals of the Old Testament typified one day that Christwould come, shed his blood, but then this blood, this bloodbeing shed now, brings about redemption and not atone-ment, which is a temporal covering. For thousands ofyears, the Jews under the Mosaic economy offered up sac-rifice of animals—you’ve probably read that—and they





did this because this was representative of one day a com-ing Savior.

You remember the incident in Exodus [sic], about howAbraham went to offer his son Isaac on Mount Moriah.And the Bible says that Isaac the son said, “Father”—hedidn’t know what was going on—he said, “Here’s thealtar, here’s the wood, here’s the knife, here’s the fire, butwhere’s the sacrifice? Where’s the lamb?” And Abrahamsaid, “My son, God himself shall provide a sacrifice. Alamb.” Now we go down several thousand years into thefuture, and John the Baptist, when he saw Jesus Christ forthe first time, he told the disciples that were with him, hesaid, “Behold, take a look. Here is the lamb of God thatwill take away the sins of the world.” And the lamb ofGod was Jesus Christ. Of course, Isaac was not slain.There was a ram caught in the thicket which was a type ofsubstitution. So Jesus Christ died in my place as a substi-tution for me.

According to Billy Graham, “the conquest of deathis the ultimate goal of Christianity,” and victory isachieved when sinners are born again and the spiritof God is instilled in them. Rebirth is totally depen-dent upon the grace of God, as a baby is totally de-pendent on its mother for its birth. Symbolically,Campbell first moved his listener from the first birth,the mother, flesh, and water breaking, to the secondbirth, the Father, spirit, and blood shed. The second(spirit/male) birth takes over, subverts, and cancelsout the consequences of the first (flesh/female) birth,releasing the sinner from the wages of sin, death. Thewomb of the second birth was the cross at Calvary.Christ mediated between the first (flesh/female) andsecond (spirit/male) birth and created the possibilityof reconciliation with God.

After spelling out the contrast between the firstand the second birth, Campbell moved deeper into adiscussion of blood, of the innocent. The blood ofanimals sacrificed under the law of Moses was atemporal, or a temporary and earthly, covering(atonement). The blood of Christ provided eternal,heavenly remission from sin (redemption). Throughanimal sacrifice, humans asked God’s forgivenessand might stay his judgment, but they were still con-demned to die. Only the self-sacrifice of God himselfcould lift the curse of Adam and Eve and overturnthe Mosaic economy. God gave to man that which hehad not asked Abraham to give, his only son, hisown flesh and blood, and so made available eternallife to those who would believe. God no longer asks

the blood of animals from men and women. He asksfor repentance and faith in the saving grace of Christ.A sacrifice is still due, namely, the flesh-bound selfof the first birth, which is offered up in the act ofbelieving.

Animal blood is linked to spiritual death; it canonly cover sin (separation from God, death) andnakedness (meaninglessness, void); and it only rep-resents, or typifies, righteousness (order, reunionwith God) and a coming Savior. Christ’s blood actu-ally saves men and women from spiritual death;Christ’s death substitutes for them and createseternal life. Here Campbell was using the New Tes-tament to overtake, subvert, and transform the OldTestament; he seemed to suggest that “Mosaic” sacri-fice only approximated, or signaled to, God, whileborn-again sacrifice relates directly to and reunitesone with God.

On a symbolic level, Campbell argued that it wasChrist’s blood that made this transition possible. Butnarratively, that is, looking at the form his argumenttook on the surface of his whole juxtaposition ofstories, Campbell emphasized the importance of spo-ken language, of dialogue, in making the passagefrom one world to the next. He repeatedly relied ondialogue—between Jesus and Nicodemus, himselfand me, Isaac and Abraham, John the Baptist and thedisciples—to set up the dilemma of human choice. Inthis respect, he was speaking as much within Old asNew Testament tradition. Old Testament writers used“narration-through-dialogue” to highlight “humanwill confronted with alternatives which it may chooseon its own or submit to divine intervention. Articu-lated language provides the indispensable model fordefining [the] rhythm of political or historical alterna-tives, question and response, creaturely uncertaintyover against the Creator’s intermittently revealed de-sign, because in the biblical view of reality words un-derlie reality.” And it is through spoken dialogue,through witnessing, that each sinner is confrontedwith and makes the choice to accept or reject Christ.

The Reverend Campbell concluded an hour of virtu-ally uninterrupted talk with a veritable gospel poemthat fully realized the complex, holistic meaning ofblood as birth and death and emphasized the mutu-ality of the sacrifice and reconciliation betweenhumans and God. Campbell’s speech is strikinglybiblical here—in fact, much of it is a rephrasing of





several verses from the Old Testament Book ofEzekiel—though as elsewhere he converts the Hebrewtext to New Testament ends.4

My birth, it belongs to God. God made me. And thenPaul said, ”When I’ve been saved, I’ve been bought with aprice.” What was that price? His life at Calvary. That’swhat he gave for me. He ransomed me out of the, youmight say, the slave markets of sin and brought me into aright relationship. And when I was unworthy, the Biblesaid he loved me. When I was wretched and naked, when Iwas borned, the prophets said it was like I was thrown outonto the ground. I had not been washed in salt. I had notbeen suppled [washed in water]. I had not been bathed inolive oil. I was laying there in my own blood, dying. Andwhen he saw me, there was nothing about me that reallymade me desirable. Yet he looked beyond all of my faultsand saw my needs, and he come, and he loved me, and hedied for me. And he even made it available so that I couldknow this, and when I come to that knowledge, I had no al-ternative but to want to run to the one that loved me. Be-cause nobody had ever cared for me like Jesus. And that’sabout the size of the story. Nobody.

Campbell then turned to me and asked, NowSusan, let me ask you a question. Do you know Christ asyour personal savior? He asked me several more ques-tions. Do you believe in God? What if you died today?Then he told me a story of a man he buried a fewweeks before who had choked to death on some food.Had no idea he would be sent out into eternity. . . . Life isjust an uncertain thing. He inquired again into myfaith. Have you ever sensed the presence of God? Then hetold me about a man who, at forty, lamented that he’dbeen looking for a wife for so long. Campbell toldhim, I think God has sent you the right woman, probablytwenty times, and you turned her down. He said the manhad overlooked the orchid and all the other beautiful

flowers while looking for a rose. Can you identify withthat?

Then Campbell brought his exhortation to arather stunning conclusion.

Now if in this life, the Bible says, only we have hope,then we of all men are most miserable. But you see my life,my hope, is in the life to come, and I realize this life is apassing thing. Jeremiah says it’s like a vapor. It appearsbut for a little while, and then vanishes. We know how un-certain life is. We’re just not sure how long things aregoing to go. I went to work one morning. I had some workto do on a Saturday morning. And one of my sons wasfourteen years old. And the other one was fifteen years old.And we got up that morning. And I went in, and I rassledwith my son and rassled him out of bed, the one that wasfourteen. And we got up that morning and ate breakfast.We opened the Word of God. We read and we prayed to-gether as a family, my wife, my two sons, and I. And Iwent on to do that work that morning. It was a Saturday.And I had something I wanted to move. And I was operat-ing a crane. And I accidentally killed him that morning.And I looked at God, and I said, “Lord, you told me inyour Word that all things work together for good to thosethat love you, especially those that are called according toyour purpose.” And I said, “I’ve served you faithfully.And I’ve loved you. And I’ve given you my heart, my life,my soul, given you everything about me. And now I can’tunderstand this, why you’ve taken my son.” And Goddidn’t speak with a voice that I heard with my ear but hespoke to my heart. He said, “Melvin, you know maybe youdon’t understand what I’ve done at this particular time,but, can you accept it?” And I said, “yes sir, I can acceptit.” And Susan, when I made that statement, and I settledthat in my own heart, and I said “Lord, I accept it thoughI don’t understand it,” I don’t know where to say it camefrom other than that God gave it to me, but he gave me apeace in my soul. And I have not questioned it since.

Now I went and shared it with my wife. I said,“Shelby,” I said, “God said all things would work togetherfor the good to us because we loved him.” And she said ba-sically the same thing I did, “Well, I don’t understand.This isn’t good.” But I said, “Yeah, but God said it isgood.” And I shared with her, and when I shared this withher, she came of the same opinion. And we watched themclose the casket on that little fellow and my, he was justsuper. I mean, he was almost my heart throb, you know,that was my baby. And yet he died in my arms. And yet Ilooked at God and I said, “Lord, I’m going to love you ifyou take my other son. I’m going to love you if you take


4. Compare the Reverend Campbell’s language here withthese words, which God spoke to Ezekiel regarding thenation of Israel (16:4–6): “And as for thy nativity, in theday thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither wastthou washed in water to supple thee; thou wast not saltedat all, nor swaddled at all. None eye pitied thee, to do anyof these unto thee, to have compassion upon thee, butthou wast cast out in the open field, to the loathing of thyperson, in the day that thou wast born. And when I passedby thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I saidunto thee when thou wast in thy own blood, Live; yea, Isaid unto thee, when thou wast in thy blood, Live.”




my wife. I’m going to love you if you take my health, if youstrip me of everything I’ve got, I’m going to love you.”

Now I’m saying that because, Susan, he is real. This isnot mythology. I’m forty-six years old, and I’m no fool.God is alive. And his son lives in my heart. And I’d lovefor him to live in your heart. Of all that I could give orthink of ever giving over to you, I hope that what we’vetalked about here today will help you make that decision,to let him come into your heart, and then he will be yourtutor. And he’ll instruct you in things that perhaps I’vestumbled over today. Sometimes the vocabulary may notbe appropriate to really describe the depth and the detail ofthe things that need to be said. But this is where the HolySpirit can make intercession for us. The Bible says withgroanings and utterings that we just cannot utter. I maymiss something, but he’ll bring it out. I may present some-thing, and you don’t understand it. But he will reveal it toyou. This is what the whole thing is about.

Campbell began his ultimate narrative on a noteof wistful resignation. Life is a passing thing, avapor; it’s here for a little while and then vanishes.Without pause, he shifted into a homey story aboutgetting his sons up one Saturday morning, openingand reading the Word of God, and going out to workin the yard. Then in a split second he delivered a nar-rative shock: And I accidentally killed him that morning.The sentence disrupts his story. It startles his listener.But before it is absorbed, Campbell shifts to the realpoint—his conversation with God. God askedMelvin Campbell to accept what he, God, had askedAbraham to accept and what he, God himself, waswilling to give: his son’s death. And Melvin obeyed:Yes, sir. I can accept it. This sentence, in a moment asextreme and extraordinary as the tragic death of hisson by his own hand, is what God asked of him to re-store order in himself and in the world. By speakinghis obedience, his submission to God’s will, theywere reconciled, and Campbell received in returnpeace in his soul, an eager willingness to give stillmore. The same gifts, he concluded, awaited me, ifonly I too would accept Christ. This is what the wholething is about.

The unborn-again listener wants to know moreabout Campbell and Campbell’s son, not aboutGod’s son. How did the boy die? How did Campbellreally feel about it? What about his pain? His sor-row? His guilt? How could he speak to a strangerabout what could be the most tragic moment in hislife with such spareness, such calm, such calcula-

tion? The dialogues with God and with his wifesound like cloaks concealing what he really musthave felt. At best, they ring of reinterpretation, of a ret-rospective story Campbell tells—one that, as he him-self suggests, renders him at peace with his loss. Theunregenerate listener interrogates Campbell’s story asif it were a system of verbal clues about somethingoutside itself—about the tragic event, his raw experi-ence, the unmediated emotions of the moment, orhis subsequent effort to recover and reintegrate—and finds the story distinctly odd, choppy, suspi-ciously elusive.

In contrast, the born-again believer, or the unbe-liever who is being born-again, listens to the cadenceand phrasing of Campbell’s words, to the estheticshape of his story and the multidimensional biblicaluniverse it presupposes, and hears nothing but thetruth, that is, the world evoked, the world consti-tuted, by the story. Campbell’s tale sounds home-spun, but its threads are thousands of years old. Inthe story’s rich weave are echoes of the trials of Job,and paraphrasings of David’s songs in Psalms and ofPaul’s letters to the Romans and the Phillippians.Many of the literary devices that distinguish Hebrewscripture are also audible—the strategic use of “now”and “and”; the laconic pace; the use of minimal detailto establish time, place, character, and relationships;the characteristic rush of biblical narrative toward anessential moment; auspicious shifts and gaps thatengage interpretive attention; the privileging of dia-logue over narration to reveal character; and therepetiton of key dialogue and the movement ofaction-response. Campbell’s supple mastery of bibli-cal conventions authorize him as a “man of God,” aman who breathed life into God’s Word and whomGod’s Word breathed to life. But what made his storytruly captivating and potentially transformative wasits placement at the end of a sequence of biblicalstories which, looking back, fashioned a series of in-terlocking sacrificial altars, and, looking forward,fashioned one upon which a sacrifice was due. Thissequence, the sacrificial passage, was formed in hisdisquisition on the Old Testament stories of Adamand Eve, and Abraham and Isaac, and on the NewTestament story of Christ’s death at Calvary.

Campbell summed up the narrative economy laiddown by those stories: Now here’s the entire Bible andits economy coming together. For four thousand years ofthe Old Testament, they offered up blood sacrifices. Now





all of this together, combined, typified one day a cominghope. They looked through the offering of the blood one dayto Calvary. . . . They looked forward and believed that hewould [die for us], and I look back and believed that hedid, and we all focus at a place called Calvary and realizewhy he died.

Campbell called attention here to the way inwhich Bible-believing Christians make connectionsamong the storied events, both biblical and histori-cal. The interpretive links between his juxtaposedstories—between the animal blood shed at Edenand Mount Moriah and the divine blood shed atCalvary, and between Christ’s self-sacrifice andours—were “typological,” or “figural,” links. OldTestament storied events “typify” the central storyof the New Testament. The skins that coveredAdam and Eve and the blood of animals slain inthe Old Testament were a “type” of righteousness,of redemption. Earlier events are types of laterevents. That is, earlier events prefigure laterevents, and later events complete, or fulfill, earlier,incomplete events. In figural interpretation, “anevent on earth signifies not only itself but at thesame time another, which it predicts or confirms. . . .The connection between occurrences is not re-garded as primarily a chronological or causal de-velopment but as a oneness within the divine plan,of which all occurrences are parts and reflections.”There is no distinction between biblical and histor-ical stories here. Both are “events on earth” relatedby figuration, enabling Christians to envision “thereal world as formed by the sequence told by thebiblical stories.”

Adam’s sin called forth a sacrifice of animals tocover him with their skins. Abraham’s obediencecalled forth the ram to substitute for Isaac. Both sto-ries, or events, are interpreted as incomplete. Ani-mal sacrifice only atones, only provides a temporalcovering, a substitute for the ultimate sacrifice—death—that is due. When Christ made the ultimatesacrifice upon the cross for all mankind, he com-pleted, he filled the gaps in, all the prior stories. Inthe same instant, he opened a gap that must beclosed. Christ’s death raised a question that must beanswered by all those who come after: Whom didChrist die for? In answering, “He died for me,” andin sacrificing their old selves to Christ, Campbelland all believers close the gap; they fulfill or com-plete the story. Simultaneously, their self-sacrifice

poses the question anew to all who have not sacri-ficed themselves.

Not long after his exposé of our right relationshipto Calvary, Campbell inquired into my beliefs andfound, mostly from what was not said, that I was un-likely to be convinced that afternoon that Christ diedfor me. From then on his talk led in a zigzagging butsteady fashion toward his sacrificing his own son forme in order to strike home his message one last time.In doing so, he set up a figural sequence of sacrificestories, from Abraham and Isaac, to Christ’s pas-sion, to his own terrible tale, a sequence that lookedforward with hope to the next story, my own self-sacrifice of faith.

Campbell wanted his listener to understand thatshe, her life, bore the same relationship to the storyof Christ’s sacrifice that that story bore to the story ofAbraham and Isaac. Her story would fulfill Christ’sin the same way that Christ’s fulfilled the OldTestament tale. The moment of salvation is preciselythe moment when a lost soul realizes that Christ diedfor you. Suddenly, the story of Calvary, the Bible as awhole, becomes “relevant.” The context in whichbiblical stories are meaningful and the context ofone’s personal life collapse into each other, and thefusion evokes a sense of great insight, of miracle. Allof these stories are speaking to you. These stories areGod speaking to you.

More specifically, you stand in the same relationto the ram as Isaac did. The ram died in his stead.The lamb, Christ, died in your stead. This connectionbetween stories/events is established through asense of incompleteness, of “something missing.”Isaac fashioned the gap in the form of a question:“Where’s the sacrifice?” According to Campbell,Christ answered that question, completed that story,as he became the sacrifice that was due. Campbell ac-knowledged the gap in Christ’s story by answeringthe implicit question, Why did Christ die? Christ diedfor us, so that we might live forever. We “complete”the story of Christ, we determine the meaning ofChrist’s death.

Campbell’s final story about his son’s death repli-cated the biblical stories in the obvious thematicsense—a father sacrifices his son. But the connectionwas not merely allusive. It is also figural. Campbell’sstory fulfilled Christ’s, which fulfilled Abraham’s.Campbell, like Abraham, like God himself, was will-ing to sacrifice his son in accordance with God’s





plan. But like their stories, his too was incomplete. Itevoked a haunting sense of something missing. Whydid Campbell’s son die? Or, more precisely given thetypological sequence, for whom did Campbell’s sondie? The answer, of course, had already been pro-vided as well by the previous stories. He died for me.The Reverend Campbell sacrificed his son, narra-tively speaking, for me.

Through the cumulative pattern of his Bible-based storytelling that afternoon, Campbell createda space for me to take responsibility, and feel respon-sible, for determining the meaning of his son’s death.That I owed him something, and what it was, andwhat I would receive in turn, was one of the lastthings the Reverend Campbell made clear to me: Ofall that I could give you or think of ever giving over to you,I hope that what we’ve talked about here today will helpyou make that decision, to let him come into your heart,and then he will be your tutor. Campbell had fashionedaccess to a divine pattern of history for me, and theonly question remaining was, would I accept it?

If conversion is a process of acquiring a specific reli-gious language and witnessing is a conservativeProtestant rite of conversion, then, if you are willingto be witnessed to, if you are seriously willing tolisten to the gospel, you have begun to convert. Lis-tening to the gospel initiates lost souls into the Word,the language of God.

The single most important unconscious clue Igave Campbell that I was “susceptible” to conver-sion was that I was willing to listen to the gospel.Crises, transitions, and upbringing as such do notlead you to convert. They may make you more likelyto listen, and anything that makes you more likely tolisten, including the work of ethnography, is actuallywhat makes you susceptible.

“Susceptible” implies passivity, but I was not pas-sively listening to Campbell. I was struggling might-ily against the grain of my ignorance and incredulityto make sense of what he was saying. His languagewas so intense and strange, yet deceptively plain andfamiliar, full of complex nuances and pushes andpulls, that I had no time, no spare inner speech, to in-terpret him consciously, to rework what he said intomy own words as he talked. I just gripped my chair,as it were, and took his words in straight. I was will-fully uncritical as well in the sense that I wanted tounderstand, as best I could, his words from his point

of view, to assume his position, to make his speechmine.5 It was not exactly what Campbell said thatbrought me under conviction; it is that I took it up,merely by listening to him actively and uncritically.6

The membrane between disbelief and belief ismuch thinner than we think. All I had to do was tolisten to my witness and to struggle to understandhim. Just doing so did not make me a fundamentalBaptist born-again believer, but it drew me acrossthat membrane in tiny ways so that I began to ac-quire the knowledge and vision and sensibilities, toshare the experience, of a believer. Believers and dis-believers assert there is no middle ground: you areeither one or the other. You cannot both believe anddisbelieve. But that is precisely what it means to be“under conviction.” You do not believe in the senseof public declarations, but you gradually come to re-spond to, interpret, and act in the world as if youwere a believer. It is a state of unconscious belief,experienced with more or less turmoil and anxiety,depending on how strong your disbelieving voicesare. It also depends for the ethnographer on howadamant your colleagues are about the “dangers” ofdoing “this kind of fieldwork.” I was given to think my


5. In fact, the listener can never really make the speaker’sspeech his own. Here is how Bakhtin described the dia-logue from the listener’s point of view: “As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language,for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline be-tween oneself and the other. The word in language is halfsomeone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when thespeaker [that is, the listener becoming a speaker] populatesit with his own intention, his own accent, when he appro-priates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and ex-pressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation,the word does not exist in a neutral language . . . , butrather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’scontexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from therethat one must take the word, and make it one’s own. . . .Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own inten-tions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.”6. “It seems to me that to explain what is involved in[witchcraft] situations simply by talking of the effect ofsuggestion is not sufficient, for this is to do no more thanto give a name to the very thing which is doubtful. . . . Sothe touchstone of witchcraft is not so much the simple re-alization of a prediction or malediction, as the fact that it istaken up by the bewitched, who becomes the unwillingagent of fate.”




credibility depended on my resisting any experienceof born-again belief. The irony is that this space be-tween belief and disbelief, or rather the paradoxicalspace of overlap, is also the space of ethnography. Wemust enter it to do our work.7

Campbell’s testimony was a hodgepodge ofstories sewn together with the scarlet thread of re-demption, not a series of “logical” or “empirical” ar-guments. He persuaded me narratively. Disbelief is aconscious refusal to accept a particular version ofreality, and believing involves the conscious accep-tance of “doctrines,” of particular claims about real-ity and one’s relationship to it. But disbelief is also, inthe case of evangelical Christianity at least, anunconscious refusal to participate in a particular nar-rative mode of knowing reality. Likewise, belief alsoinvolves an unconscious willingness to join a narra-tive tradition, a way of knowing and being throughBible-based storytelling and listening. You cannottell born-again stories, you cannot fashion them,without acknowledging belief, but you can hearthem, you can absorb them, and that’s how you “be-lieve” when you are under conviction. You getcaught up in the stories, no matter what your con-scious beliefs and disbeliefs are.

I was caught up in the Reverend Campbell’s stories—I had “caught” his language—enough tohear God speak to me when I almost collided withanother car that afternoon. Indeed, the near-accidentdid not seem like an accident at all, for there is nosuch thing as a coincidence in born-again culture;God’s hand is everywhere. Gospel talk casts in yoursubliminal mind, your heart, a Bible-based sense ofoptions poised to trigger God’s speech, given a con-

text in which you seem to have a choice to submit toGod’s will or ply your own. Preachers construct suchcontexts verbally, and life presents them virtuallyevery day—those gaps in the ordinary, when theseams split and you encounter the unknown, theunexpected, the uncontrollable, the irrational, theuncanny, the miraculous. These are moments ripe forsupernatural harvesting, moments when fear or awemutes your natural voices and God may speak,offering you the opportunity to speak back.

Coming under conviction (listening to gospel sto-ries or voices) is easy compared to being saved(speaking, telling stories). When you come underconviction, you cross through a membrane intobelief; when you get saved, you cross another mem-brane out of disbelief. This passage is more problem-atic for some lost souls, for what outsiders would saywere reasons of education, class, or intellect, andinsiders would say was hardness of the heart, pride,or the work of the devil. However you explain itgetting saved among fundamental Baptists involvespublicly giving up disbelief, not just suspending it,but disavowing it. It involves accepting born-againbelief in the sense of acquiring new knowledge of re-ality that quickens the supernatural imagination andyields a conversational relationship to God. Born-again knowledge becomes the centering principle ofyour identity, your personal and public life, yourview of human nature and history. And it involvesjoining a particular narrative tradition to which youwillingly submit your past, present, and future as aspeaker.

One more reason Campbell was a compelling wit-ness was the extent to which, and eloquence withwhich, he gave his life, narratively speaking, to thelanguage of Christ. This willingness to submit one’slife to God, to narrate one’s experience and fashionstories out of it in dialogue with God’s will and bibli-cal truths, makes God, and his Word, most real andknown and irrefutable to oneself and to one’s listener.Campbell understood this, at least intuitively, wellenough to tell me about killing his son just before hisfinal appeal on behalf of my soul. The story disarmedme because he said he had killed his own son, becausehe so crisply gave up his grief and his guilt to God,and because he was telling me, a stranger and an out-sider, about it. He sacrificed his own son to his narra-tive tradition with a calm assurance, a peace of heart,that I still find difficult to accept. Often that afternoon


7. Perhaps, as William James concluded about the divine,the only certain evidence of the reality that preoccupiesethnographers, of shared unconscious knowledge, is expe-riential. Faye Ginsburg (personal communication) put itthis way: “Anthropologists approach self-alteration as amode of knowing. Our epistemology requires that we alterourselves in order to know.” And Barbara Myerhoff, inher last film, In Her Own Time, said, “This is what anthro-pologists are taught to do. You study what is happening toothers by understanding what is going on in you, and youyourself become the data-gathering instrument. You comefrom a culture, and you step into a new culture, and howyou respond to the new one tells you about them, and ittells you about the one you came from.”




I found myself at a loss for words as Campbell narra-tively generated what for me were novel grounds forknowing and for speaking, but the story of his son’sdeath struck me dumb. He might as well have goneup in a puff of smoke.

A cynic, second-guessing Campbell’s motives,would say he was manipulative, that he used thispainful story to “get to” his listener. But from withinborn-again culture, this telling was the ultimate evi-dence of belief, Campbell’s moment of maximumauthenticity. If he told me the story for effect, it wasto effect the reality of God in me. What God said tohim and he said to God in that tragic moment meant

that God is absolutely real. This was his own conclu-sion: Now I’m saying that, Susan, because he is real. Thisis not mythology. I’m forty-six years old, and I’m no fool.God is alive. And his son lives in my heart.

Among fundamentalist Baptists, the Holy Spiritbrings you under conviction by speaking to yourheart. Once you are saved, the Holy Spirit assumesyour voice, speaks through you, and begins torephrase your life. Listening to the gospel enablesyou to experience belief, as it were, vicariously. Butgenerative belief, belief that indisputably transfig-ures you and your reality, belief that becomes you,comes only through speech: speaking is believing.





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Islamic law is based on the immutable holy sourcesof the Qur’an and Sunna and is therefore a religiouslaw in theory—al-fiqh, or jurisprudence—and Shari’a,the law in practice. The Qur’an, as the revealed wordof God, and the teachings and the practice of theMessenger of God, Muhammad, are fundamental

sources that have been interpreted over the ages butcannot be altered. However, the various schools ofjurisprudence that have developed since the intro-duction of Islam, primarily in the first century afterthe Hegira (seventh to eighth centuries C.E.), revealthat the law is not static or immutable. These schoolsinclude the Maliki, Hanafi, Hanbali, and Shafi’, aswell as others that are a bit more obscure, which hadtheir origins and influence in various parts of theoriginal core of the early Islamic world. For example,

48

Islamic Law: The Foundation ofMuslim Practice and a Measureof Social and Political ChangeCarolyn Fluehr-Lobban

Thanks to well-intentioned but de-contextualized popular media coverage, many non-Muslims inthe West are likely to have been exposed to the topic of the following article only through sensationalnews accounts of stonings for adultery, hand amputations for burglary, or honor killings of women.This article demonstrates how the anthropological perspective—with attention to variation withinand among countries and across time—helps us see beyond simplistic reductions. Rather than beingan immutable medieval tradition, Islamic law has evolved over twelve centuries in response to intel-lectual developments and specific cultural and historical circumstances, including European colo-nization and post-independence politics.

Author Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban is an anthropologist specializing in the study of Islamic law andits implications and has conducted research in Tunisia, Egypt, and Sudan. Here, she introduces keyareas in the study and application of Islamic law: Islamic concepts of justice and punishment; Islam’sdistinctive forms of banking and finance, which avoid interest; economic development; and familylaw. Family law and the rights of women have seen dramatic change and reinterpretation in manyMuslim countries during the 20th century, changes the author relates to new patterns in family life,such as the entry of women into the salaried workforce and the promotion of family planning.

Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban is Professor of Anthropology at Rhode Island College. The chapter fromwhich this text has been adapted includes case study material on Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, andMalaysia, omitted here due to length.

From: ISLAMIC SOCIETIES IN PRACTICES, 2nd ed.University Press of Florida, copyright by the Board of Regentsof the State of Florida, pp. 163–76 and 192–96, 2004.




the Maliki school grew out of the customs in practicein Medina and Mecca and spread throughout Northand West Africa, while the Hanafi school spreadwith the Ottoman Empire. The differences in inter-pretation between the different schools are, rela-tively speaking, rather minor and do not representdoctrinal or factional differences in Islamic law.

Shari‘a, as a religious law, is comprehensive andtheoretically applies to all legal matters that wewould differentiate in the West as civil, criminal, andfamily law. There is even a system of economics,banking, and finance that has grown out of Islamicprescriptions. In practice, in the modern period, Is-lamic Shari‘a was circumscribed by Ottoman rule,which secularized the law in commerce and tradeand relegated the Shari‘a more to a law governingpersonal status matters of Muslims. The colonialpowers reinforced and amplified this model, intro-duced their own Western laws in civil and criminalareas, and left Islamic law to govern family mattersalmost exclusively. Thus the current movement bythe Islamists to restore the comprehensive role ofthe Shari‘a in Islamic society does have historical le-gitimacy. However, Western and Muslim critics havequestioned the compatibility of Islamic law withthe standards and demands of the modern state interms of protecting the rights of non-Muslims andwomen. . . .

Each of the countries of the Arab-Muslim MiddleEast share Islamic culture, and they share, to varyingdegrees, Arabic language and culture. Most are na-tions with a background of European colonialism,French rule in the case of the Maghrib and the Levant,Italian rule in Libya, and British rule in the cases of theNile Valley countries of the Sudan and Egypt, Jordan,Palestine, Iraq, and the oil nations of the Persian Gulfand Arabian Peninsula. Each country has been gov-erned, since independence or the formation of a newnation, essentially by a monarchy or single party ormilitary monopoly that has effectively excluded de-mocratic elections or referenda on the subjects of fam-ily and social change or on any other matter.

Shari‘a in Arabic means the “correct path,” and ina religious sense it is quite clear that this means ad-hering to a correctly guided life that is upright andconforming to the teachings and practice of Islam.Living in a Shar‘i way can be used to describe aproper home for a husband and wife, or living withone’s family and assisting them rather than living

alone in a flat, or to describe the revived form of Is-lamic dress that many young Muslim women areadopting. All are examples of proper conduct guidedby the religion of Islam. From an Islamic point ofview, there is little distinction between sacred andsecular, and the different contextual use of terms likeShar‘i and Shari‘a is more noticeable to the Westernnon-Muslim than to the Muslim, for whom religionand society more comfortably commingle. The pastdevelopment and future role of Islamic law in Muslimsocieties is a critical part of the contemporary debateregarding the “correct path” for Islamic nations topursue into the twenty-first century.

For thirteen centuries, Islamic law has developedwithin Muslim communities and states compre-hending civil, criminal, and family legal matters. In-terpretations of the holy sources have developedthrough discussion and commentary relying uponthe judgment of the jurists and scholars of the goldenages of Muslim caliphates—from Baghdad to Cor-doba, from the Maghrib to central and south Asia.Great scholars such as al-Ghazali wrote detailedopinions upon multiple subjects relating to Muslimlife, Islamic civil society, family relations, and rela-tions with non-Muslims. These opinions are remark-able and worthy of greater weight than the Oriental-ist view of Max Weber that “Kadi justice” was nomore than capricious decision making by Islamicjudges who decided cases whimsically and not basedon the more “logical” Western use of precedent.

For example, as early as the tenth century, Mus-lim jurists determined that since the Qur’an wassilent on contraception birth control was permissiblein Islamic society (Musallam 1986, 16). The methoddiscussed was coitus interruptus, or male with-drawal. Medieval Arab medical texts also notedfemale techniques, such as vaginal suppositories orother barriers to the womb. “Spilling the seed,”or male withdrawal, was forbidden in Jewish andChristian law, so this Islamic interpretation was noveland presaged developments in the twentieth centurydebates over theological and secular legal interpreta-tions of birth control and the right to life. Al-Ghazali(1058–1111), one of the most influential of early ju-rists, argued that contraception for reasons of econ-omy or to protect a wife from dangerous childbirthwas lawful, but contraception to prevent the birth ofdaughters was not (Musallam 1986, 22). The rightof a wife to sexual fulfillment in Muslim marriage





intrigues and surprises Westerners accustomed toviews of Eastern women as disempowered. . . . .

Slavery was acknowledged as part of existing so-cial conditions when Islam began in the Hijaz and al-though it was not banned, legal opinion held that itspractice was mollified by recommending kind treat-ment of slaves, including marriage, property, and in-heritance rights, as well as heavenly reward for man-umission, or freeing of slaves.

Interpretations regarding the treatment of non-Muslims living within Muslim states favored Kitabiy-een (Jews and Christians) over pagans, who werenot endowed with the same rights as either Muslimor Kitabiyeen. The idea of a multireligious Islamicstate may be viewed either as a contradiction interms or as an idea to be developed further by Muslimreformers.

Islamic Law during Colonialism

More than twelve centuries of Islamic societies inlocal and state practice in Africa and Asia precededthe colonization of most of the Muslim world byEuropean powers. Colonizing pressures from Europethreatened the Ottoman Empire and forced it intodecline before its demise after World War I. OttomanHanafi law spread as official law throughout itsempire, while local traditions favored Malikitraditions—especially in Africa—and Shafi‘i tradi-tions were favored in parts of Asia, while the Han-bali school was adopted by the Wahhabis in Arabia.

In 1798, with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt,the era of European colonialism of “the Orient” beganin earnest. Britain and France particularly vied forcontrol of the trade routes and the natural resources.Lord Nelson’s defeat of Napoleon secured Egypt forBritain, and for much of the nineteenth centuryBritain made strategic alliances with the Ottomansin their pursuit of empire. From Egypt they soughtto control the Nile Valley, but met with resistancefrom the Sudanese Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmed,whose jihad against the foreign invader preventedBritish rule, beginning with the battle at Khartoum(1884–85). The Mahdi ruled much of the countryuntil 1898, when the British returned in force underH. H. Kitchener with gunboats and gatling guns.They overcame Sudanese resistance, slaughteringover ten thousand one morning at the battle ofOmdurman.

In 1885 the major European powers met in Berlinto divide up the African continent into spheres of in-fluence. In Islamic Africa, British colonial rule wasextended with and without resistance not only inEgypt and the Sudan but also in Uganda, Kenya,Tanganyika, South Africa, Rhodesia, Zambia, Nigeria,Ghana, and Sierre Leone. France, the political rival,colonized Algeia in 1830 and the rest of the Maghribbefore the end of the century. The French securedSenegal, Ivory Coast, and the Sahelian countries ofMali, Niger, and Chad with their armies.

In Asia, the British secured India, Pakistan, Ceylon,Burma, and Thailand along with the major Muslimcountries of Malaysia and Indonesia.

Colonial attitudes toward Shari’a were general-ized and filtered through the indirect rule of theBritish, who used an English governor general andlocal rulers and officials as intermediaries, and thedirect rule of the French, who placed themselves inofficial positions from the top down through thecolonial hierarchy. Islamic law was treated as a formof “customary” law and relegated to personal statusor family law matters. European-based law was im-posed in the more politically important areas ofproperty, civil, and criminal law. Certain Islamic insti-tutions were retained or created—such as mosques,Islamic schools for training local imams, and “Mo-hammedan” courts with Muslim judges administer-ing to family law needs. Emphasis was placed oncontrolling Islamic institutions and keeping themwithin the bounds of the colonial government with-out suppressing them altogether. However, monitor-ing the activities of the Muslim ‘ulama under colonialrule was routine.

Lord Cromer, the architect of English colonialismin Egypt and the Sudan, wrote to the governor gen-eral of Sudan about how to handle the ‘ulama at theKadi School. Cromer wrote that he did not likethe “tone” of the Grand Kadi’s report, which desiredthe teaching of “pure Mohammedan law withoutalteration or amendment.” “This is sheer nonsense,”Cromer exclaimed. “Mohammedan law more thananything else is what is keeping the Mohammedansback. I am inclined to think that a Kadi who holdsthese views is not the man you want for the job, al-though I recognize that it is probably difficult to getanybody better. They are pretty well all of themalike, so I would advise keeping a careful watch overhim, and not trusting him too far” (Cromer to

FLUEHR-LOBBAN • ISLAMIC LAW | 399




Wingate, 11 February 1907, Sudan Archives, Univer-sity of Durham).

The Indian Penal Code was created by the Englishto introduce Western criminal law into the East andwas adapted to multiples colonial holdings in theIslamic and other colonies. French Napoleonic lawwas applied in their colonies consistent with directrule. In Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, and other formerFrench colonies, the tradition was established of usingthree sitting judges in civil cases. (Although Frenchoccupation of Egypt only lasted from 1798 until 1803,this tradition continues to this day.) Local qadis ad-ministered personal status family law from Malaysiaand Indonesia, to India, to British-controlled MiddleEast and North Africa, but they suffered less pay,lower status, poorer facilities, and political isolationfrom the central government and from their colleaguesin the civil and criminal division of the judiciary. Thisimposed inferior status during colonialism was keenlyfelt such that when opportunities for enhanced statusfor Islamic governance and Muslim institutionsappeared—such as with various Islamist politicalmovements—qadis and members of the ‘ulama class ofreligious scholars embraced these opportunities, evenif they were not committed Islamists. This broadercolonial historical background to understanding callsfor the restoration or full implementation of Shari‘a asstate law is often ignored in Western discourse on therise of Islamism. The Shari‘a judges and members ofthe High Court with whom I worked told me of this in-herited sense of inferiority as well as of their nearly uni-versal celebration when Shari‘a was made state law.

Punishment in Islam

Hadd (hudud, pl.) penalties—including flogging, am-putation, and stoning for crimes of immorality, theft,fornication and adultery—are much discussed in theWest as inhumane, uncivilized, or barbaric. Suchpenalties are Qur’anic, meaning they are mentionedspecifically in the Holy Book, and as such are of suchclear intent by God that their application is accepted.But over the centuries they have been the subject ofmuch debate about their application because theyare so severe.

As for the thief, both male and female, cut off theirhands.It is the reward of their own deeds, an exemplarypunishment from Allah. (sura 5:38)

But who so repents after his wrongdoing andamends, lo! Allah will relent toward him. Lo!Allah is Forgiving, Merciful. (sura 5:39, Pickthalltranslation)

The standard of proof of the crimes punishable byhudud penalties requires the admission of the guiltyperson or the testimony of four full witnesses (mean-ing four men or double the number of women). Thisrequirement is so difficult to fulfill that the intentappears to be that hudud penalties should be usedrarely, as examples. In Sudan since Shari‘a becamestate law under Numeiri after 1983, and in the periodof the rule of the National Islamic Front after 1989when extremist interpretations prevailed, hundredsof amputations have been carried out by the IslamistCourts of Prompt Justice. Some of these amputeeswere not Muslims but were southerners displacedby the chronic civil war; it is not permissible to applyhadd punishments to non-Muslims. And many werepoor men of the street, homeless vagrants accused orcaught stealing, presumably from economic need.International human rights groups have criticizedthis application of hudud not only as cruel but asun-Islamic, since they were applied against non-Muslims and failed the stringent Islamic test ofproof. The amputees in Sudan have organized them-selves into mutual aid societies and are beingassisted by Muslims who disapprove of the wrong-ful carrying out of these harsh penalties.

For example, in the case of adultery, both the manand the women are to receive hadd punishments.

The adulterer and the adulteress, scourge ye each oneof them [with] a hundred stripes. And let not pity forthe two withhold you from obedience to Allah, if yebelieve in Allah and Last Day. And let a party ofbelievers witness their punishment. (sura 24:2)

And those who accuse honorable women butbring not four witnesses, scourge them witheighty stripes, and never (afterward) accept theirtestimony—they indeed are evil doers. (sura 24:4)

Save those who afterward repent and makeamends. (For such) lo! Allah is Foregiving, Merciful.(sura 24:5, Pickthall translation)

In each case where the hadd punishment is men-tioned, the Qur’an adds that repentance and amend-ment yield God’s forgiveness and mercy. However,the contemporary sentencing and application of thehudus penalties seem to have held neither to the





standard of proof nor to the invocation of God’smercy.

Studies of the application of hudud penalties inthe past cannot as yet answer the question of the fre-quency of their application within the caliphates orMuslim empires, such as the Moghuls or Ottomans.However, in the context of politicized Islamist states,such as Sudan, Afghanistan under the Taliban, SaudiArabia, or Nigeria, the application of hudud pun-ishments has raised many religious, political, andhuman rights questions. Most common has been theapplication of flogging for “immoral” behavior andamputation for theft. Sentences of stoning for adul-tery have been handed down in Sudan and Nigeria,but have not been carried out.

Islamic criminal law and hudud penalties arelegal in countries where a comprehensive Shari‘a isapplied: Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistanunder the Taliban, Sudan, and northern Nigeria. Thehadd punishment of stoning for adultery has beenapplied not only in Sudan but also in northernNigeria, where Islamism has been on the rise. InSudan there was an international outcry because thepenalty was levied against a Christian woman fromthe south who was a refugee in Khartoum from thecivil war waged there. International human rightsgroups protested the application of Islamic lawagainst a non-Muslim as well as the cruelty of thepunishment. The Islamist government of Sudanbacked down, as did the Nigerian government in theruling by its Supreme Court in the case of SalfiyaHussaini, a Muslim woman from the northern city ofSokoto who had been convicted of having sex out-side of wedlock and sentenced to death by stoning.She was the first of two women convicted sincea dozen northern Nigerian states had institutedShari‘a as state law; the second was sentenced inKatsina state after President Olusegun Obasanjodeclared beheadings, amputations, and stonings un-constitutional (Providence Journal, March 26, 2002).International pressure included the withdrawal ofthe Miss World Pageant from Nigeria, moving it toLondon in 2002 in protest of the government’sfailure to deal decisively with the stoning cases.Nigeria’s delicate constitutional balance amongits multiple ethnicities and between its Muslim northand Christian and animist south suggests that a majorconstitutional and political crisis would develop if astoning sentence were carried out. Nigerian Muslim

critics fear the intercommunal violence betweenChristians and Muslims that will spread if the sen-tence is applied, and they point out correctly that theQur’an is clear about punishing both the man andthe woman, not just the woman whose pregnancyclearly marks her.

The hudud punishments have been applied andexecuted in countries where Islamism (politicalIslam) or Wahhabism (conservative and puritanicalinterpretations) are in force using the apparatus ofthe state, such as in Sudan, northern Nigeria, orSaudi Arabia. Application of these severe punish-ments may be used to exhibit the unlimited powerand Islamic character of the state, or they may beused to terrify their potential opponents. It is signifi-cant that they are not applied in Muslim countriesthat are officially secular states, such as in Indonesiaor Egypt.

Contemporary Banking and Finance

The religious inspiration for an Islamic system ofeconomics stems from the Qur’anic prohibition onusury, riba, which in itself derives from the funda-mental principle of tawheed, the unity and oneness ofGod, and the relationship of cooperation and equitythat is commanded between Muslims. Riba literallymeans “an increase” and was the subject of the lastrevelation of the Prophet; riba is usually interpretedas any form of direct interest charges upon moneyloaned or borrowed. Financial dealings that uniteand provide support for the Umma have beenfavored. Waqf (awqaf, pl.) is a religiously inspiredbequest of land or funding for the construction ormaintenance of beneficial projects, such as the build-ing of mosques, schools, and medical facilities thatbenefit the Muslim community. A waqf is a specialtestamentary bequest made in God’s name that ispermanent and cannot be sold or transferred with-out the intervention of local religious leaders. Thisexplains why mosques built under waqf regulationcenturies before the present are still standing and aremaintained. A special family waqf could also benominated to increase the share of inheritance to aneedy Qur’anic heir, but could not be used to disin-herit a proscribed relative in Muslim inheritance.Likewise, zakat––religious almsgiving and one ofthe five pillars––is a compulsory obligation to finan-cially or materially assist the needy in the Muslim





community. The Islamic states have imposed a zakattax to enforce this religious obligation.

By analogy, that which divides the Muslim com-munity, such as unjust economic practices involvedin usury, is forbidden in Islam. The Qur’an specifi-cally condemns the taking of interest on loans as aform of expropriation, since it claims more from aperson’s capital than its fair value. Likewise, it iscommonly said that it is wrong to profit from an-other person’s hardship, the assumption being thatonly a needy person would seek a loan.

Islam encourages commerce, trade, and eco-nomic growth. However, any financial dealingsthat involve charging interest are banned, as aretrade and commerce in commodities that are for-bidden, such as pork, alcohol, or drugs. The sellingof products that are known to cause harm tohumans, such as guns and tobacco, is consideredby some religious scholars as haram (forbidden) ormakruh (reprehensible). The sale of stolen propertyis also forbidden, although it is permitted in muchof Western civil law.

The fundamental ban on interest charges led inthe 1970s to the creation of new Islamic banks andinstitutions of investment. An interesting, but lesswell known, aspect to the current revival of Islamhas been the creation of Islamic alternatives in theeconomic sphere. The Islamic banking and financemovement was synthesized by a combination of re-ligious philosophy and practical need to meet theeconomic demands of Muslims engaging in localand international commerce. The Islamic bankswere started with capital from Saudi Arabia, Dubai,and Bahrain, which have continued to play a domi-nant role in the ownership of these alternative finan-cial institutions. Ironically, while the finance capitaloriginates in the Gulf among some of its richest fam-ilies (e.g., in the Faisal Islamic banks), most of the Is-lamic banks have been established in the poorerArab states, chiefly Egypt, Sudan, and Jordan,where they have come to dominate smaller localbanking needs. It is virtually impossible to separatethe movement to promote Islamic economics fromthe movement to restore Islamic principles in gov-ernment and society, thus Islamic banking is verymuch tied to Islamic revival. After 9/11, some Is-lamic banks were alleged to be funnels for fundingal-Qaeda operatives; however, Western banks couldjust as well have been involved.

The rules regarding Islamic banking and invest-ment, while common in theory, may vary in practice.The Islamic alternatives that have been devised toavoid charging interest emphasize partnership andprofit-sharing in investment. A common type ofloan from an Islamic bank is known as mudarabah,whereby the bank loans money to a client to financea business venture in return for which the bank re-ceives a specified percentage of the net profits of thebusiness for a designated period. Share of the profitsprovides for repayment of the principal plus a profitfor the bank to pass on to its depositors. Should amudarabah enterprise lose money or fail to thrive,the bank, the borrower, and the bank’s depositors alljointly absorb the loss. This puts into practice thebasic Islamic principle that lenders and borrowers ofcapital should share risks and rewards.

Another commonly used technique is murabahah,whereby the bank purchases goods in its own nameand takes title to these goods, and then sells them atan agreed-upon markup. The profit that the bankderives is justified in terms of the service rendered.This technique is frequently used for the financing oftrade.

Trade and commerce must conform to Islamicteachings; commercial dealings with alcohol, drugs,pork products, pornography, and sexually exploita-tive material are forbidden. Some interpretationsalso forbid the sale of guns, ammunition, and anyother deadly weapons. The Taliban in Afghanistancurtailed the drug trade during their years of rule;however, other Afghani governments observed nocontradiction in the international trade in drugs, es-pecially after 9/11 and the U.S. invasion that toppledthe Taliban. Shortly after the end of the Talibanregime, the international drug trade resumed as alucrative means of fueling various movements.Some scholars make a sharp distinction over theapplication of the rules of investment and tradebetween Muslims, where rules are essential, andwith non-Muslims, where they are not.

To be clear, Islam does not condemn profit takingfrom legitimate businesses so long as the accumula-tion of wealth is not based on interest earned byloaning money. For example, loans made by theIslamic Development Bank to poorer Islamic coun-tries using capital from the richer Arab-Muslim na-tions are interest-free. This stands in marked contrastto the interest-bearing loans made by the Western





capitalist nations whose banking systems andeconomies are founded on loaning money at pre-scribed interest rates. Often poorer nations use theirentire GNP to pay off the interest on loans fromWestern financial institutions like the World Bank orInternational Monetary Fund. While loans from theIslamic Development Bank may have other stringsattached that make them less desirable, the elementof long-term indebtedness is absent.

The Islamic banking movement reflects popularIslamist sentiment and propagandizes for it. In theSudan, the Islamic banking movement is closely tiedto the growth of the National Islamic Front and islargely responsible for funding it. Islamic banks havecome to dominate all banking transactions under thecurrent Islamist regime, having been favored by thegovernment as being exempt from state regulation.The banks have offered opportunities to small andmedium-sized business ventures that have aided intheir mass appeal, and have served, to break the mo-nopoly of some of the old merchant families thathave dominated trade and commerce since colonialtimes. With 60 percent of the capital being foreignbased, typically Saudi or other Gulf money, thestability of the banks depends on the maintenance ofgood ties with these nations. During the 1991 GulfWar, the Sudan sided with Iraq and thus incurred thewrath of Saudi Arabia, which in turn limited its flowof capital into the country. Sudan turned to Iran foreconomic and military assistance, which has alsoIslamized its banking system.

The Islamic banking and financial institutionshave not always lived up to the high standardsexpected of them. In Egypt, for example, Islamicinvestment corporations established envious reputa-tions for very high rates of return on money in-vested, sometimes as high as 20–25 percent. Thesehigh returns brought more capital to the Islamicalternative, not necessarily for religious motives.Standing outside of government regulation, someimproprieties were inevitable. During the late 1980s,there was a scandal in Egypt involving corruptionand misrepresentation of monies invested in severalof the largest Islamic investment corporations, withthe result that the government stepped in andimposed strict guidelines over what had been alaissez-faire economic situation.

The challenge presented by the very existenceand dramatic growth of the Islamic banks is one that

is faced by secular regimes, fearful of their ties to theIslamic revival movements but reluctant to restrainthem for fear of popular resistance. The Islamicbanks present an indigenous challenge to theWestern financial institutions, like the English-basedBarclay’s Bank, the French Credit Lyonaise, orCitibank, which have been accustomed to control-ling the movement of foreign capital in many Arab-Muslim nations; they may find that regional Islamicfinancial institutions will replace the internationalflow of capital among Muslim nations.

Likewise, an economic system that operates ontotally different premises, such as the Islamic ban oncharging interest, has a broad appeal among thedebt-ridden nations of the world and poor people ingeneral. In my own teaching about Islamic concepts,I find that many of my students, who are themselvesstruggling to make ends meet, are attracted to theideas of Islamic economics. Even the more cynicalamong them, who see banking fees and servicecharges as a form of “interest” taken by the Islamicbanks, yield the point that the system is more opento the poorer echelons of society and would havepopular appeal. Some of my Muslim students pointwith pride to the economic alternatives that havesprung up within Muslim communities wherebymortgages on houses and car loans are made usingIslamic principles that bypass the usurious loansmade by American banks. These loans involve thejoint purchase of the house, for example, by a groupof Muslim investors who receive “rent” or “use”payments from the occupant of the home, who isalso an investor; when the home is eventually soldand a profit presumably made, all of the investorsshare in the profit made from the sale of the home.Islamic investment corporations have been estab-lished in a number of U.S. and Canadian cities tohandle these alternative economic transactions forMuslims seeking a banking method that conforms totheir religious principles.

In a related vein, American Muslims are advisednot to use VISA or MasterCard because they chargeinterest rates for the unpaid balance. It is, or hasbeen, preferable to choose the American Expresscard, which charges an annual service fee instead ofcharging interest.

To many non-Muslim Americans, including thestudents I have taught over the years, many of theseideas make sense as a collective approach to solving





what are otherwise individual financial problems.However, the social collectivity, based or religion orsome other common bond, is difficult to create inWestern society, which has been erected so funda-mentally upon individualism.

Development Programs

A number of solutions to the dramatic regionaleconomic imbalances between rich and poor Araband Muslim states have been proposed, involvingWestern technology, Arab or Muslim capital, andindigenous labor. The potential partnership for pur-poses of economic development of Western technol-ogy purchased by Arab capital and managed by locallabor has been more attractive in theory than in prac-tice. Western technological ventures have been moreinterested in contract work than in a long-term com-mitment to development projects, while Arab capitalhas been less willing to risk long-term ventures.

Various Arab development funds have been orga-nized for several decades on the principle that sur-plus Arab capital, generated in the oil-producingcountries with their relatively small populations andlimited agricultural resources, should be invested inthe capital-poor nations with large labor pools andgreater agricultural potential. In fact, the flow ofArab capital into poorer nations has been timid, dueto politically generated risks of failure and elevatedexpectations of the recipient nations. Nationalisticconsiderations came into play when foreign in-vestors, Arab and non-Arab, sought to buy into saferventures, such as real estate.

The common bond of Islam between capital-richand capital-poor nations in the region has engen-dered a religiously based system of financing andinvestment, with the creation of various alternateIslamic financial and investment institutions in the1970s, including the Islamic Development Bank andprivate Islamic banks, such as the Faisal IslamicBank, relying heavily on Saudi capital, the BarakaGroup of Bahrain, and others. These financialgroups and development banks employ the invest-ment alternative of shared ventures, where thecapital is provided by one partner and the labor andmanagement of the project are provided by theother partner. Together they share the risks andprofits in proportions agreed upon in advance of theundertaking.

As a religiously based alternative for economic in-vestment, there is much to be admired in theory in Is-lamic investment. With their philosophy of sharingcapital and labor, risk and profit, they have helped tomobilize indigenous small businesses that had beenalienated and rejected by the power of traditionalwealth concentrated in the hands of a few families.However, the Islamic banks have also acted as a fun-nel for controlled investment, such as financingIslamic Jihad, the al-Qaeda organization of Osama binLaden, or the National Islamic Front in the Sudan,which have pursued a political agenda of Islamizationand militant and violent actions against the rationaleconomic interests of the nation and region as awhole. It is ironic that the religiously correct Islamicbanks and financial groups operate primarily outsidethe Arabian Peninsula, while the major Western banksare favored within these oil-producing countries.

Family Law

Although different in the particulars of the historicaldevelopment of family law matters, the laws of eachcountry all derive from a common Islamic base ofinterpretation of the fundamental sources of Shari’a,the Qur’an and Sunna. Many predominantly Islamicstates have religious and cultural minorities whohave been historically exempted from Muslim familylaws. Moreover, each country has been affected by re-cent revisions of Muslim family law, especially con-cerning marriage and divorce. Child betrothal hasvirtually disappeared, and the right of the woman,not her father, to choose her husband has been sup-ported in the law. The previous unilateral right of thehusband to divorce has been seriously undermined,with a corresponding rise in the legal interpretationand actual practice of the wife’s right to judicial di-vorce. This began in North Africa as early as 1915when the Ottoman Empire introduced judicial di-vorce for women; Sudan and Egypt later followedthis example. This legal development was consistentwith the Maliki religious interpretation that a womanshould not be harmed in her marriage. Thus, the ini-tial grounds that were recognized for women seekingdivorce in court were injury or harm, at first inter-preted as physical harm, such as beating, abandon-ment, or failure to support, but later incorporat-ing notions of psychological abuse, such as insult.Change in the reform of the divorce laws is uneven





and still ongoing, as women in Kuwait and SaudiArabia lack this right and Jordan granted women theright to judicial divorce in 2002 after a governmenthuman rights commission recommended the change.

The right of a wife and the duty of a husband tosupport the family have been reinforced strongly inthe recent decades of economic growth in someArab-Muslim countries and relative stagnation inothers. With massive labor migration from poorer toricher Arab countries, the stress placed on the familyhas been observed most acutely in the sharp rise incases of nonsupport raised by wives againsthusbands who are labor migrants. One of the advan-tages of the Umma is the idea that national bound-aries can be irrelevant in Islamic family law cases,such that Muslim courts of differing nations recog-nize the actions and decisions from other nationalIslamic courts.

Even though there are great commonalities in thereligious law and practice of Muslim communities,each nation has its own unique political develop-ments in relation to the larger issue of secularismversus Islamic revival. . . .

Changing Family Patterns andImplications for Muslim Family Law

From a social scientific perspective, the changes infamily law are reflective of changes that have beentaking place in Muslim societies for generations.These are especially dramatic with respect to the sta-tus of women, for whom major social change tookplace in the twentieth century, especially in thedecades since the advent of independence.

Most impressive has been the entry of women intothe workforce. Women represent significant numberswhere the economic need is the greatest, but educatedmiddle-class women have entered into the profes-sions in ever-increasing numbers as well. Egypt andTunisia have the greatest number (25 percent) ofwomen undertaking salaried employment outsidethe home. Even in a country as traditionally conser-vative as the Sudan, the participation of women in theworkforce has more than doubled in the past fewdecades, from 7 percent to 15 percent of all women.The percentage of women in the workforce in Iran in-creased in the 1980s. This may seem low by Westernstandards, where typically well over 50 percent of

women work for wages. But similar economic and so-cial forces are at work in the Arab-Muslim world andare occurring at a more rapid pace than in the West.Since such work by women may be consideredshameful according to Arab and Islamic values, it isusually undertaken only under the worst of economicand social conditions. Historically, women driven towork by personal circumstances were looked upon asthe most pitiable of humans. The idea that womenmight work in factories, in government or businessoffices, or in gender-mixed situations was unthink-able only a generation or two ago. But the shame isbeginning to be replaced with a sense of dignity inwork, and many women have entered professionsseen as “male,” such as engineering, medicine, or law.

Of course, women work, as do men, whether theyreside in the urban centers or in the countryside.Apart from the domestic work, growing numbers ofwomen are working in the informal economic sectoras street vendors, maids and domestics, or in craftproduction (such as carpet weaving). This work,although described as self-employment, placeswomen in highly dependent positions whereby theirlivelihood or supplement to family income dependsupon their relations with economic middlemen orthose who hire them unofficially. Needless to say, thetransience, vulnerability, and lack of benefits that aperson working in the informal sector receives repre-sent hardships for these working women. Despiteoften difficult working conditions, the entry ofwomen into the informal sector is an offshoot of thelarger social transformation that has brought womeninto the formal working sector (see Lobban 1998).

This economic participation of women amounts toa social transformation in the postindependence pe-riod, and to be sure, it correlates highly with the eraof secular politics and the state support for the eman-cipation of women. With Islamist agitation, the pro-priety of women in the workforce is under intensescrutiny. . . . .

An interesting survey of five hundred Sudanesewomen with an average age of twenty-six and tenyears of marriage was conducted under the aus-pices of the Ahfad University College for women(Grotberg and Washi 1991), a pioneer in women’seducation in the Sudan and in the Muslim worldgenerally. Sixty percent of these women married tra-ditionally, that is, they married their first cousins,usually their father’s brother’s son. Thirteen percent





were salaried employees. Those who indicated thatthey exercised personal choice in the selection of theirhusbands had significantly lower fertility rates.These women had, on average, 3.5 children, whilethe general fertility rate for Muslim Sudanesewomen is 6.0 children. In contrast, the ideal “mod-ern” family is described by these women as havingtwo children. The average educational level ofwomen in the sample was middle school, and theirhusbands were generally better educated, with somesecondary school training.

Family Planning Movement

An untutored Western response to fundamentalismin the Muslim world projects onto that social realitythe forces at work in one’s own society. Thus, “funda-mentalism” in the Islamic world might suggest a banor hostility toward birth control and family planning,as that issue has divided liberal and conservative re-ligion in the West. In fact, there has been no compara-ble right-to-life movement in the Muslim world, andfamily planning information has entered Islamic soci-ety without much rancorous theological or politicalstruggle. The accepted religious interpretation of thebeginning of life is at the time of “quickening,” or thetime when the mother feels life in her body. Thusabortion in the early stages of the development of thefetus is not a moral problem. However, if that abor-tion is linked to immoral and illicit sexual conduct,then the consequences are grave. Indeed, becausesexual activity is so controlled and constrained in theMuslim world, the emphasis in birth control has beenplaced on preventing pregnancy within the context ofa married woman’s life. The idea that birth control in-formation and devices should be made available tounmarried women is anathema to every basic valueof Islamic society and sexuality.

The family planning movement has enteredArab-Muslim society, generally speaking, as a by-product of the movement for female emancipation,which in turn was linked to the nationalist move-ments. Family planning clinics initially were intro-duced with the idea that the full incorporation ofwomen’s labor and participation in the newly inde-pendent nation required smaller families.

In the case of the nations we have been examin-ing, family planning movements were enthusiasti-cally endorsed and promoted by the official women’s

organizations, such as the National Union ofTunisian Women, the Sudanese Women’s Union, andthe Egyptian Women’s Union. To assist the workingwoman, accessible and inexpensive daycare centerswere also established by these women’s organiza-tions. For urban, relatively better educated workingwomen, family size did decrease. However, in Egypt,where family planning was embraced as governmentpolicy and the emphasis shifted to rural women re-ducing the number of pregnancies, the results werefar less successful. Egypt became recognized as anexception to the rule that urbanization curtails familysize; large numbers of Egyptian peasants werestreaming into Egypt’s cities and still fellahin womenwere bearing an average of seven children. Govern-ment propaganda and international financial aid forfamily planning programs instilled questions in theminds of many Egyptians as to motives, and the gov-ernment got the message that the limited success andunenthusiastic response from people was a formof passive resistance. The programs then shifted toa more decentralized approach, involving localwomen cooperating with family planning clinics,without the apparent heavy hand of the government,and a greater success rate has been achieved.

Numerous studies have shown that the most ef-fective way to reduce population is to promote edu-cation for women. There is a powerful and persua-sive correlation between the number of years of awoman’s education and the number of her children.The correlation is an inverse one: the greater theeducational level, the fewer the children. In Grotbergand Washi’s study of young married Sudanesewomen, lower fertility rates correlate not only witheducation but also with the following set of attitudes:(1) a man and a woman can be friends, (2) strict seg-regation of the sexes can be relaxed, (3) a woman canchoose to work outside of the home, (4) women canbe involved in politics, and (5) women and men areequally competent and should enjoy equal rights.

These attitudes are just beginning to emerge inmany Middle Eastern Muslim states, and the rates ofchange are uneven in the various countries. How-ever, on the matter of family planning, there has notbeen the resistance and social turbulence that hasbeen witnessed in many Western nations, driven bya theological interpretation that life begins at con-ception and that reproduction is a legitimate matterfor the state.





Economic Pressures on the Family

Despite rapid and massive urbanization in the Araband Muslim worlds, much of traditional family struc-ture remains intact. However, some cracks in thefoundation of social life are becoming visible. Al-though the majority of people in the Middle Easternnations now live in cities, the integrity of the extendedfamily has generally been upheld. Elsewhere urban-ization has had a devastating effect on the extendedfamily, and it is likely to have profound effects on theMuslim extended family in the Middle East in the fu-ture. In other regions the nuclear family has come toreplace the extended family, and in other places thenuclear family has broken down into matrifocal (sin-gle mother–headed household) units. Despite massiverural to urban migration and male out-migration frompoorer nations to richer ones, the essential qualities ofthe extended family have held together. That is, fam-ily members speak of the larger extended family as aunit experiencing either good or bad times economi-

cally, and poor economies at home have broughtabout a necessary alliance between family members.

However, this is in the short term; in the long termthe extended family may not fare so well in the ab-sence of physical or residential unity to reinforce theideology of family solidarity. In each of the three coun-tries where I have conducted studies of Islamic familylaw, one of the major areas of concern is the failure ofhusbands/fathers who have migrated abroad forwork to provide adequate economic support to thosewhom they are bound legally to support. Primarily,this affects the immediate nuclear family, and the ma-jority of court cases have been suits brought by wivesagainst husbands. But with most people still residingin some form of a communal-extended household, theimpact is greater than on the nuclear family alone.These changes in the stability of family life may lead toeven greater problems if present trends continue, espe-cially if the economic imbalances in the region con-tinue to foster massive rural to urban migration andexpatriate migration.


Suggested Readings

Brown, Michael F.1997 The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press.

Goldberg, Harvey E.1987 Judaism Viewed from Within and from Without: Anthropological Studies. Albany: State

University of New York Press.

La Barre, Weston1970 The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Mardin, S.1989 Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi. Albany:

State University of New York Press.

Marty, Martin E., and R. Scott Appleby1991–95 The Fundamentalism Project. 5 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thrupp, Sylvia, ed.1970 Millenial Dreams in Action: Studies in Revolutionary Religious Movements. New York:

Schocken Books.

Volkman, Toby Alice1985 Feasts of Honor: Ritual and Change in the Toraja Highlands. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.


10. Religion as Global Culture: Migration, Media, and Other Transnational Forces


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CHAPTER TEN

Religion as GlobalCulture: Migration,Media, and OtherTransnational Forces

Throughout much of the history of anthropology, anthropologists tended to view culturesas discrete and homogeneous units—as groups of people who are pretty much alike andlive in communities that are bounded in some identifiable way. Many anthropologists em-phasized contrasts between the West and elsewhere and presented non-Western cultures instatic terms, either overlooking the changes that occur over time in all societies or viewingchange as a one-way process, with Western powers imposing unidirectional change on pas-sive, less developed communities. By the last decades of the 20th century, however, anthro-pologists had begun to pay more attention to complex and multidirectional interconnec-tions between societies. Localized religious change was the main theme of Chapter 9. Ourconcluding chapter considers how religion shapes and is shaped by cultural phenomena ona global scale, spreading beyond the boundaries of particular human groups.

Examination of how societies affect one another, and how different groups within a so-ciety affect one another, has led anthropologists to a number of new areas of inquiry, manyof which have profound significance for the study of religion and the supernatural. Likeother aspects of culture, religion has come to be seen in relation to politics, the state, inter-national economic structures, and the media. These have all been areas of intense recent in-terest for anthropology. With the discipline’s traditional emphasis on cultural relativism, ithas been natural for anthropologists to also take a strong interest in systems of power andinequality, including race and gender. Historical perspectives have been particularly im-portant in such analyses; for example, areas of focus have included the relationship be-tween religion and colonialism in Africa, the effects of missionaries on Native Americansand in the Pacific, and the ways in which women have resisted control by traditional modesof religious authority.

One of the most influential contemporary anthropologists to grapple with the refor-mulation of culture in a global context is Arjun Appadurai of Yale University. He hascoined a set of five terms to describe the dimensions through which cultural materials flowaround the world (Appadurai 1996: 33–37). By utilizing the suffix -scape rather than a more

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common term, Appadurai highlights what he calls the disjunctures among these five flows,all of which transcend boundaries of culture, society, and nation. The five “scapes” arebuilding blocks that shape our imagined worlds, or the ways individuals and groupsconceive of themselves and think about their place in the world—who they are and howthey want to be.

1. Ethnoscapes are the moving groups of people in our world, such as tourists, immigrants,refugees, exiles, and guest workers. These humans move around, carrying goals, values,and ideas about themselves and others.

2. Technoscapes are the patterns by which all kinds of technology, high and low, move athigh speeds across the world.

3. Financescapes refers to the distribution of capital and such nation-transcending phenom-ena as currency markets, stock exchanges, and commodity speculations.

4. Mediascapes are the images and the media themselves that disseminate informationglobally, such as newspapers, magazines, television, and electronic information sources.These profoundly influence how we perceive our lives and imagine the lives of peoplewho live elsewhere.

5. Ideoscapes are frequently shaped by state ideologies. On all continents, components ofmany globally dispersed ideoscapes derived from the Enlightenment worldview andinclude such notions as freedom, rights, and democracy.

The point is that our modern-day cultures, or perhaps even past cultures, cannot be thoughtof as bounded, isomorphic entities, coherent in themselves. The relationships amongAppadurai’s five scapes are unpredictable, rapidly changing, and highly dependent onparticular circumstances and contexts.

Such ways of thinking about culture and global interconnections offer a number of newavenues for understanding religion. A key question concerns the degree to which religion isa force for conformity and homogenization, especially in a global context. Is religion part ofthe McDonaldization of the world? In a recent book on religion and globalization, Hopkinset al. write:

If religion is one of the most fundamental means of organizing human life, then the seeds ofglobalization may lie within religion itself. We cannot talk about globalization without talk-ing about religion, and we cannot talk about religion without considering how it might havelaid the foundations for globalization’s inception and launching. Does religion prepare theground, both culturally and socially, for globalization?… Might a dialectical tension exist be-tween religion and globalization, a codependence and codetermination, manifesting in dif-ferent modes of religious revitalization? Religion, in various contexts, may serve as an agentof homogenization or an agent of heterogenization. (2001: 4)

The term globalization itself is provocative and has swept through both scholarly and popu-lar discussions to become one of the major concepts guiding our understanding of socialprocesses. In its narrowest sense, globalization refers to the worldwide movement of financecapital but, in its more common, broader sense, it refers to the international spread of ideas,materials, technology, labor, and even people. Responses to globalization run the gamutfrom positive to negative. As examples of the negative impacts of globalization, one mightpoint to deforestation; the spread of infectious diseases, such as HIV, ebola, and SARS; theextinction of local languages; and the exploitation of labor in the sweatshops of multina-tional manufacturers. On the other hand, globalization offers opportunities for the expan-sion of human rights and democracy; the growth of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)




410 | RELIGION AS GLOBAL CULTURE: MIGRATION, MEDIA, AND OTHER TRANSNATIONAL FORCES

to protect the environment; the emancipation of women; and the territory-less exchange ofideas on the Internet (Hopkins et al. 2001: 3). In terms of religion, processes of globalizationat work for centuries have spread Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism far beyond their geo-graphic points of origin, and today’s information technologies allow anyone who uses theWeb or watches TV to cruise the “spiritual marketplace,” to use a term coined by journalistDonald Lattin (quoted in Batstone 2001: 228).

There are close connections among globalization (however one defines it), the spread ofcapitalism, and the consumer culture that goes along with capitalism. Because anthropolo-gists are interested in how groups of people resist structures of power, many have turnedtheir attention to religion as a form of anti-systemic protest (Robbins 1999). Some feel thatthe only groups around the world that actually seek to overthrow or replace the culture ofcapitalism are religious groups, including Liberation Theology Catholics in Latin America,Islamic fundamentalists in Arab and Southeast Asian countries, and some Protestant fun-damentalists in the United States. The so-called fundamentalist movements that are off-shoots of major world religions (especially Protestant Christianity and Islam) are markedlydifferent in scope and organization from the smaller religious protest movements examinedin Chapter 9, such as the Ghost Dance movement and cargo cults. However, contradictionsabound. In one of the upcoming articles, Mark Juergensmeyer’s survey of religious nation-alist movements around the world highlights examples that are decidedly anti-capitalismand anti-globalization.

An ethnographic study by Simon Coleman (2000) exemplifies the anthropologicalapproach to studying religion in relation to globalization and documents the interplay ofpeople, technology, finance, media, and ideology noted by Appadurai. During the 1990s,Coleman studied conservative Protestant Christians in Uppsala, Sweden, and found thatthe spread of charismatic Christianity across national borders reveals much about how theglobal and the local shape one another. By talking with Swedish charismatic Christians, at-tending their worship services, and observing their use of television, video, and Internettechnologies, Coleman came to understand how participants strike a complex balance be-tween their immediate community, their national identity, and a sense of global belonging.

In the selections that follow, we have chosen to highlight only a small number of topicsrelated to religion, globalization, and the spread of culture across national boundaries. Webegin with an example of the movement of people, and its potential for increased under-standing as well as intolerance. Homa Hoodfar’s work on Muslim women’s clothing ad-dresses the historical effects of confrontational contact between Western and Middle East-ern peoples and includes a discussion of Muslim communities in North America. Hoodfardispels the notion that modest Islamic women’s dress is “traditional” and unchanging or isa sign of oppression. Given this background of misunderstanding, how will the participa-tion of Muslims in Canadian universities and communities shape life in the 21st century?

The second article documents two rituals among Lao Buddhists living in the UnitedStates emphasizing how religion builds and asserts new forms of identity for immigrants.

Mark Juergensmeyer’s article turns our attention to one of the more disturbing implica-tions of globalized religious phenomena: the rise of violent activist movements advocatingviolence and terror. Juergensmeyer’s work includes examples that readers will frequentlyfind mentioned in the news.

The issue of how popular and entertainment-oriented media represent religion is signif-icant, with rich potential for comparison across cultures. How are religious institutionsdepicted in the soap operas of Latin America? How are spiritual resources drawn on in thesupernatural TV dramas of South and Southeast Asia? What happens when commercial en-tertainment is shaped strongly by a few capital-rich industry centers, such as the United




INTRODUCTION | 411

States, Japan, and India? Our concluding article takes a look at U.S. religion as depicted inthe television show The Simpsons. What have the world’s millions of viewers of The Simpsonslearned from that show about religion in America?

References

Appadurai, Arjun1996 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

Batstone, David2001 “Dancing to a Different Beat: Emerging Spiritualities in the Network Society.” In

Dwight N. Hopkins et al., Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases, pp. 226–42.Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Coleman, Simon2000 The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hopkins, Dwight N., Lois Ann Lorentzen, Eduardo Mendieta, and David Batstone, eds.2001 Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Robbins, Richard H.1999 Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.




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Muslim women, and particularly Middle Easternand North African women, for the past two centurieshave been one of the most enduring subjects ofdiscussion in the Western media. I can also assertwithout hesitation that the issue of the veil and theoppression of Muslim women has been the mostfrequent topic of conversation and discussion I have

49

The Veil in Their Minds and onOur Heads: Veiling Practicesand Muslim WomenHoma Hoodfar

Anyone who has read a newspaper or magazine from the Western press in recent years is likely torecognize that their depictions of Islam and Muslim societies prominently feature women’s dress. Inmany news photographs, women’s head coverings signify the status of women or the modernity of aculture. Immigration, the global spread of faiths, and the international political and economic con-flicts of recent years have made Muslim communities increasingly visible in North America andEurope. Western tradition has long equated the veil with oppression or ignorance, so Muslim womenfrequently bear the brunt of misunderstanding and intolerance, especially from well-intentionednon-Muslims who are concerned about women’s rights. A goal of anthropology, however, is to lookwithin cultures to discover meaning and significance, rather than to assume that the observer alreadyknows what something means or to impose facile judgments.

Homa Hoodfar, a Canadian anthropologist of Iranian descent, here shows the malleability andcomplexity of veiling by paying careful attention to the experiences of Muslim women, arguing thatmany Western images of the veil are inaccurate and romanticized. To illustrate how Islamic women’sdress has varied in response to changing social conditions, the author focuses on women’s dress inIran between the 1930s and the 1980s, including anecdotes from her own family. Finally, Hoodfardiscusses her fieldwork among Muslim communities in Canada, highlighting difficulties faced bywomen who wear modest dress. Hoodfar argues that misconceptions about Muslim women are a formof racism that prevents Muslims and others from joining together to fight injustice.

The scholarly literature on women and Islam, including the role of dress, is voluminous. Inter-ested students might wish to read In Search of Islamic Feminism by Elizabeth Fernea (Doubleday,1998) and Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society by FatimaMernissi (Saqi Books, rev. ed. 2003).

From Homa Hoodfar, “The Veil in Their Minds and on OurHeads: Veiling Practices and Muslim Women” in THEPOLITICS OF CULTURE IN THE SHADOW OF CAPITAL,edited by Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, pp. 248–79. Copyright© 1997, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Used bypermission of the publisher. (Endnotes and some references havebeen omitted for the present volume.)




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been engaged in, often reluctantly, during sometwenty years of my life in the Western world (mostlyin the UK and Canada). Whenever I meet a person ofwhite/European descent, I regularly find that assoon as he or she ascertains that I am Muslim/Mid-dle Eastern/Iranian, the veil very quickly emerges asthe prominent topic of conversation. This scenariooccurs everywhere: in trains, at the grocery store, atthe launderette, on the university campus, at parties.The range of knowledge of these eager conversantsvaries: some honestly confess total ignorance ofIslam and Islamic culture or Middle Eastern soci-eties; others base their claims and opinions on theirexperiences in colonial armies in the Middle East, oron their travels through the Middle East to Indiaduring the 1960s; still others cite as reference films ornovels. What I find remarkable is that, despite theiradmitted ignorance on the subject, almost all peopleI have met are, with considerable confidence, adamantthat women have a particularly tough time inMuslim cultures. Occasionally Western non-Muslimwomen will tell me they are thankful that they werenot born in a Muslim culture. Sometimes they go sofar as to say that they are happy that I am living intheir society rather than my own, since obviously myways are more like theirs, and since now, havingbeen exposed to Western ways, I could never returnto the harem!

For years I went through much pain and frustra-tion, trying to convey that many assumptions aboutMuslim women were false and based on the racismand biases of the colonial powers, yet without de-fending or denying the patriarchal barriers thatMuslim women (like women in many other coun-tries, including Western societies) face. I took painsto give examples of how Western biases against non-Western cultures abound. In research, for example,social scientists often fail to compare like withlike. The situation of poor illiterate peasant womenof the South is implicitly or explicitly compared withthe experiences of educated upper-middle-classwomen of Western societies. Failing to adequatelycontextualize non-Western societies, many researcherssimply assume that what is good for Westernmiddle-class women should be good for all otherwomen. It is frustrating that, in the majority of cases,while my conversants listen to me, they do not hear,and at the end of the conversation they reiterate theirearlier views as if our discussion were irrelevant. Inmore recent years, they treat me as an Islamic apolo-

gist, which silences me in new ways that often pre-clude argument.

I had assumed that my experiences were uniqueand were the result of my moving in milieux thathad little contact with or knowledge about Muslimcommunities and cultures. However, through my re-cent research on the integration of Muslim women ineducational institutions and the labor market inCanada, which has brought me into contact withmany young Muslim women, I have come to realizethat these reactions on the part of the dominantgroup are much more prevalent than I had thought.Moreover, the Muslim community, and in particularveiled women, suffer the psychological and socio-economic consequences of these views. This situa-tion has created a high level of anger and frustrationin response to the deliberate racism toward Muslimsin Canada and the unwillingness, despite ample ex-amples, to let go of old colonial images of passiveMuslim women. The assumption that veil equalsignorance and oppression means that young Muslimwomen have to invest a considerable amount of en-ergy to establish themselves as thinking, rational, lit-erate students/individuals, both in their classroomsand outside.

In this essay, I draw on historical sources, my re-search data on young Muslim women in Canada, aswell as my own experience as a nonveiled Muslimwoman of Iranian descent. I argue that the veil,which since the nineteenth century has symbolizedfor the West the inferiority of Muslim cultures, re-mains a powerful symbol both for the West and forMuslim societies. While for Westerners its meaninghas been static and unchanging, in Muslim culturesthe veil’s functions and social significance have var-ied tremendously, particularly during times of rapidsocial change. Veiling is a lived experience full ofcontradictions and multiple meanings. While ithas clearly been a mechanism in the service ofpatriarchy, a means of regulating and controllingwomen’s lives, women have used the same socialinstitution to free themselves from the bonds of pa-triarchy. Muslim women, like all other women, aresocial actors, employing, reforming, and changingexisting social institutions, often creatively, to theirown ends. The static colonial image of the op-pressed veiled Muslim woman thus often contrastssharply with the lived experience of veiling. Todeny this is also to deny Muslim women theiragency.




The continuation of misconceptions and misin-terpretations about the veil and veiled women hasseveral consequences, not just for Muslim womenbut also for occidental women. The mostly man-made images of oriental Muslim women continueto be a mechanism by which Western dominantcultures re-create and perpetuate beliefs abouttheir superiority. The persistence of colonial andracist responses to their societies has meant thatMuslim communities and societies must continu-ally struggle to protect their cultural and politicalidentities, a situation that makes it harder formany Muslim women, who share the frustration oftheir community and society, to question the mer-its and uses of the veil within their own communi-ties. Moreover, the negative images of Muslimwomen are continually presented as a reminder toEuropean and North American women of their rel-ative good fortune and as an implied warning tocurb their “excessive” demands for social and legalequality. Yet all too often Western feminists uncrit-ically participate in the dominant androcentric ap-proaches to other cultures and fail to see how suchparticipation is ultimately in the service of patri-archy. Significantly, Western feminists’ failure tocritically interrogate colonial, racist, and andro-centric constructs of women of non-Western cul-tures forces Muslim women to choose betweenfighting sexism or racism. As Muslim feministshave often asked, must racism be used to fightsexism?

To illustrate the persistence of the social and ideo-logical construction of the veil in colonial practicesand discourses and its contrast to the lived experi-ence of veiling, I first briefly review a history of theveil and its representation in the West. Then, by ex-amining some of the consequences of both compul-sory de-veiling and re-veiling in Iran, I demonstratethe costs to Iranian women of generalized and un-substantiated assumptions that the veil is inherentlyoppressive and hence that its removal is automati-cally liberating. I then discuss some of my findingson the representation of the veil and its usage in thecontext of Canadian society and its consequences foryoung Muslim women in their communities and intheir interaction with other women, particularlyfeminists. I point out how the androcentric imagesand stereotypes of occidental and oriental womeninhibit women’s learning about and from each other

and weakens our challenge to both patriarchy andWestern imperialism.

The Origins of the Veil

The practice of veiling and seclusion of women ispre-Islamic and originates in non-Arab Middle East-ern and Mediterranean societies. The first referenceto veiling is in an Assyrian legal text that dates fromthe thirteenth century B.C., which restricted the prac-tice to respectable women and forbade prostitutesfrom veiling. Historically, veiling, especially whenaccompanied by seclusion, was a sign of status andwas practiced by the elite in the ancient Greco-Roman, pre-Islamic Iranian, and Byzantine empires.Muslims adopted the veil and seclusion from con-quered peoples, and today it is widely recognized,by Muslims and non-Muslims, as an Islamic phe-nomenon that is presumably sanctioned by the Qur’an.Contrary to this belief, veiling is nowhere specifi-cally recommended or even discussed in the Qur’an.At the heart of the Qur’anic position on the questionof the veil is the interpretation of two verses (Surahal-Nur, verses 30–31) that recommend women tocover their bosoms and jewelry; this has cometo mean that women should cover themselves. An-other verse recommends to the wives of the Prophetto wrap their cloak tightly around their bodies, so asto be recognized and not be bothered or molested inpublic (Surah al-Ahzab, verse 59). Modern commen-tators have rationalized that since the behavior of thewives of the Prophet is to be emulated, then allwomen should adopt this form of dress. In any case,it was not until the reign of the Safavids (1501–1722)in Iran and the Ottoman Empire (1357–1924), whichextended to most of the area that today is known asthe Middle East and North Africa, that the veilemerged as a widespread symbol of status amongthe Muslim ruling class and urban elite. Signifi-cantly, it is only since the nineteenth century, afterthe veil was promoted by the colonials as a promi-nent symbol of Muslim societies, that Muslims havejustified it in the name of Islam, and not by referenceto cultural practices.

Although the boundaries of veiling and seclusionhave been blurred in many debates, and particularlyin Western writing, the two phenomena are separate,and their consequences for Muslim women arevastly different. Seclusion, or what is sometimes






known as purdah, is the idea that women should beprotected, especially from males who are not rela-tives; thus they are often kept at home where theircontact with the public is minimized. Seclusion mayor may not be combined with the veiling that coversthe whole body.

It has been argued that seclusion developedamong Mediterranean and Middle Eastern societiesbecause they prefer endogamous marriages; conse-quently they tend to develop social institutions thatlend themselves to more control of young people,particularly women. The argument is made evenmore strongly for Muslim women because they in-herit wealth and remain in control of their wealthafter marriage. Although a daughter’s inheritedshare is equal to half that of a son, it is also estab-lished, by religion, that a father does not have thepower to disinherit his daughters. It is an irony ofhistory that the more economic rights women havehad, the more their sexuality has been subject to con-trol through the development of complex social in-stitutions. Nonetheless, outside the well-to-do socialelites, seclusion was rarely practiced to any consider-able degree, since women’s economic as well as re-productive labor was essential for the survival of theirhouseholds. In reality, the majority of social classes,particularly in rural settings, practiced segregationand sexual division of labor rather than seclusion.The exertion of these controls often created an obsta-cle but did not erase Muslim women’s control of theirwealth (if they had any), which they managed.

However, as the socioeconomic conditionschanged and factory production and trade becamethe major sources of wealth and capital, elite womenlost ground to their male counterparts. The ideologyof seclusion prevented their easy access to therapidly changing market and to information, thuslimiting their economic possibilities. Consequentlytheir socioeconomic position vis-à-vis their hus-bands deteriorated. Moreover, the informal socialinstitutions, class alliances, and kin networks thathad protected women to some extent were breakingdown very rapidly. In the twentieth century, thiscontext is an important, though often neglected,reason for women of the upper classes in theMiddle East to become more radically involved inthe women’s movement. In Egypt, where the socio-economic changes were most rapid, the women’smovement developed into an organized and

effective political force that other political groupscould not afford to ignore. As for women in othersocial groups, the “modern” and “traditional” ide-ologies of domesticity often excluded women frombetter-paying jobs in the public sector, particularly ifthis involved traveling outside their neighborhoodsand being in contact with unrelated males. More-over, the early modern governments that sponsoredthe training of many citizens in fields such as com-mercial and international law, engineering, and com-merce, following the European model, closed theseoptions to women until a much later date, therebyreproducing and occasionally intensifying the gapalready existing between men’s and women’s eco-nomic opportunities.

The veil refers to the clothing that covers and con-ceals the body from head to ankle, with the exceptionof the face, hands, and feet. Incidentally, this is alsoa very accurate description of the traditional maleclothing of much of the Arab world, although in dif-ferent historical periods authorities have tried, withvarying degrees of success, to make the clothingmore gender specific. The most drastic differencebetween male and female clothing worn among theArab urban elite was created with the Westerniza-tion and colonization of Muslim societies in the Mid-dle East and North Africa. Men, particularly, beganto emulate European ways of dress much sooner andon a larger scale than women did.

Although in Western literature the veil and veil-ing are often presented as a unified and static prac-tice that has not changed for more than a thousandyears, the veil has been varied and subject to chang-ing fashion throughout past and present history.Moreover, like other articles of clothing, the veil maybe worn for multiple reasons. It may be worn tobeautify the wearer, much as Western women wearmakeup; to demonstrate respect for conventionalvalues, or to hide the wearer’s identity. In recenttimes, the most frequent type of veiling in most citiesis a long, loosely fitted dress of any color combina-tion, worn with a scarf wrapped (in various fash-ions) on the head so as to cover all the hair. Nonethe-less, the imaginary veil that comes to the mindsof most Westerners is an awkward black cloak thatcovers the whole body, including the face, and isdesigned to prevent women’s mobility. Throughouthistory, however, apart from the elite, women’s laborwas necessary to the functioning of the household




and the economy, and so they wore clothing thatwould not hamper their movement. Even a casualsurvey of clothing among most rural and urbanareas in the Middle East and other Muslim cultureswould indicate that these women’s costumes,though all are considered Islamic, cover the body todifferent degrees. The tendency of Western scholarsand the colonial powers to present a unidimensionalIslam and a seamless society of Muslims has pre-vented them from exploring the socioeconomic sig-nificance of the existing variations that were readilyavailable, sometimes in their own drawings andpaintings. Similarly, scholarly study of Islamic be-liefs and culture focused on Islamic texts and use ofIslamic dialogues, while overlooking the variationsin the way Islam was practiced in different Islamiccultures and by different classes.

Although clothing fulfills a basic need of humanbeings in most climates, it is also a significant socialinstitution through which important ideological andnonverbal communication takes place. Clothing, inmost aspects, is designed to indicate not only genderand stage of life cycle, but also to identify social groupand geographic area. Moreover, in the Middle East,veiling has been intertwined with Islamic ethics,making it an even more complex institution. Accord-ing to Muslims, women should cover their hair andbody when they are in the presence of adult men whoare not close relatives; thus when women put on ortake off their veil, they are defining who may or maynot be considered kin. Furthermore, since veiling de-fines sexuality, by observing or neglecting the veil,women may define who is a man and who is not. Forinstance, high-status women may not observe the veilin the presence of low-status men.

In the popular urban culture of Iran, in situationsof conflict between men and women who are outsidethe family group, a very effective threat that womenhave is to drop their veil and thus indicate that theydo not consider the contester to be a man. This is anirrevocable insult and causes men to be wary of get-ting into arguments with women. Similarly, bythreatening to drop the veil and put on male cloth-ing, women have at times manipulated men tocomply with their wishes. One such example canbe drawn from the Tobacco Movement of the latenineteenth century in Iran. In a meeting on devisingresistance strategies against the tobacco monopolyand concessions given to Britain by the Iranian

government, men expressed reluctance to engage inradical political action. Observing the men’s hesita-tion, women nationalists who were participating inthe meeting (from the women’s section of themosque) raised their voices and threatened that ifthe men failed to protect their country for the womenand children, then the women had no alternative butto drop their veil and go to war themselves. Thus,the men were obliged to consider more radical formsof action.

The Making of the Veil in Their Minds

It was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury that the West’s overwhelming preoccupa-tion with the veil in Muslim cultures emerged. Travelaccounts and observations from commentators priorto this time show little interest in Muslim women orthe veil. The sexual segregation among all sects(Muslims, Christians, and Jews) in Mediterraneanand Middle Eastern cultures was established knowl-edge and prior to the nineteenth century rarely at-tracted much attention from European travelers.Some pre-nineteenth-century accounts did report onoriental and Muslim women’s lack of morality andshamelessness based on their revealing clothes andtheir free mobility. Others observed and commentedon the extent of women’s power within the domesticdomain, an aspect totally overlooked in the latterpart of the nineteenth century.

The representation of the Muslim orient by theChristian occident went through a fundamentalchange as the Ottoman Empire’s power diminishedand the Muslim orient fell deeper and deeper underEuropean domination. The appearance and circula-tion of the earliest version of A Thousand and OneNights in the West coincided with the Turkish defeat.By the nineteenth century the focus of representationof the Muslim orient had changed from the malebarbarian, constructed over centuries during theCrusades, to the “uncivilized” ignorant male whosemasculinity relies on the mistreatment of women,primarily as sex slaves. In this manner images ofMuslim women were used as a major building blockfor the construction of the orient’s new imagery, animagery that has been intrinsically linked to thehegemony of Western imperialism, particularly thatof France and Britain.






Scholars of Muslim societies, including feminists,have recently begun to trace the entrenchment of theWestern image of the oppressed Muslim woman.This informal knowledge about Muslim womenseeped into numerous travel books and occasionallyinto historical and anthropological accounts of theregion. In a century and a half, 1800 to 1950, an esti-mated sixty thousand books were published in theWest on the Arab orient alone. The primary missionof these writings was to depict the colonizedArabs/Muslims as inferior/backward and urgentlyin need of progress offered to them by the colonialsuperiors. It is in this political context that the veiland the Muslim harem, as the world of women,emerged as a source of fascination, fantasy, and frus-tration for Western writers. Harems were supposedto be places where Muslim men imprisoned theirwives, who had nothing to do except beautify them-selves and cater to their husbands’ huge sexual ap-petite. It is ironic that the word harem, which etymo-logically derives from a root that connotes sacred andshrine, has come to represent such a negative notionin the Western world. Women are invariably de-picted as prisoners, frequently half-naked and un-veiled and at times sitting at windows with bars,with little hope of ever being free. How these mostlymale writers, painters, and photographers havefound access to these presumably closed women’squarters/prisons is a question that has been raisedonly recently.

Western representations of the harem were in-spired not only by the fantasies of A Thousand andOne Nights, but also by the colonizers’ mission ofsubjugation of the colonized, to the exclusion of thereality of the harems and the way women experi-enced them. Of little interest to Western readers wasthe fact that during the nineteenth century in mostMiddle Eastern societies over 85 percent of the pop-ulation lived in rural areas, where women workedon the land and in the homes, with lives very differ-ent from the well-to-do urban elites (who, in anycase, were a very small minority). When Westerncommentators of the nineteenth century came acrossa situation that contradicted their stereotype of thepower structure in Muslim households, they simplydismissed it as exceptional.

It is important to bear in mind that the transfor-mation in the representation of Muslim women dur-ing the nineteenth century did not occur in isolation

from other changes taking place in the imperial land,as Mabro has pointed out. During the same period,the ideology of femininity and what later came to beknown as the Victorian morality was developing inBritain, and variations on this theme were cominginto existence in other areas of the Western world.Yet Western writers zealously described the oppres-sion of Turkish and Muslim women, with little re-gard for the fact that many of these criticisms ap-plied equally to their own society. Both Muslimoriental and Christian occidental women werethought to be in need of male protection and intel-lectually and biologically destined for the domesticdomain. Moreover, in both the orient and occidentwomen were expected to obey and honor their hus-bands. In his book Sketches of Persia, Sir John Malcolmreports a dialogue between himself and MeerzaAboo Talib in which he compares the unfavorableposition of Persian women relative to Europeanwomen. Aboo Talib makes the point that “we con-sider that loving and obeying their husbands, givingproper attention to their children, and their domesticduties, are the best occupations for females.” Malcolmthen replies that this made the women slaves to theirhusbands’ pleasure and housework. That is, ofcourse, quite correct, but, as Mabro has pointed out,Aboo Talib’s comment on Persian women was anequally correct description of women’s duty in mostEuropean societies, including Britain, at the time.

Neither did Western women traveler-writersdraw parallels between the oppression of women intheir own society and that of women in the orient.For instance, European women of the nineteenthcentury were hardly freer than their oriental coun-terparts in terms of mobility and traveling, a situa-tion of which many European female expatriates re-peatedly complained. Mobile Shaman, in her bookThrough Algeria, lamented that women were not ableto travel unless accompanied by men. Westernwomen travelers often wrote about the boredom oforiental women’s lives. It often escaped them that inmany cases it was precisely the boredom and thelimitation of domestic life that had been the majormotivating force behind many Western women’stravels to the orient, an option no doubt open only tovery few. Similarly, while Western writers of thenineteenth century wrote about the troubled situa-tion of women in polygamous marriages and thedouble standard applied to men and women, they




totally ignored the plight of “mistresses” in theirown societies and the vast number of illegitimatechildren, who not only had no right to economic sup-port but as “bastards” were also condemned to carrythe stigma of the sin of their father for the rest of theirlife. Clearly, societies in the Muslim orient and theChristian occident both practiced a double standardas it applied to men and women. Both systems ofpatriarchy were developed to cater to men’s whimsand to perpetuate their privileges. But the social in-stitutions and ethos of the orient and occident thathave developed in order to ensure male prerogativeswere/are different. The Western world embraced amonogamous ideology, overlooking the bleak life ofa huge group of women and their illegitimate chil-dren. In the orient, at the cost of legitimization ofpolygynous marriages and institutionalizing thedouble standard, women and their children receivedat least a limited degree of protection and social le-gitimacy. Although the occident demonstrated littleinterest in the oriental images of the Europeanworld, numerous nineteenth-century documentsindicate that oriental writers were conscious of thecontradiction between the presentation of a civilizedfaçade and the hideous and cruel reality of the West-ern world for many women and children.

Women in Qajar Iran were astonished by theclothing of Western women and the discomfort thatwomen must feel in the heavy, tight garments; theyfelt that Western societies were unkind to theirwomen by attempting to change the shape of theirbodies, forcing them into horrendous corsets. A sce-nario quoted in Mabro has aptly captured the wayoriental and occidental women viewed each other:“When Lady Mary Montague was pressed by thewomen in a Turkish bath to take off her clothes andjoin them, she undid her blouse to show them hercorset. This led them to believe that she was im-prisoned in a machine which could only be openedby her husband. Both groups of women could seeeach other as prisoners and of course they wereright.”

As the domination by Europe over the orient in-creased, it shattered Islamic societies’ self-confidenceas peoples and civilizations. Many, in their attemptto restore their nations’ lost glory and independence,sought to Westernize their society by emulatingWestern ways and customs, including the clothing.The modernizers’ call for women’s formal education

was often linked with unveiling, as though the veilper se would prevent women from studying or intel-lectual activities. The reformers proposed a combi-nation of unveiling and education in one package,which at least partly stemmed from their belief thatthe veil had become in the West a symbol of their so-ciety’s “backwardness.” In many Muslim societies,particularly among urban elites, patriarchal rulershad often enforced (and in some cases still do) theveil to curtail women’s mobility and independence.The reformers’ criticisms were mostly directed atthe seclusion in the name of the veil, for clearly,seclusion and public education were incompatible.Nonetheless, given the connections between the veiland Islamic ethics in Muslim cultures, the reformersand modernizers made a strategic mistake in com-bining unveiling with formal education. Conserva-tive forces, particularly some of the religious author-ities, seized the opportunity to legitimize theiropposition to the proposed changes in the name ofreligion and galvanized public resistance. Thougheducation is recommended by Islam equally formales and female, in fact the public is largely op-posed to unveiling.

Despite much opposition from religious and con-servative forces, many elite reformists in the MiddleEast (both males and females) pressed for de-veiling.In Egypt, where feminist and women’s organiza-tions had emerged as important political forces vo-cally criticizing colonial power, it was the women ac-tivists who initiated and publicly removed the veilduring a demonstration in Cairo in 1923. Egypt thusbecame the first Islamic country to de-veil withoutstate intervention, a situation that provoked heateddebates in Egypt and the rest of the Arab and Mus-lim world. Recent assessment of de-veiling has dis-missed the importance of this historical event on thegrounds that veiling only affected upper-classwomen. But, as I have argued elsewhere, “althoughEgyptian women of low-income classes never veiledtheir faces and wore more dresses which did notprevent movement, they nevertheless regarded theupper-class veil as an ideal. It was not ideologywhich prevented them from taking ‘the veil,’ ratherit was the lack of economic possibilities.” The de-veiling movement among upper-class Egyptianwomen questioned not only the ideology of the veilbut also the seclusion of women in the name of theveil and Islam.






In other countries, such as Iran and Turkey, it wasleft to the state to outlaw the veil. Although therhetoric of de-veiling was to liberate women so theycould contribute to build a new modern nation, inreality women and their interests counted little.Rather, they had become the battlefield and thebooty of the harsh and sometimes bloody strugglebetween the secularists and modernists on one side,and the religious authorities on the other. The mod-ernist states, eager to alienate and defeat the reli-gious authorities, who historically had shared thestate’s power and who generally opposed the trendtoward secularization, outlawed the veil and en-listed the police forces to compel deveiling withoutconsidering the consequences of this action forwomen, particularly those outside the elite and mid-dle classes of large urban centers. Ataturk (1923–38),who represented the secularist, nationalist move-ment in Turkey, outlawed the veil and in fact all tra-ditional clothing including the fez; the Turks were towear European-style clothing in a march towardmodernity. Iran followed suit and introduced cloth-ing reform, albeit a milder version, but the stress wasput on de-veiling. Feminists and women activists inIran were less organized than their counterparts inEgypt and Turkey. Debates on women’s issues andthe necessity of education were primarily champi-oned by men and placed in the context of the mod-ernization of Iran to regain its lost glory. In thesediscussions, women were primarily viewed as themothers of the nation, who had to be educated inorder to bring up educated and intelligent children,particularly sons. The veil was often singled out asthe primary obstacle to women’s education.

The Veil on Our Heads: Iran, a Case Study

De-veiling, particularly without any other legal andsocioeconomic adjustments, can at best be a dubiousmeasure of women’s “liberation” and freedom ofmovement, and it can have many short- and long-term consequences. To illustrate this point, here I re-view the experiences of my own grandmother andher friends during the de-veiling movement in the1930s, and then compare this with some of the trendsthat have developed with the introduction and strictenforcement of compulsory veiling under the cur-rent Islamic Republic of Iran.

In 1936, the shah’s father, as part of his plan tomodernize Iran, decided to outlaw the veil. The gov-ernment passed a law that made it illegal for womento be in the street wearing the veil (or, as Iraniansrefer to it, the chador, which literally means tent andconsists of a long cape-type clothing that covers fromhead to ankle but normally does not cover the face)or any other kind of head covering except a Euro-pean hat. The police had strict orders to pull off andtear up any scarf or chador worn in public. This hadgrievous consequences for the majority of women,who were socialized to see the veil and veiling as le-gitimate and the only acceptable way of dressing.Nonetheless, it is important to note the impact of thecompulsory de-veiling for rural and urban women,younger and older women, as well as women of dif-ferent classes. As the state had little presence in thecountryside and since most rural women dressed intheir traditional clothing, the law had only a limitedimpact in the countryside. The women who wereurban modern elites welcomed the change and tookadvantage of some of the educational and employ-ment opportunities that the modern state offeredthem. Women of the more conservative and religioussocial groups experienced some inconvenience in theearly years of compulsory de-veiling, but they hadthe means to employ others to run their outdoorerrands. However, it was the urban lower middleclasses and low-income social groups who bore thebrunt of the problem. It is an example of these socialgroups that I present here.

Contrary to the assumptions and images preva-lent in the West, women generally were not kept inharems. Most women of modest means who livedin urban households often did the shopping andestablished neighborly and community networks,which, in the absence of any economic and socialsupport by the state, were a vital means of supportduring hard times. Many young unmarried women,including some of my aunts, went to carpet weav-ing workshops, an equivalent activity in many waysto attending school. Attending these workshopsgave the young women legitimate reason to moveabout the city and socialize with women outsidetheir circle of kin and immediate neighbors. Learn-ing to weave carpets in this traditional urban cul-ture was, however, fundamentally differentfrom the crocheting and embroidery engaged inby Victorian ladies: carpet weaving was a readily




marketable skill which enabled them to earn someindependent income, however small, should theyhave need.

The introduction of the de-veiling law came at atime of rapid social change created by a nationaleconomy in turmoil. In search of employment, thou-sands of men, especially those with no assets or cap-ital, had migrated to Tehran and other large cities,often leaving their families behind in the care of theirwives or mothers, since among the poor, nuclearfamilies were the prevalent form of household.Those men who did not migrate had to spend longerhours at their jobs, usually away from home, whileleaving more household responsibilities to theirwife. My grandmother, a mother of seven children,lived in Hamedan, an ancient city in the central partof Iran. By the time of de-veiling, her husband,whose modest income was insufficient to cover theday-to-day expenses of his family, had migrated toTehran in the hope of finding a better job, and shecarried sole responsibility for the public and privateaffairs of her household. According to her, this wasby no means an exceptional situation but was in factcommon for many women. Evidently this common-ality encouraged closer ties between the women,who went about their affairs together and spentmuch time in each other’s company.

Because the women would not go out in publicwithout a head covering, the de-veiling law and itsharsh enforcement compelled them to stay homeand beg favors from their male relatives and friends’husbands and sons for the performance of the publictasks they normally carried out themselves. Mygrandmother bitterly recounted her first memory ofthe day a policeman chased her to take off her scarf,which she had put on as a compromise to the chador.She ran as the policeman ordered her to stop; hefollowed her, and as she approached the gate ofher house he pulled off her scarf. She thought the po-liceman had deliberately allowed her to reach herhome decently, because policemen had mothers andsisters who faced the same problem: neither they northeir male kin wanted them to go out “naked.” Formany women it was such an embarrassing situationthat they just stayed home. Many independentwomen became dependent on men, while those whodid not have a male present in the household suf-fered most because they had to beg favors from their

neighbors. “How could we go out with nothing on?”my grandmother asked us every time she talkedabout her experiences. Young women of modestincome stopped going to the carpet weaving work-shops. Households with sufficient means wouldsometimes set up a carpet frame at home if theirdaughters were skilled enough to weave withoutsupervision. Gradually, however, the carpet tradersstarted to provide the wool, the loom, and other nec-essary raw materials to the households with lessermeans and, knowing that women had no other op-tion, paid them even smaller wages than when theywent to the workshops. Moreover, this meant thatwomen lost the option of socializing with those out-side their immediate kin and neighbors, thus youngwomen were subject to stricter control by their fam-ily. Worse yet, male relatives began to assume therole of selling completed carpets or dealing with themale carpet traders, which meant women lost con-trol over their wages, however small they were.

Apart from the economic impact, de-veiling hada very negative impact on the public, social, andleisure activities of urban women of modest means.For instance, historically, among urban Shi’ites,women frequently attended the mosque for prayer,other religious ceremonies, or simply for some peaceand quiet or socializing with other women. Theywould periodically organize and pay a collectivevisit to the various shrines across town. The legiti-macy of this social institution was so strong thateven the strictest husbands and fathers would notoppose women’s participation in these visits, al-though they might ask an older woman to accom-pany the younger ones. My grandmother, andwomen of her milieu, regretfully talked about howthey missed being able to organize these visits for along time, almost until World War II broke out. Sheoften asserted that men raised few objections to theselimitations, and said, “Why would they, since menalways want to keep their women at home?”

One of the most pleasant and widespread femalesocial institutions was the weekly visit to the publicbath, of which there were only a few in the town.Consequently, the public bath was a vehicle for so-cialization outside the kin and neighbor network.Women would go at sunrise and return at noon,spending much time sharing news, complainingabout misfortune, asking advice for dealing with





business, family, and health problems, as well as find-ing suitors for their marriageable sons, daughters,kin, and neighbors. At midday, they would oftenhave drinks and sweets. Such a ritualized bath wasespecially sanctioned within Muslim religious prac-tices, which require men and women to bathe aftersexual intercourse; bathing is also essential forwomen after menstruation before they resume thedaily prayers. A long absence from the public bathwould alarm the neighbors of a possible lapse in thereligious practices of the absentee. Therefore theyhad to develop a strategy that would allow them toattend to their weekly ablutions without offendingmodesty by “going naked” in the street, as the de-veiling law would require them to do.

The strategies they developed varied from brib-ing the police officers to disappear from their route,to the less favored option of warming up enoughwater to bathe and rinse at home. Due to the cold cli-mate in Hamedan, and the limited heating facilitiesavailable, this option was not practical during themany cold winter months. One neighbor had heardof women getting into big bags and then being car-ried to the public bath. So, women of the neighbor-hood organized to make some bags out of canvas.The women who were visiting the public bath wouldget into the bags, and their husbands, sons, or broth-ers would carry them in the bags over their shoulder,or in a donkey- or horse-driven cart to the publicbath, where the attendant, advised in advance,would come and collect them. At lunch time thewomen would climb back in the bags and the menwould return to carry them home.

Although this strategy demonstrates how farpeople will go to defy imposed and senseless world-views and gender roles envisaged by the state, it isalso clear that in the process women have lost muchof their traditional independence for the extremelydubious goal of wearing European outfits. One caneffectively argue that such outfits, in the existing so-cial context, contributed to the exclusion of womenof popular classes and pushed them toward seclu-sion, rather than laying the ground for their libera-tion. The de-veiling law caused many moderate fam-ilies to resist allowing their daughters to attend schoolbecause of the social implication of not wearing ascarf in public. Furthermore, as illustrated above,women became even more dependent on men since

they now had to ask for men’s collaboration in orderto perform activities they had previously performedindependently. This gave men a degree of controlover women they had never before possessed. It alsoreinforced the idea that households without adultmen were odd and abnormal. Moreover, not all mencollaborated. As my grandmother observed, manymen used this opportunity to deny their wives theweekly money with which women would pay theirpublic bath fare and the occasional treat to consumewith women friends. Yet other men used the oppor-tunity to gain complete control over their householdshopping, denying women any say in financialmatters.

Wearing the chador remained illegal, althoughthe government eventually relaxed the enforcementof the de-veiling law. In the official state ideology,the veil remained a symbol of backwardness, de-spite the fact that the majority of women, particu-larly those from low and moderate income groupsand the women of the traditional middle classesin the urban centers, continued to observe variousdegrees of hijab (covering). The government, throughits discriminatory policies, effectively denied veiledwomen access to employment in the governmentsector, which is the single most important nationalemployer, particularly of women. The practice of ex-cluding veiled women hit them particularly hard asthey had few other options for employment. Histor-ically, the traditional bazaar sector rarely employedfemale workers, and while the modern private sectoremployed some blue-collar workers who wore thetraditional chador, rarely did they extend this policyto white-collar jobs. A blunt indication of this dis-crimination was clear in the policies covering the useof social facilities such as clubs for civil servants pro-vided by most government agencies or even privatehotels and some restaurants, which denied service towomen who observed the hijab.

This undemocratic exclusion was a major sourceof veiled women’s frustration. To demonstrate buta small aspect of the problem for women who ob-served the hijab, I give two examples from among myown acquaintances. In 1975 my father was paid avisit by an old family friend and her daughter to seekhis advice. The family was deeply religious but veryopen-minded, and the mother was determined thather daughters should finish their schooling and seek






employment before they marry. She argued thatthere is no contradiction between being a goodMuslim and being educated and employed with anindependent income of one’s own. After much argu-ment, the father agreed that if the oldest daughter,who had graduated from high school, could find ajob in the government sector, he would not object toher working. Since, as a veiled woman, she had littlechance of even obtaining an application, she askedan unveiled friend to go to the Ministry of Financeand fill out the application form. With the help ofneighbors, the mother managed to arrange an inter-view for her. The dilemma was that, should she ap-pear at the interview with chador or scarf on herhead, she would never get the job and all their effortswould be wasted. It was finally agreed that shewould wear a wig and a very modest dress and leavefor the interview from a relative’s house so that theneighbors would not see her. After a great deal oftrouble, she finally was offered a position and con-vinced her father not to object to her wearing a scarfwhile at work. Thus she would leave her housewearing the chador and remove it, leaving just a scarfon her hair, before she arrived at work. To her col-leagues, she explained that because she lived in avery traditional neighborhood, it would shame herfamily if she left the house without a chador.

A similar example can be drawn from the experi-ence of a veiled woman I met at university in Iran.She came from a religious family with very modestmeans. She had struggled against a marriage ar-ranged by her family, and managed to come to uni-versity always wearing her chador. She graduatedwith outstanding results from the Department ofEconomics and taught herself a good functionalknowledge of English. She hoped, with her qualifica-tions, to find a good job and help her family, whohad accommodated her nontraditional views. To sat-isfy the modesty required by her own and her fam-ily’s Islamic beliefs, and the need to be mobile andwork, she designed for herself some loosely cut, butvery smart, long dresses that included a hood or ascarf. But her attempt to find a job was fruitless,though she was often congratulated on her abilities.Knowing that she was losing her optimism, I askedher to come and apply for an opening at the Irano-Swedish company where I worked temporarily asassistant to the personnel manager. When she visitedthe office, the secretary refused to give her an ap-

plication form until I intervened. Later, my bossinquired about her and called me to his office. To myamazement, he said that it did not matter whather qualifications were, the company would neveremploy a veiled woman. I asked why, since thecompany had Armenians, Jews, Baha’is, and Mus-lims, including some very observant male Muslims,we could not also employ a practicing female Mus-lim, especially since we needed her skills. He dis-missed this point, saying it was not the same thing;he then told the secretary not to give applicationforms to veiled women, as it would be a waste ofpaper. My friend, who had become quite disap-pointed, found a primary teaching job at an Islamicschool at only an eighth of my salary, though we hadsimilar credentials.

A few years prior to the Iranian revolution, a ten-dency toward questioning the relevance of Eurocen-tric gender roles as the model for Iranian societygained much ground among university students.During the early stages of the revolution this wasmanifested in street demonstrations, where manywomen, a considerable number of whom belongedto the nonveiled middle classes, put on the veil andsymbolically rejected the state-sponsored genderideology. Then, in 1980, after the downfall of theshah and the establishment of the Islamic Republic,the Islamic regime introduced compulsory veiling,using police and paramilitary police to enforce thenew rule. Despite the popularity of the regime, itfaced stiff resistance from women (including someveiled women) on the grounds that such a law com-promised their democratic rights. The resistance ledto some modification and a delay in the impositionof compulsory veiling. After more than a decade ofcompulsory veiling, however, the regime still is fac-ing resistance and defiance on the part of women,despite its liberal use of public flogging, imprison-ment, and monetary fines as measures of enforce-ment of the veil. The fact is that both rejection of theshah’s Eurocentric vision and the resistance to thecompulsory veil represents women’s active resis-tance to the imposed gender role envisaged forwomen by the state.

The Islamic regime has no more interest in thefate of women per se than did the shah’s moderniststate. Women paid heavily, and their democraticrights and individual freedom once again were chal-lenged. The Islamic regime, partly in celebration of





its victory over the modernist state of the shah andpartly as a means for realizing its vision of “Islamic”Iran, not only introduced a strict dress code forwomen but also revoked many half-hearted reformsin the Iranian Personal Law, which had providedwomen with a limited measure of protection in theirmarriage. The annulment meant wider legal recogni-tion of temporary marriage, polygyny, and men’sright to divorce at will. Return to the shariah (Muslimlaw) also meant women were prevented from be-coming judges. The new gender vision was also usedto exclude women from some fields of study in theuniversities. These new, unexpected changes createdsuch hardship, insecurity, and disillusionment formany women, regardless of whether they had reli-gious or secular tendencies, that they became politi-cally active to try to improve their lot. However,strategies that women with religious and Islamictendencies have adopted are very different fromthose of secular women’s groups.

The impact of compulsory veiling has been var-ied. There is no doubt that many educated middle-class women, who were actually or potentially activein the labor market, either left their jobs (and a con-siderable number left the country) voluntarily orwere excluded by the regime’s policies. However,these women were replaced by women of other so-cial groups and not by men. Labor market statisticsindicate that, contrary to the general expectation ofscholars, the general public, and the Islamic stateitself, the rate of female employment in the formalsector has continued to increase in the 1980s evenduring the economic slump and increased generalunemployment. Similarly, the participation ofwomen in all levels of education, from adult literacyto university level, has continued to increase.

Significantly, whether women believe and adhereto the veiling ideology or not, they have remainedactive in the political arena, working from withinand outside the state to improve the socioeconomicposition of women. Iranian women’s achievementsin changing and redefining the state vision ofwomen’s rights in “Islam” in just over one and a halfdecades have been considerable. For instance, thepresent family protection law, which Muslimwomen activists lobbied for and Ayatollah Khomeinisigned in 1987, offers women more actual protectionthan had been afforded by the shah’s Family Code,introduced in 1969, since it entitles the wife to

half the wealth accumulated during the marriage.More recently, the Iranian parliament approved alaw that entitles women to wages for housework,forcing the husbands to pay the entire sum in theevent of divorce.

Although, as in most other societies, the situationof Iranian women is far from ideal or even reasonable,nonetheless the lack of interest or acknowledgmentof Muslim women activists’ achievements on the partof scholars and feminist activists from Europe andNorth America is remarkable. Such disregard, in acontext where the “excesses” of the Islamic regimetoward women continue to make headlines andMuslim women and religious revivalism in theMuslim world continue to be matters of wide interest,is an indicator of the persistence of orientalist andcolonial attitudes toward Muslim cultures. Wheneverunfolding events confirm Western stereotypes aboutMuslim women, researchers and journalists rush tospread the news of Muslim women’s oppression. Forinstance, upon the announcement of compulsoryveiling, Kate Millett, whose celebrated work SexualPolitics indicates her lack of commitment to and un-derstanding of issues of race, ethnicity, and class (al-though she made use of Marxist writings on develop-ment of gender hierarchy), went to Iran supposedlyin support of her Iranian sisters. In 1982 she publisheda book, Going to Iran, about her experiences there.Given the atmosphere of anti-imperialism and angertoward the American government’s covert and overtpolicies in Iran and the Middle East, her widely pub-licized trip to Iran was effectively used to associatethose who were organizing resistance to the compul-sory veil with imperialist and pro-colonial elements.In this way her unwise and unwanted support andpresence helped to weaken Iranian women’s resis-tance. According to her book, Millett’s intention ingoing to Iran, which is presented as a moment of greatpersonal sacrifice, was not to understand why Iranianwomen for the first time had participated in suchmassive numbers in a revolution whose scale was un-precedented, nor was it to listen and find out what themajority of Iranian women wanted as women fromthis revolution. Rather, according to her own account,it was to lecture to her Iranian sisters on feminism andwomen’s rights, as though her political ideas, life ex-pectations, and experiences were universally applica-ble. This is symptomatic of ethnocentrism (if we don’tcall it racism) and the lingering, implicit or explicit





assumption that the only way to “liberation” is tofollow Western women’s models and strategies forchange; consequently, the views of third worldwomen, and particularly Muslim women, are entirelyignored.

Veiled Women in theWestern Context

The veiling and re-veiling movement in Europeanand North American societies has to be understoodin the context not only of continuing colonial imagesbut also of thriving new forms of overt and covertchauvinism and racism against Islam and Muslims,particularly in these post–cold war times. Often, un-critical participation of feminists/activists from thecore cultures of Western Europe and North Americain these oppressive practices has created a particu-larly awkward relationship between them andfeminists/activists from Muslim minorities both inthe West and elsewhere. This context has importantimplications for Muslim women, who, like all otherwomen of visible minorities, experience racism in allareas of their public life and interaction with thewider society, including with feminists and feministinstitutions. Muslim women, faced with this un-pleasant reality, feel they have to choose betweenfighting racism and fighting sexism. Their strategieshave to take account of at least three interdependentand important dimensions: first, racism; second,how to accommodate and adapt their own culturalvalues and social institutions to those of the core anddominant cultures that are themselves changingvery rapidly; and finally, how to devise ways of (for-mally and informally) resisting and challenging pa-triarchy within both their own community and thatof the wider society without weakening their strug-gle against racism. In my ongoing research on youngMuslim women in Montreal, I was impressed byhow the persistence of the images of oppressed andvictimized Muslim women, particularly veiledwomen, creates barriers for them, the majority ofwhom were brought up in Canada and feel a part ofCanadian society. Consequently, many now do noteven try to establish rapport with non-MuslimQuébecoise and Anglo women. A college student,angered by my comment that “when all is said anddone, women in Canada share many obstaclesand must learn to share experiences and develop, if

not common, at least complementary strategies,”explained to me:

it is a waste of time and emotion. They [whiteCanadian women] neither want to understand norcan feel like a friend towards a Muslim. Whenever Itry to point out their mistaken ideas, for instance bysaying that Islam has given women the right tocontrol their wealth, they act as if I am makingthese up just to make Islam look good, but if Icomplain about some of the practices of Muslimcultures in the name of Islam they are more thanready to jump on the bandwagon and lecture aboutthe treatment of women in Islam. I wouldn’t mindif at least they would bother to read about it andsupport their claims with some documentation orreferences. They are so sure of themselves and thesuperiority of their God that they don’t think theyneed to be sure of their information! I cannot standthem any more.

Another veiled woman explained the reasons for herfrustration in the following manner:

I wouldn’t mind if only the young students whoknow nothing except what they watch on televisiondemonstrated negative attitudes to Islam, butsometimes our teachers are worse. For instance, Ihave always been a very good student, but alwayswhen I have a new teacher and I talk or participatein the class discussion the teachers invariably makecomments about how they did not expect me to beintelligent and articulate. That I am unlike Muslimwomen. . . . What they really mean is that I do notfit their stereotype of a veiled woman, since theycould hardly know more Muslim women than Ido and I cannot say there is a distinctive modelthat Muslim women all fit into. Muslim womencome from varieties of cultures, races, and histor-ical backgrounds. They would consider me unso-phisticated and criticize me if I told them that theydid not act like a Canadian woman, becauseCanada, though small in terms of population, issocially and culturally very diverse.

Some Western feminists have such strong opin-ions about the veil that they are often incapable ofseeing the women who wear them, much less theirreasons for doing so. Writing in the student news-paper, one McGill student said that she could not de-cide whether it is harder to cope with the sexism andpatriarchy of the Muslim community, or to toleratethe patronizing and often unkind behavior of whitefeminists. She then reported that her feminist house-mate had asked her to leave the house and look for





other accommodations because she couldn’t standthe sight of the veil and because she was concernedabout what her feminist friends would think of herliving with a veiled woman, totally disregarding thefact that, though veiled, she was nonetheless an ac-tivist and a feminist.

The stereotypes of Muslim women are so deep-rooted and strong that even those who are very con-scious and critical of not only blatant racism but ofits more subtle manifestations in everyday life donot successfully avoid them. To the Western feministeye, the image of the veiled woman obscures all else.One of my colleagues and I were discussing a veiledstudent who is a very active and articulate feminist. Imade a comment about how intelligent and imagi-native she was. While he admiringly agreed withme, he added (and I quote from my notes): “She is abundle of contradictions. She first came to see mewith her scarf tightly wrapped around her head . . .and appeared to me so lost that I wondered whethershe would be capable of tackling the heavy courseshe had taken with me. . . . She, with her feministideas, and critical views on orientalism, and love oflearning, never failed to amaze me every time she ex-pressed her views. She does not at all act like a veiledwoman.” As a “bundle of contradictions” only be-cause she wears the veil, consisting of a neat scarf,while otherwise dressed like most other students,she has to overcome significant credibility barriers.The fact that, at the age of nineteen, without lan-guage proficiency or contacts in Montreal, she cameto Canada to start her university studies at McGillhas not encouraged her associates to question theirown assumption about “veiled women.” Neither hasanyone wondered why Muslim women, if by virtueof their religion they are so oppressed and deprivedof basic rights, are permitted by their religious par-ents to travel and live alone in the Western world.

I had thought that part of the problem was thatthe veil has become such an important symbol ofwomen’s oppression that most people have diffi-culty reducing it to simply an article of clothing.However, I discovered that the reality is much morecomplicated than the veil’s being simply a visiblemarker. For instance, a Québecoise who had con-verted to Islam and observed the veil for the pastfour years said she had no evidence that wearing theveil was a hindrance to a woman’s professional andeducational achievements in Canada. In support of

her claim she told me of her recent experience atwork:

When I was interviewed for my last job, in passingI said that I was a Muslim and since I wear the veilI thought they made note of it…. I was offered thejob and I was working for almost nine monthsbefore I realized nobody seemed to be aware that Iwas a Muslim. One day, when I was complainingabout the heat, one of my colleagues suggested thatI take off my scarf. To which I answered that as apracticing Muslim I did not want to do that. At firsthe did not believe me, and when I insisted andasked him and others who had joined our con-versation if they had seen me at all without thescarf, they replied, no, but that they had thoughtI was following a fashion!

She then added that while she is very religious andbelieves that religion should be an important andcentral aspect of any society, the reality is thatCanada is a secular society and that for the most partpeople care little about what religious beliefs onehas.

While her claim was confirmed to varying de-grees by a number of other white Canadian veiledwomen, converts to Islam, my own experience, andthat of other nonwhite, non-Anglo/French Canadianveiled women is markedly different. Here is a recentexperience. Last year, my visit to a hairdresser endedin disastrously short hair. I was not accustomed tosuch short hair and for a couple of weeks I wore ascarf loosely on my head. While lecturing in myclasses I observed much fidgeting and whispereddiscussions but could not determine the reason.Finally, after two weeks, a student approached me toask if I had taken up the veil. Quite surprised, I saidno and asked what caused her to ask such a question.She said it was because I was wearing a scarf; since Iwas always saying positive things about Islam theythought I had joined “them.” “Them?” I asked. Shesaid, “Yes, the veiled women.” Perplexed, I realizedthat what I discuss in lectures is not evaluated on themerits of my argument and evidence alone, but alsoon the basis of the listener’s assumption about myculture and background. My colorful scarf, howeverloosely and decoratively worn, appears to my stu-dents as the veil, while the more complete veil of apracticing but culturally and biologically “white”Muslim who had worn the veil every day to work isseen as fashion! The main conclusion that I draw




from these incidents is that the veil by itself is not sosignificant, after all; rather, it is who wears the veilthat matters. The veil of the visible minorities is usedto confirm the outsider and marginal status of thewearer. Such incidents have made me realize whymany young Muslim women are so angry andhave decided against intermingling with Anglo/Québecoise women. After all, if I, as a professor in aposition of authority in the classroom, cannot escapethe reminder of being the “other,” how could theyoung Muslim students escape it?

Many Muslim women who are outraged by thecontinuous construction of Islam as a lesser religionand the portrait of Muslims as “less developed” and“uncivilized” feel a strong need for the Muslim com-munity to assert its presence as part of the fabric ofCanadian society. Since the veil, in Canadian society,is the most significant visible symbol of Muslimidentity, many Muslim women have taken up theveil not only from personal conviction but to assertthe identity and existence of a confident Muslimcommunity and to demand fuller social and politicalrecognition.

In the context of Western societies, the veil can alsoplay a very important role of mediation and adapta-tion, an aspect that, at least partly due to colonialimages of the veil, has been totally overlooked byWestern feminists. The veil allows Muslim women toparticipate in public life and the wider communitywithout compromising their own cultural and reli-gious values. Young Canadian Muslim women, par-ticularly those who are first-generation immigrants toCanada, have sometimes seen the wearing of the veilas affording them an opportunity to separate Islamfrom some of their own culture’s patriarchal valuesand cultural practices that have been enforced and le-gitimated in the name of religion. Aware of the socialand economic consequences of wearing the veil in theWestern world, taking it up is viewed by many Mus-lims as an important symbol of signifying a woman’scommitment to her faith. Thus many veiled womenare allowed far more liberty in questioning the Is-lamic foundation of many patriarchal customs per-petuated in the name of Islam. For instance, severalveiled women in my sample had successfully resistedarranged marriages by establishing that Islam hadgiven Muslim women the right to choose their ownpartners. In the process, not only did they secure their

parents’ and their communities’ respect, but they alsocreated an awareness and a model of resistance forother young women of their community.

Wearing the veil has helped many Muslimwomen in their effort to defuse their parents’ andcommunities’ resistance against young womengoing away to university, particularly when theyhad to leave home and live on their own in a differ-ent town. Some of the veiled women had argued suc-cessfully that Islam requires parents not to discrimi-nate against their children and educate both maleand female children equally; hence, if their brotherscould go and live on their own to go to university,they should be given the same opportunities. Thewomen in the study attributed much of their successto their wearing of the veil, since it indicated to theparents that these young women were not aboutto lose their cultural values and become “whiteCanadian”; rather, they were adopting essential andpositive aspects of their Canadian and host society toblend with their own cultural values of origin.

Many Muslim women have become conscious ofcarrying a much larger burden of establishing theircommunity’s identity and moral values than theirmale counterparts, the great majority of whom wearWestern clothes entirely and do not stand out asmembers of their community. Yet frequently, whenMuslim women criticize some of the cultural prac-tices of their own community and the double stan-dards often legitimized in the name of Islam, theyare accused by other elements in their community ofbehaving like Canadians and not like Muslims.Many women eager to challenge their family’s andcommunity’s attitude toward women have foundthat wearing the veil often means they are given avoice to articulate their views and be heard in a waythat nonveiled Muslims are not. Their critics cannoteasily dismiss them as lost to the faith. However, inwearing the veil they often find that they are silencedand disarmed by the equally negative images ofMuslim and Middle Eastern women held by whiteAnglo/Québecoise women, images that restrict thelives of both groups of women.

Conclusion

In this paper I have tried to demonstrate how thepersistence of colonial images of Muslim women,with their ethnocentric and racist biases, has formed






a major obstacle to understanding the social signifi-cance of the veil from the point of view of the womenwho live it. By reviewing the state-sponsored de-veiling movement in the 1930s in Iran and its conse-quences for women of low-income urban strata, andthe reemergence of veiling during the anti-shahmovement as an indication of rejection of state Euro-centric gender ideology, I argued that veiling is acomplex, dynamic, and changing cultural practice,invested with different and contradictory meaningsfor veiled and nonveiled women as well as men.Moreover, by looking at the reintroduction of com-pulsory veiling in the Islamic Republic of Iran underKhomeini and the voluntary veiling of Muslimwomen in Canada, I argued that while veiling hasbeen used and enforced by the state and by men asmeans of regulating and controlling women’s lives,women have used the same institution to loosen thebonds of patriarchy imposed on them.

Both de-veiling, as organized by the Egyptianfeminist movement in the 1920s, and the current re-sistance to compulsory veiling in Iran are indicationsof defiance of patriarchy. But veiling, viewed as alived experience, can also be a site of resistance, as inthe case of the anti-shah movement in Iran. Similarly,many Muslim women in Canada used the veil andreference to Islam to resist cultural practices such asarranged marriages or to continue their education

away from home without alienating their parentsand communities. Many veiled Muslim women em-ploy the veil as an instrument of mediation betweenMuslim minority cultures and host cultures. Para-doxically, Western responses to Muslim women, fil-tered through an orientalist and colonialist frame,effectively limit Muslim women’s creative resistanceto the regulation of their bodies and their lives.

The assumption that veiling is solely a static prac-tice symbolizing the oppressive nature of patriarchyin Muslim societies has prevented social scientistsand Western feminists from examining Muslimwomen’s own accounts of their lives, hence perpetu-ating the racist stereotypes that are ultimately in theservice of patriarchy in both societies. On the onehand, these mostly man-made images of the orientalMuslim women are used to tame women’s demandfor equality in the Western world by subtly remind-ing them how much better off they are than theirMuslim counterparts. On the other hand, these ori-ental and negative stereotypes are mechanisms bywhich Western-dominant culture re-creates and per-petuates beliefs about its superiority and domi-nance. White North American feminists, by adoptinga racist construction of the veil and taking part indaily racist incidents, force Muslim women tochoose between fighting racism and fighting sexism.The question is, why should we be forced to choose?




428

place, That Luang, Vientiane, the capital of Lao PDR.Both are key parts of performing Lao religious andethnic identity in Lao PDR and in North America. Boththese rituals reside more or less comfortably withinTherava- da Buddhism. I first consider Soukhouanrituals, and then the celebrations surrounding ThatLuang. The paper concludes with some speculationswith regard to Buddhism and the establishment ofLao national and ethnic identity in North America.

Soukhouan

Soukhouan rituals accompany Buddhist, community,and household celebrations and express the heart ofLao identity. Despite the disruption of war and

50

Ritual and the Performance ofBuddhist Identity Among LaoBuddhists in North AmericaPenny Van Esterik

In the following article, Penny Van Esterik considers two key rituals in the religious life of the Lao,both as refugees in North America and in late-20th century Lao People’s Democratic Republic.Soukhouan rituals therapeutically strengthen an individual’s morale and social bonds––enacted bytying strings to one’s wrist—while the That Luang festival celebrates an important pilgrimage sitein Vientiane, the capital city of Laos. The author traces the shifting meanings of these rituals amidstpolitical change in Laos, and considers the many ways in which they build community and assertnew identities for Lao in North America. What emerges is a picture of religion as malleable, adaptive,and dynamic in response to social conditions.

A documentary film entitled “Blue Collar and Buddha” (New York: Filmmakers Library, c1987)illustrates the challenges facing Lao refugees in Rockford, Illinois, in the 1980s, and includes footageof community life at the local Lao temple. Further ethnographic work on Laos appears in The Lao:Gender, Power, and Livelihood by Carol Ireson-Doolittle and Geraldine Moreno-Black (Boulder,CO: Westview Press, 2004). Penny Van Esterik is Professor of Anthropology at York University anda widely published specialist on mainland Southeast Asia.

From: AMERICIAN BUDDHISM: METHODS ANDFINDINGS IN RECENT SCHOLARSHIP, ed. DuncanRyuken Williams and Christopher S. Queen (Surrey, GreatBritain: Curzon Press), 1999, pp. 57–68.

The lowland Lao first entered North America as refu-gees around 1978 following the take-over of theRoyal Lao government by the Pathet Lao and the es-tablishment of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic(Lao PDR). By 1985, 102,783 Lao had resettled in theUnited States and 12,793 in Canada. The Lao Lum orlowland Lao are the largest ethnic group in Lao PDR,and the majority practice Therava- da Buddhism.

This paper examines the transformation of a ritualact, Soukhouan, and the celebration of a ritually charged




ESTERIK • RITUAL AND THE PERFORMANCE OF BUDDHIST IDENTITY AMONG LAO BUDDHISTS IN NORTH AMERICA | 429

socialist reconstruction and the changes in the lives ofLao refugees resettled in North America, this ritual cel-ebrates social relatedness in a concrete and powerfulway. Soukhouan reasserts and strengthens social bondsby helping individuals “pull themselves together”and by tying individuals to their communities.

Soukhouan rituals literally invite the thirty-twocomponents of an individual’s spirit essence, orkhouan, to reside comfortably and permanently inthe hair whorls on the crown of the head. If thekhouan leaves the body for any length of time, physi-cal or mental illness or even death might result. Theprerevolutionary, or feudalist, form of Soukhouanwas probably the most elaborate, although AnandaRajah argues that this feudalist “traditional” imageof the Soukhouan ceremony reflects a romanticized,idealized view.

Soukhouan ceremonies vary in complexity, withweddings and New Year’s being the most elaborate.The basic Soukhouan structure includes a set ofactions, objects, and words that accomplish a ritualtask. That task is to strengthen an individual’smorale by attracting and binding the wanderingsouls firmly into the individual’s body.

Soukhouan rites celebrate rites of passage, such asmarriage, pregnancy, birth, and ordination; mark thestart of an undertaking, such as a trip or military ser-vice; celebrate someone’s return to the communityafter an absence; strengthen someone suffering from along or serious illness; dispel bad luck; and welcomeofficials or guests to a community or a celebration.

The term Soukhouan is in most general use; theterm baci refers specifically to the conical tray-likestructure for the “auspicious rice” used in the ritual.The Cambodian origin of the word hints at the moreformal or royal context of the term baci, compared tothe more informal term, Soukhouan. The khouan areattracted back to the body by the beauty of the wordsand by the flowers and offerings built up on a tree-like structure on a tray or in an offering bowl. Here,the talent, wealth, and imagination of the sponsorsof the ritual can be fully displayed. Precut lengths ofwhite string are draped from the branches of the baci.The structure is decorated with fresh flowers, andbeneath the baci are dishes of rice, boiled eggs,bananas and other fruit, alcohol, and delicacies toattract a wandering soul.

The officiant is not a monk but a lay elder whoprobably spent some time in the monkhood. While

relatives and friends surround the candidate to behonored, the officiant takes a few strings from thebaci and recites prayers to entice the wandering soulsback into the body of the candidate. These prayersinclude the Pali verses honoring the Buddha,Dhamma, and Sangha, the Invitation to the Deities(Anchern Theweda), and other prayers appropriate tothe context.

Following these invocations, the cotton threadsare carefully picked off the baci and used to bind,first, the wrist of the celebrant, and later, othersparticipating in the Soukhouan. While the elders tiestrings around the wrist of the celebrant, they recitea formulaic wish for long life, wealth, happiness,and the success of the current undertaking—ordination to the monkhood, a journey overseas,marriage, or school exams. Following the Soukhouanand the ceremony of which it forms a part, such asthe ordination of a new monk, participants share afestive meal.

Soukhouan may also be performed in much lesselaborate settings, as, for example, when a youngman who finds he must leave his village suddenlygoes to his elderly relatives for their blessings andgood wishes for his safety and success. But he stillcarries with him the strings on his wrist for at leastthree days and nights to remind him of thestrength of his family’s concern and to boost hismorale.

When the Pathet Lao established the Lao PDR in1975, they were unable to purge all remnants of roy-alist ritual; including Soukhouan. The Pathet Lao,after their unsuccessful efforts to destroy religion al-together, are now skilled in pulling apart the strandsof ethnic and religious identity to emphasize someand downplay others. Since there is no longer a Laoking, royal symbols have largely disappeared orbeen reinterpreted in Lao PDR.

In contemporary socialist Laos, Soukhouan cere-monies still form the basis of wedding ceremonies,along with government authorization for the mar-riage of its cadre. Martin Stuart-Fox notes thatSoukhouan persist in the new regime as ceremonies ofwelcome or farewell for guests, to mark an auspi-cious occasion, or to prepare for an important event.Lao refugees leaving camps to be repatriated in Laosare given a Soukhoun ceremony to wish them luck ontheir return to Laos. Although some of the moremagical or feudalistic language may be altered for





officials, Soukhouan rituals are not described as need-ing to be purged from Lao culture. That is, they arenot seen as superstitious, feudalistic remnants, butas expressions of egalitarian reciprocity and generos-ity. In fact, Mayoury Ngaosyvathn sees Soukhouan asstrengthening the moral stance of the new regime byemphasizing marital fidelity and the respect ofchildren for their parents. Less ostentatious andexpensive ceremonies also enhance the equality-oriented policy of the new government.

Soukhouan rituals have also thrived in refugeecamps and in Lao refugee communities in NorthAmerica. They have been successfully adapted tomeet new needs in new contexts. Their core meaningremains intact, although the acts are reinterpreted.Lao refugees from New England, for example, com-ment on constructing baci:

Here in America we make the floral offerings withleaves and flowers that we gather. At home in Laoswe used to arrange the flowers differently, just thebuds in rows, stuck into a banana stock. Here wedon’t have banana stalks so we do it this way now . . .We arrange flowers in a beautiful silver bowl. On theleaves are many strings to bless our loved ones.You tie a string around the person’s wrist and say ablessing for strength, health, and long life. There aredifferent blessings for different people. When yourwrists are tied in the baci ceremony you must keepthe strings on for three days and nights.

In North America, the delicacies under the baci in-clude cans of Coca Cola, Twinkles, and Oreo cookies,which are later eaten by children.

In North American communities, Lao continue tocelebrate their ethnic identity with Soukhouan, partic-ularly for weddings. During Buddhist services, par-ents may approach Buddhist monks to tie threadsaround the wrists of a sick child. Following a motor-cycle accident, a very acculturated-looking youngLao couple requested the monk and elders to per-form an abbreviated Soukhouan for them to rid themof bad luck. For these individuals, the strings tied bymonks or elders around the wrist of the person forwhom the ceremony is performed reestablish thepsychological equilibrium of the individual, bringblessings, and promote good health.

As the strings help individuals “pull themselvestogether” in the face of challenges, so too the stringstie individuals more tightly into their communities.Soukhouan, as a joint social activity, affirms core Lao

values of reciprocity and sociability. Ngaosyvathnwrites that Soukhouan

expresses traditional Lao values of avoidance ofconflict and aims at promoting consensus withinthe social fabric and strengthening social ties. As a key element of Lao culture, the ritual is amicrocosm of Lao values serving to integrate theindividual both spiritually and socially. In theseterms, the ritual may be seen as the quintessentialexpression of conceptualizations of Lao identity.

Soukhouan rituals present great analytical challengesfor anthropologists because they require examina-tion once again of the relations between differentaspects of religious and cultural practice; Soukhouanencompasses animistic, Buddhist, and court Brah-man concepts in a single ritual event.

The problem of where spirits and Hindu deitiesfit into Therava- da Buddhist practice is epitomized inSoukhouan rituals. To some extent, the potential con-tradictions are also resolved. For in the practice ofSoukhouan, the strands are truly interwoven andbound together in the performative act. The questionraised by scholars regarding whether Soukhouan is aBuddhist, animist, or court Brahman ritual is notraised by participants because it is not relevant tothem. The act of performing a Soukhouan integratesand demonstrates the interdependence of all thestrands of Lao religion.

The historical, textual, and contextual strands ofTherava- da Buddhism, spirit worship, and courtBrahmanism are all intertwined in Soukhouan. In dif-ferent contexts, one strand predominates or providesthe dominant symbol for religious activities. Cur-rently, the symbols of court Brahmanism are effec-tively purged from the Lao religious scene. Kingshipno longer exists as the pivotal reference point forritual behavior as it still is in Thailand. Nevertheless,the more formal baci invoke the Hindu gods to ob-serve and participate in the Soukhouan.

The greatest contradiction between the variousstrands in Lao religion concerns the person.Therava- da Buddhism is based on concepts of anatta(non-self) and anicca (impermanence). How canthese concepts provide the basis for stable socialand political hierarchies and institutions of somepermanence? Soukhouan fixes the temporary mani-festation we perceive as humans long enough to“tie down” this human illusion with all its sufferingand imperfections and gives it a fixed bounded





identity. Building on the insightful work of G. Con-dominas, we can use the concept of “enboîtment”to stress the importance of the body or person as thefirst “box,” surrounded sequentially by the house-hold, village, and muang (political realm, principal-ity, or city). It is the body that is most immediatelyaddressed in Soukhouan rituals.

Soukhouan, the most basic Lao ritual, stresses theintegrity and identity of persons and offers ritualprotection to keep mobile “souls” trapped within aperson’s body. Only then can a person act (morallyor immorally) within a Buddhist social order. LaoBuddhists are not ambiguous about non-self andimpermanence as guiding principles. They place pri-ority on the integrity of the person as a social actor.Thus, they have been able to carry the ritual guaran-teeing this integrity across revolutions and resettle-ment virtually unchanged.

The loss of “soul,” vital essence or khouan, is apowerful metaphor for the experience of Lao Bud-dhists in North America, as individuals were sepa-rated from their homeland and loved ones andfaced painful disruptions to every aspect of theirlives. Like the wandering souls unable to return totheir homes, refugees wander without homes, fac-ing dangerous and unknown conditions. Soukhouanrituals are particularly necessary when the socialorder has been disrupted, as in the experience ofrefugee flight and resettlement. For Lao refugeecommunities throughout North America, it is thestrength of these social bonds that can tie souls intobodies, and reintegrate individuals into new com-munity settings in North American cities and, forrepatriated Lao, into the transformed villages of theLao PDR.

That Luang

The festival of That Luang, celebrated in late Novem-ber or early December around the stu-pa (reliquary)outside of Vientiane has been described as “the mostimportant occasion in the Lao religious calendar.”The stu-pa housing Buddha relics was built around1567 when the Lao capital was shifted to Vientiane.The French restored the monument after its burningin the 1870s. It has since become an important pil-grimage center. But without the Lao king, the ritualhas become more of a “national ceremony” in LaoPDR as well as in North America.

More so than most Lao rituals, That Luang cele-brates a place as well as an event. Since the ritual ofThat Luang is so intimately connected with the stu-paoutside Vientiane, it is surprising that it has beentransferred to North America so successfully. In theKingdom of Laos, government officials used topledge allegiance to the Lao king during That Luangrituals. However, the ritual of That Luang was secu-larized during the revolution and served as a centralrallying ground for official post-liberation rallies in1975. Its symbolic importance was further exploitedwhen Lao PDR officials offered food and robes to theresident monks at the site in 1979. In 1995, a numberof NGOs produced a calendar widely distributed inVientiane. The cover showed two temples flanking alarge rendering of That Luang with a procession ofmen and women from a number of different ethnicgroups playing instruments and dancing together.This is particularly noteworthy, since the midlandKhmu and upland Hmong head the procession be-side the lowland Lao, who are not Buddhists. ThatLuang is clearly becoming a sign of national identityrather than religious identity.

Photographs of That Luang are prominently dis-played in Lao homes and at Lao community eventsin North America. The festival of That Luang was firstcelebrated in Toronto as a Buddhist merit-makingoccasion in the late 1980s. Dominating these celebra-tions was a model of the stu-pa at Vientiane built outof bright yellow-painted styrofoam. The model,standing about eight feet high, was decorated withChristmas tree lights and flowers. The model stoodin the middle of the hall, with the laity sitting on allsides of the model, facing the monks on the stage atthe front of the room.

A merit-making service preceded the celebrationof That Luang. Following the monks’ meal and finalchants, community members and visitors from NewYork State joined in a procession around the model ofThat Luang. The procession formed behind fourmoney trees (Kalapra-pruk), to the accompaniment ofdrums and cymbals, with guests and important malecommunity leaders leading the procession in threeclockwise circumambulations of the stu-pa. As theprocession passed the monks on the stage, the monkssprinkled holy water on the crowd. The demeanor ofthe chanting monks and the sedate male marchers—eyes downcast and hands folded in front of chests—contrasted strikingly with the joyous singing and





dancing of the middle-aged women who broke out ofthe throng to dance, “hoot,” sing, and entice partici-pation from embarrassed teenage males sitting onthe periphery of the room smirking or trying to ig-nore the antics of their mothers, sisters, and aunts.“You would think they were drunk,” muttered oneblack leather-jacketed youth in English.

Following the procession, the merit accrued byparticipating in the ritual and giving generously wasshared with others. Merit transference is stressedwhenever there is a rupture in the social order, suchas during funerals and ordinations; for refugees, therupture in the social order is particularly obvious.Transferring merit is one of the ten traditional gooddeeds of Therava- da Buddhism. The sharing of meritwith the gods and with the wandering ghosts (Pali:peta, the only non-humans who can acquire merit) ismentioned in Buddhist scriptures (Anguttara-Nika-ya,sutta 50; Dıgha-Nika-ya, sutta 16). In practice, the act ofsharing merit is a very human response to the loss ofloved ones and the uncertainty of their rebirth status.While the monks chant the verse to share merit withall sentient being, all present slowly pour water froma small bottle into pedestal bowls. By this act, thosewho perform meritorious acts generously wish thatothers––particularly their deceased relatives––couldreap the benefits of their meritorious deeds. For theLao, this wish is most intensively directed towardsdeceased parents in Lao PDR.

This act of generosity is particularly poignant forrefugees who may have left their parents behind. Forothers, close relatives remain missing and presumeddead. Few refugees in North America can afford toreturn to Laos at short notice in time for their par-ents’ funerals, which is why the act of transferringmerit is more significant for Lao refugees than forLao Buddhists in Laos. During a service at a templein Vientiane, Laos, in July 1989, the act was per-formed very quickly with water poured onto plantsand over cobblestones much more casually than atthe Toronto services. There was not the emotional in-tensity and tension during the chanting that onefeels among Lao refugees in Toronto.

This practice also reflects core Lao values regard-ing responsibilities to elders and parents. Theseresponsibilities do not end with resettlement in a thirdcountry. In fact, they become more complex, as theLao in North America must deal with missing par-ents, parents whose funerals and memorial services

were incomplete, and caring for elderly relatives. Forexample, an unmarried Lao refugee in Toronto whocould not support his elderly parents placed hisparents in a subsidized seniors’ apartment where nei-ther he nor their grandchildren could stay overnightfor a visit. The old couple felt imprisoned––isolatedand useless because they were cut off from theirrelatives. Regulations in the apartments made it im-possible for the unmarried son to fulfil his responsi-bilities to his parents.

Merit-making through water pouring (Kruat nam)is a metaphor of loss and death. It expresses one of thedominant ethical preoccupations of Lao refugees andexemplifies the kind of problems they face in adapt-ing to their new home. With the loss of their parentaland ancestral generations, they lose the direct conti-nuity with their past that is at the core of Lao identity.For Lao Buddhists in North America, the practice oftransferring merit to deceased relatives helps bridgethe distance between Laos and North America, pastand present, old and new responsibilities.

Following the That Luang ritual procession, thefood offered to the monks is redistributed to the laityin the form of a communal meal. This is more thanjust the commensality of most Lao social occasions.For it is considered a particular blessing to share thefood given to and accepted by the monks. Anyoneparticipating in the ritual occasion is welcome andencouraged to join the groups of friends sittingaround raised bamboo trays laden with special Laofood dishes. Even those who have not contributedfood are actively encouraged to share the meal, as ifthe sharing of food may cause the intention to givegenerously to arise among all partaking of the meal.Leftover food is carefully wrapped and taken tothose who were unable to attend the ceremony, sothat they too may participate in the blessings createdby the communal merit-making.

This shared meal of Buddhist merit-makers is amodel of reciprocity, redistribution, and generosityand actually creates groups. The act of eating to-gether and sharing each other’s food constitutes agroup, even if this group identity can only be main-tained for a short period of time and must be recon-stituted on the next ritual occasion. However, it is aconcrete and reliable means of establishing a moralcommunity where people know they can develop re-lations of trust with others and cooperate in jointactivities within the domain of religion.





The centrality of food in Lao ceremonies cannotbe overemphasized. Yet the relations between foodand religious practice have been transformed inNorth America. On ritual occasions, there is an ex-cess of food donated to the monks. This is in the formof cooked glutinous rice, unpeeled fruit, and specialdishes such as curries and soups to be served withthe rice. The rice and fruit are placed directly into thealms bowls of the monks. The other dishes arearranged on trays and presented to the monks. Infact, the monks take only a small amount from thedishes displayed on the trays, although they symbol-ically accept all the food presented. This excess offood is redistributed to the laity in the form of acommunal meal following the service. This is animportant social and political occasion in NorthAmerica, as it is one of the few occasions when Laofrom distant communities get together.

Adapting Buddhism

It is difficult to be a Lao in North America, difficult toform a Lao community, and difficult to be a Buddhistin a Judeo-Christian context. Lao who arrive in NorthAmerican cities together may not have known eachother in the camps in Thailand let alone in Laos. Theyshare a national origin and the refugee experience,but little else. From this commonality, they must con-struct Lao identity and Lao community. Buddhistritual occasions provide special opportunities forforming and strengthening groups. The problem ofdealing with strangers is a problem of trust. Who istrustworthy? Who shares your personal standards ofmorality? Who is a true friend? Buddhist merit-making is an opportunity for displaying one’s moralworth and demonstrating one’s trustworthiness.

But focusing on Buddhist rituals emphasizes soli-darity of ethnic communities rather than cleavagesalong class and religious lines. Buddhist temples arealso sites of conflict over power, resources, and cul-tural change. Any Buddhist temple established in aNorth American city can no longer be the “hub” ofcommunity life; the physical space of the temple nolonger dominates the landscape nor serves the mul-tiple functions performed by a Lao temple in Laos. InLaos, the temple and Buddhist activities were totallyintegrated into everyday life. In North America, thetemple loses: its centrality––spatially, cognitively,and socially––because of the dispersed population

and the economic effort Lao refugees need to expendto survive and prosper in North America.

The timing of communal celebrations in NorthAmerica must be integrated with work weeks. Ser-vices are generally held on Sundays, when Buddhistand Christian services compete within the commu-nity. That is, it is not easy to participate in both ritualsystems on a single weekend, However, in somecommunities, Buddhist services are held on Satur-days, freeing refugees to attend Christian services,often with their sponsors, on Sundays.

In North America, ritual events are condensed intime. Rituals that lasted three days in Laos take oneday in North America. All-day rituals in Laos are con-densed to two or three hours in North America. Thisis partly related to the shift in the use of the weekend,when there are other alternative ways to spend time.Rituals compete with sports and other leisure activi-ties, carried out on weekends, where in Laos, ritualtime replaced work time. In North America, other so-cial, economic, and political activities are embeddedwithin ritual time. Since there are only a limited num-ber of occasions for widely dispersed Lao families toget together, Buddhist rituals are also occasions forvisiting, matchmaking, selling cloth from Lao PDR,and exchanging information about available jobs andapartments. Religious identity becomes secondary tocultural identity, as temples become sites for culturalpreservation through music, dance, and languageclasses. While public funds cannot be used to supportreligious initiatives, they can be used to support cul-tural centers and ethnic associations.

When monks are only available occasionally, ritualcycles change to accommodate their schedules. Sea-sonal rituals may be stressed or unstressed dependingon the availability of monks. On the occasion of a sin-gle monk’s visit to a community, a public ritual mightbe held on Sunday, a house blessing at a sponsor’shome the next day, and a service to dispel bad luck at athird house. This opportunistic scheduling means thatritual acts which may normally never occur together inLaos will be put together in North America.

These changes in scheduling, condensation, andembeddedness in ritual time may be quite disorient-ing for elderly Lao familiar with the more leisurelypace of ritual time in Laos. However, since most Laoin North America experienced the disruptions ofnormal time during the war and the suspension oftime while in refugee camps, they adapt readily to





the temporal structures of future-oriented Western-ers, even within their religious domain.

The Lao face particularly difficult problems re-solving the meaning of Lao cultural identity outsideof Laos. Rituals such as Soukhouan and That Luangprovide raw materials from which individual Lao canbegin to structure a new identity in North America.From these ritual acts they select those values whichare central to their individual and collective identitiesas Lao rather than their identity as Buddhists.

Nevertheless, Buddhism is important to this taskbecause it provides a framework for explaining suf-fering and for making sense out of an otherwisechaotic world. Buddhist temples also provide mater-ial as well as spiritual insurance against unforeseenneeds, counseling, alternative healing techniques,crisis intervention, recreational activities, as well asspiritual resources. Buddhist rituals performed innew lands remain an important part of reconstitut-ing identity.




435

Though the horrific images of the aerial assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon onSeptember 11, 2001 were shocking, the headlines ofAmerican newspapers on September 12 containedanother surprise: how quickly the rhetoric of war-fare entered into public consciousness. “The worldat war,” pronounced one headline. “The first war ofthe twenty-first century,” President George W. Bushproclaimed. The September 11, 2001 assaults werein fact the most spectacular of a decade-long seriesof attempts by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda net-work to bring the rest of the world into his view of

global war. An earlier, less devastating attack on theWorld Trade Center in 1993 received scarcely ashrug from the American populace. But in 2001 hewas more successful, both in the enormity of theevent and in the change in America’s mindset that itcreated.

Yet even though it seemed palpably to be an act ofwar, it was not clear what kind of war it was. The in-stant comparisons to Pearl Harbor seemed forced.The Japanese attack that signaled America’s entryinto World War II was, after all, the military act of asovereign state. Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda net-work was essentially a rogue band of transnationalactivists based in distant caves but spread through-out the world. What united them was neither a state-centered organization nor a political ideology, but

51

Religious Terror and Global WarMark Juergensmeyer

The late 20th and early 21st centuries have been characterized, Mark Juergensmeyer writes, by aglobe-spanning war between culture-based ideologies and the secular state. Here, Juergensmeyerconsiders ideas about such warfare (which in truth is often not a war at all), emphasizing the role ofreligion and conflicting ideologies about the place of religion in modem life. He considers religiousterror in a wide range of examples, including the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001;the Oklahoma City bombing; Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo; Hamas and the Palestinian conflict; and reli-giously based violence in India and Sri Lanka. The author explores why images of warfare seem to“work,” providing justification for violence and credibility for causes, and ultimately promptingequally violent reactions.

Mark Juergensmeyer directs the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies and is aprofessor of global and international studies, sociology, and religious studies at University of Cali-fornia, Santa Barbara. Among his numerous publications on religious violence is Terror in theMind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, 2000). Thepresent article first appeared in a collection of articles by scholars from numerous disciplines, in re-sponse to the September 11, 2001, tragedy.

From: UNDERSTANDING SEPTEMBER, 11, ed. CraigCalhoun, Paul Price, and Ashley Timmer. New York: The FreePress, pp. 27–40.





the ties of a certain form of politicized religion andthe riveting image of an evil secular foe.

The Al Qaeda network has not been alone in thereligious assault on the secular state. In the last fif-teen years of the post–Cold War world, religionseems to have been connected with violence every-where: from the World Trade Center bombings tosuicide attacks in Israel and Palestine; assassinationsin India, Israel, Egypt, and Algeria; nerve gas in theTokyo subways; abortion clinic killings in Florida;and the bombing of Oklahoma City’s federal build-ing. What unites these disparate acts of violence istheir perpetrators’ hatred of the global reach of themodern secular state.

Thus in many ways the September 11 attackswere part of a global confrontation. In the minds ofmany on both sides this confrontation is increasinglyviewed as a war—though the enemies in this en-gagement are less like the axis of powers engaged inWorld War II than the ideological foes of the ColdWar. Like the old Cold War, the confrontation be-tween these new forms of culture-based politics andthe secular state is global in its scope, binary in itsopposition, occasionally violent, and essentially adifference of ideologies; and, like the old Cold War,each side tends to stereotype the other. The image ofwar mobilizes the animosities of both sides. Themajor differences between the old Cold War and thenew one is that the present war is in a senseimaginary—it entails very little state support—andthe various forms of religious opposition are scarcelyunited. Yet when they do lash out in acts of terror-ism, as September 11 demonstrated, the results canbe as awesome as they are destructive.

The Role of Religion

What is odd about this new global war is not onlythe difficulty in defining it and the non-state,transnational character of the opposition, but alsothe opponents’ ascription to ideologies based onreligion. The tradition of secular politics from thetime of the Enlightenment has comfortably ignoredreligion, marginalized its role in public life, and fre-quently co-opted it for its own civil religion of publicreligiosity. No one in the secular world could havepredicted that the first confrontations of the twenty-first century would involve, of all things, religion—secularism’s old, long-banished foe.

Religious activists are puzzling anomalies in thesecular world. Most religious people and their orga-nizations are either firmly supportive of the secularstate or quiescently uninterested in it. Osama binLaden’s Al Qaeda network, like most of the new reli-gious activists, comprises a small group at the ex-treme end of a hostile subculture that itself is a smallminority within the larger world of their religiouscultures. Osama bin Laden is no more representativeof Islam than Timothy McVeigh is of Christianity, orJapan’s Shoko Asahara is of Buddhism.

Still, one cannot deny that the ideals and ideas ofactivists like bin Laden are authentically and thor-oughly religious and could conceivably becomepopular among their religious compatriots. Theauthority of religion has given bin Laden’s cadresthe moral legitimacy of employing violence in theirassault on the very symbol of global economicpower. It has also provided the metaphor of cosmicwar, an image of spiritual struggle that every reli-gion has within its repository of symbols—the fightbetween good and bad, truth and evil. In this sense,then, the attack on the World Trade Center was veryreligious. It was meant to be catastrophic, an act ofbiblical proportions.

Though the World Trade Center assault and manyother recent acts of religious terrorism have no obvi-ous military goal, they are meant to make a powerfulimpact on the public consciousness. These are actsmeant for television. They are a kind of perverse per-formance of power meant to ennoble the perpetra-tors’ views of the world and to draw us into theirnotions of cosmic war. In my comparative study ofcases of religious terrorism around the world I havefound a strikingly familiar pattern. In all of thesecases, concepts of cosmic war are accompanied bystrong claims of moral justification and an enduringabsolutism that transforms worldly struggles intosacred battles. It is not so much that religion has be-come politicized, but that politics have become reli-gionized. Worldly struggles have been lifted into thehigh proscenium of sacred battle.

This is what makes religious warfare so difficultto combat. Its enemies have become satanized—onecannot negotiate with them or easily compromise.The rewards for those who fight for the cause aretranstemporal, and the time lines of their strugglesare vast. Most social and political struggles look forconclusions within the lifetimes of their participants,




JUERGENSMEYER • RELIGIOUS TERROR AND GLOBAL WAR | 437

but religious struggles can take generations to suc-ceed. When I pointed out to political leaders of theHamas movement in Palestine that Israel’s militaryforce was such that a Palestinian military effort couldnever succeed, I was told that “Palestine was occu-pied before, for two hundred years.” The Hamasofficial assured me that he and his Palestinian com-rades “can wait again—at least that long,” for thestruggles of God can endure for eons. Ultimately,however, they knew they would succeed.

Insofar as the U.S. public and its leaders embracedthe image of war following the September 11 attacks,America’s view of this war was also prone to reli-gionization. “God Bless America” became the coun-try’s unofficial national anthem. President George W.Bush spoke of the defense of America’s “righteouscause,” and the “absolute evil” of its enemies. Still,the U.S. military engagement in the months follow-ing September 11 was primarily a secular commit-ment to a definable goal and largely restricted to lim-ited objectives in which civil liberties and moral rulesof engagement, for the most part, still applied.

In purely religious battles, waged in divine timeand with heaven’s rewards, there is no need to com-promise one’s goals. There is no need, also, to con-tend with society’s laws and limitations when oneis obeying a higher authority. In spiritualizing vio-lence, therefore, religion gives the resources ofviolence a remarkable power.

Ironically, the reverse is also true: Terrorism cangive religion power. Although sporadic acts of terror-ism do not lead to the establishment of new religiousstates, they make the political potency of religious ide-ology impossible to ignore. The first wave of religiousactivism, from the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1978 tothe emergence of Hamas during the Palestine intifadain the early 1990s, was focused on religious national-ism and the vision of individual religious states. In-creasingly, religious activism has a more global vision.Such disparate groups as the Christian militia, theJapanese Aum Shinrikyo, and the Al Qaeda networkall target what their supporters regard as a repressiveand secular form of global culture and control.

Global War

The September 11 attack and many other recent actsof religious terrorism are skirmishes in what theirperpetrators conceive to be a global war. This battle

is global in three senses. The choices of targets haveoften been transnational. The World Trade Centeremployees killed in the September 11 assault werecitizens of 86 nations. The network of perpetratorswas also transnational: The Al Qaeda network,which was implicated in the attack—though con-sisting mostly of Saudis—is also actively supportedby Pakistanis, Egyptians, Palestinians, Sudanese,Algerians, Indonesians, Malaysians, Filipinos, and asmattering of British, French, Germans, Spanish,and Americans. The incident was global in its im-pact, in large part because of the worldwide and in-stantaneous coverage of transnational news media.This has been terrorism meant not only for televi-sion but for global news networks such as CNN—and especially for Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based newschannel that beams its talk-show format throughoutthe Middle East.

Increasingly terrorism has been performed for atelevised audience around the world. In that sense ithas been as real a global event as the transnationalactivities of the global economy, and as vivid as theglobalized forms of entertainment and informationthat crowd satellite television channels and the Inter-net. Ironically, terrorism has become a more efficientglobal force than the organized political efforts tocontrol and contain it. No single entity, including theUnited Nations, possesses the military capabilityand intelligence-gathering capacities to deal withworldwide terrorism. Instead, consortia of nationshave been formed to handle the information-sharingand joint operations required to deal with forces ofviolence on an international scale.

This global dimension of terrorism’s organizationand audience, and the transnational responses to it,give special significance to the understanding of ter-rorism as a public performance of violence—as a so-cial event that has both real and symbolic aspects. Asthe late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu observed,our public life is shaped by symbols as much as byinstitutions. For this reason, symbolic acts—the“rites of institution”—help to demarcate publicspace and indicate what is meaningful in the socialworld. In a striking imitation of such rites, terrorismhas provided its own dramatic events. These rites ofviolence have signaled alternative views of publicreality: not just a single society in transition, but aworld challenged by strident religious visions oftransforming change.





What is extraordinary about such performances istheir success in bringing the rest of the world intotheir world view—specifically their view of theworld at war. War is an enticing conceptual con-struct, an all-embracing view of the world thatcontains much more than the notion of forceful con-testation. It points to a dichotomous opposition onan absolute scale. War suggests an all-or-nothingstruggle against an enemy who is determined to de-stroy. No compromise is deemed possible. The veryexistence of the opponent is a threat, and until theenemy is either crushed or contained, one’s own ex-istence cannot be secure. What is striking about amartial attitude is the certainty of one’s position andthe willingness to defend it, or impose it on others, tothe end.

Such certitude may be regarded as noble by thosewhose sympathies lie with it and dangerous by thosewho do not agree with it. But either way it is notcivil. One of the first rules of conflict resolution is thewillingness to accept the notion that there are flawson one’s own side as well as on the opponent’s side.This is the sensible stand to take if one’s goal is to getalong with others and avoid violence. But often thatis not the goal. In fact, a warring attitude implies thatthe one who holds it no longer thinks compromise ispossible or—just as likely—does not want an accom-modating solution to the conflict in the first place. Infact, if one’s goals are not harmony but the empow-erment that comes with using violence, it is in one’sinterest to be in a state of war. In such cases, war isnot only the context for violence but also the excusefor it. This reasoning holds true even if the worldlyissues that are at heart in the dispute do not seem towarrant such an extreme and ferocious position.

This logic may explain why acts of terrorism seemso puzzling to people outside the movements thatperpetrate them and entirely understandable tothose within them. The absolutism of war makescompromise unlikely, and those who suggest a nego-tiated settlement can be excoriated as the enemy. Inthe Palestinian situation, the extreme religious posi-tions on both sides loathed the carefully negotiatedcompromise once promised by Israel’s YitzhakRabin and Palestine’s Yasir Arafat. “There is no suchthing as coexistence,” a Jewish activist in Israel toldme, explaining that there was a biblical requirementfor Jews to possess and live on biblical land. This waswhy he despised the Oslo and Wye River accords

and regarded Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu astreasonous for signing them. Hamas leaders told meessentially the same thing about the necessity forArab Muslims to occupy what they regarded as theirhomeland. They expressed anger toward their ownsecular leader—Yasir Arafat—for having enteredinto what both Jewish and Muslim extremists re-garded as a dangerous and futile path toward an ac-commodation deemed by them to be impossible. Theextremes on both sides preferred war over peace.

One of the reasons why a state of war is oftenpreferable to peace is that it gives moral justificationfor acts of violence. Violence, in turn, offers the illu-sion of power. The idea of warfare implies more thanan attitude; ultimately it is a world view and an as-sertion of identity. To live in a state of war is to live ina world in which individuals know who they are,why they have suffered, by whose hand they havebeen humiliated, and at what expense they havepersevered. It provides cosmology, history, and es-chatology, and offers the reins of political control.Perhaps most importantly, it holds out the hope ofvictory and the means to achieve it. In the images ofreligious war this victorious triumph is a grandmoment of social and personal transformation, tran-scending all worldly limitations. One does not easilyabandon such expectations. To be without such im-ages of war is almost to be without hope itself.

The idea of warfare has had an eerie and intimaterelationship with religion. History has been studdedwith overtly religious conflicts such as the Crusades,the Muslim conquests, and the Wars of Religion thatdominated the politics of France in the sixteenth cen-tury. These have usually been characterized as warsin the name of religion, rather than wars conductedin a religious way. However, the historian NatalieZemon Davis has uncovered what she calls “rites ofviolence” in her study of religious riots in sixteenth-century France. These constituted “a repertory of ac-tions, derived from the Bible, from the liturgy, fromthe action of political authority, or from the tradi-tions of popular folk practices, intended to purify thereligious community and humiliate the enemy andthus make him less harmful.” Davis observed thatthe violence was “aimed at defined targets and se-lected from a repertory of traditional punishmentsand forms of destruction.” According to Davis,“even the extreme ways of defiling corpses—dragging bodies through the streets and throwing





them to the dogs, dismembering genitalia andselling them in mock commerce—and desecratingreligious objects,” had what she called “perverseconnections” with religious concepts of pollutionand purification, heresy and blasphemy.

Anthropologist Stanley Tambiah showed how thesame “rites of violence” were present in the religiousriots of South Asia. In some instances innocent by-standers would be snatched up by a crowd andburned alive. According to Tambiah, these horrifyingmurders of defenseless and terrified victims weredone in a ritual manner, in “mock imitation of boththe self-immolation of conscientious objectors andthe terminal rite of cremation.” In a macabre way, theriotous battles described by Davis and Tambiah werereligious events. But given the prominence of therhetoric of warfare in religious vocabulary, both tra-ditional and modern, one could also turn this pointaround and say that religious events often involvethe invocation of violence. One could argue that thetask of creating a vicarious experience of warfare—albeit one usually imagined as residing on a spiritualplane—is one of the main businesses of religion.

Virtually all cultural traditions have containedmartial metaphors in their symbols, myths, and leg-endary histories. Ideas such as the Salvation Army inChristianity or a Dal Khalsa (“army of the faithful”)in Sikhism characterize disciplined religious organi-zations. Images of spiritual warfare are even morecommon. The Muslim notion of jihad is the most no-table example, but even in Buddhist legends greatwars abound. In Sri Lankan culture, for instance, vir-tually canonical status is accorded the legendary his-tory recorded in the Pali Chronicles, the Dipavamsaand the Mahavamsa, that related the triumphs ofbattles waged by Buddhist kings. In India, warfarecontributes to the grandeur of the great epics, the Ra-mayana and the Mahabharata, which are tales ofseemingly unending conflict and military intrigue.More than the Vedic rituals, these martial epics de-fined subsequent Hindu culture. Whole books of theHebrew Bible are devoted to the military exploits ofgreat kings, their contests related in gory detail.Though the New Testament does not take up the bat-tle cry, the later history of the Church does, supply-ing Christianity with a bloody record of crusadesand religious wars.

What is unusual about contemporary acts ofterrorism is that the vision of religious war is not

confined to history and symbols but is a contempo-rary reality. Politics have become religionized asstruggles in the real world become baptized with theabsolutism of religious fervor. Acts of violence areconducted not so much to wage a military campaignas to demonstrate the reality of the war to aunknowing public. In such cases, the message is themedium in which it is sent: The bombings providemoments of chaos, warfare, and victimage that theperpetrators want a slumbering society to experi-ence. These acts make the point that war is at handby providing a bloody scene of battle in one’s ownquiet neighborhoods and everyday urban streets.

What is buttressed in these acts of symbolic em-powerment is not only the credibility of their cause.These acts, for the moment, place the perpetrators ona par with the leaders of governments that they tar-get, and equate the legitimacy of the secular statewith their own vision of religious social order.Through the currency of violence they draw atten-tion to what they believe to be significant and trueabout the social arena around them. In the languageof Bourdieu they create a perverse “habitus,” a darkworld of social reality, forcing everyone to take stockof their perception of the world. Thus the very act ofperforming violence in public is a political act: It an-nounces that the power of the group is equal or su-perior to that of the state. In most cases this is exactlythe message that the group wants to convey.

The establishment of political rule based on reli-gious law has been the primary aim of many Muslimgroups. Members of Hamas regarded this as themain difference between their organization and thesecular ideology of Fateh and other groups associ-ated with Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. A sim-ilar argument has been made by activists associatedwith Egyptian groups. Mahmud Abouhalima toldme that President Hosni Mubarak could not be a trueMuslim because he did not make shari‘a—Islamiclaw—the law of the land. A cleric in Cairo’s conserv-ative Al-Azhar theological school told me he resentedhis government’s preference for Western law. “Whyshould we obey Western laws when Muslim laws arebetter?” he asked me. It is this position that has beenassumed by many Muslim activists: that Westernpolitical institutions and the ideology on which theywere based should be banished from their territories.They want to rebuild their societies on Islamicfoundations.





Yet the images of political order that these ac-tivists yearn to create have been deliberately fuzzy.Sometimes the goals have appeared to be democra-tic, sometimes socialist, sometimes a sort of reli-gious oligarchy. Sometimes the goals have beennationalist, at other times international in scope. AHamas leader told me that what distinguished hisorganization from Yasir Arafat’s Fateh movementwas that Fateh was waging a “national struggle”whereas Hamas was “transnational.” The Al Qaedanetwork of Osama bin Laden has been especiallystriking in its global reach and curious in its lack of aspecific political program. It is as if the idea of globalstruggle is sufficient, its own reward. Although it isclear who the supporters of Al Qaeda hate, nowherehave they given a design for a political entity—Islamic or otherwise—that could actually adminis-trate the results of a victory over American andsecular rule and the emergence of a religious revolu-tion, should they achieve it.

My conclusion is that acts of religious terrorismare largely devices for symbolic empowerment inwars that cannot be won and for goals that cannot beachieved. The very absence of thought about whatthe activists would do if they were victorious is suf-ficient indication that they do not expect to win, norperhaps even want to do so. They illustrate a pecu-liar corollary to the advice of the French theorist,Frantz Fanon, during Algeria’s war of independencesome years ago, when he advocated terrorism as theAlgerians’ mobilizing weapon. Fanon reasoned thateven a small display of violence could have immensesymbolic power by jolting the masses into an aware-ness of their own potency. What Fanon did not real-ize was that for some activist groups the awarenessof their potency would be all that they desired.

Yet these acts of symbolic empowerment havehad an effect beyond whatever personal satisfactionand feelings of potency they have imparted to thosewho supported and conducted them. The very act ofkilling on behalf of a moral code is a political state-ment. Such acts break the state’s monopoly onmorally sanctioned killing. By putting the right totake life in their own hands, the perpetrators of reli-gious violence have made a daring claim of poweron behalf of the powerless, a basis of legitimacy forpublic order other than that upon which the secularstate relies. In doing so, they have demonstrated toeveryone how fragile public order actually is, and

how fickle can be the populace’s assent to the moralauthority of power.

Empowering Religion

Such religious warfare not only gives individualswho have engaged in it the illusion of empower-ment, but it also gives religious organizations andideas a public attention and importance that theyhave not enjoyed for many years. In modern Americaand Europe, the recent warfare has given religion aprominence in public life that it has not held since be-fore the Enlightenment, more than two centuries ago.

Although each of the violent religious move-ments around the world has its own distinctive cul-ture and history, I have found that they have threethings in common regarding their attitudes towardreligion in society. First, they reject the compromiseswith liberal values and secular institutions that mostmainstream religion has made, be it Christian,Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, or Buddhist. Second,radical religious movements refuse to observe theboundaries that secular society has set aroundreligion—keeping it private rather than allowing it tointrude into public spaces. And third, these move-ments try to create a new form of religiosity thatrejects what they regard as weak modern substitutesfor the more vibrant and demanding forms of religionthat they imagine to be essential to their religion’sorigins.

During a prison interview, one of the men accusedof bombing the World Trade Center in 1993 told methat the critical moment in his religious life camewhen he realized that he could not compromise hisIslamic integrity with the easy vices offered bymodern society. The convicted terrorist, MahmudAbouhalima, claimed that the early part of his lifewas spent running away from himself. Although in-volved in radical Egyptian Islamic movements sincehis college years in Alexandria, he felt there was noplace where he could settle down. He told me thatthe low point came when he was in Germany, tryingto live the way that he imagined Europeans andAmericans carried on: where the superficial comfortsof sex and inebriates masked an internal emptinessand despair. Abouhalima said his return to Islam asthe center of his life carried with it a renewed sense ofobligation to make Islamic society truly Islamic—to“struggle against oppression and injustice” wherever





it existed. What was now constant, Abouhalima said,was his family and his faith. Islam was both “a rockand a pillar of mercy.” But it was not the Islam of lib-eral, modern Muslims: They, he felt, had compro-mised the tough and disciplined life the faithdemanded. In Abouhalima’s case, he wanted his reli-gion to be hard, not soft like the humiliating, mind-numbing comforts of secular modernity. Activistssuch as Abouhalima—and, for that matter, Osamabin Laden—have imagined themselves to be defend-ers of ancient faiths. But in fact they have creatednew forms of religiosity: Like many present-day reli-gious leaders they have used the language of tradi-tional religion in order to build bulwarks aroundaspects of modernity that have threatened them, andto suggest ways out of the mindless humiliation ofmodern life. It is vital to their image of religion, how-ever, that it be perceived as ancient.

The need for religion—a “hard” religion asAbouhalima called it—was a response to the softtreachery they had observed in the new societiesaround them. The modern secular world thatAbouhalima and the others inhabited was a danger-ous and chaotic sea, in which religion was a harbor ofcalm. At a deep level of their consciousnesses theysensed their lives slipping out of control, and they feltboth responsible for the disarray and a victim of it. Tobe abandoned by religion in such a world wouldmean a loss of their own individual locations andidentities. In fashioning a “traditional religion” oftheir own making, they exposed their concerns not somuch with their religious, ethnic, or national commu-nities, but with their own personal, perilous selves.

These intimate concerns have been prompted bythe perceived failures of public institutions. As PierreBourdieu observed, social structures never have adisembodied reality; they are always negotiated byindividuals in their own strategies for maintainingself-identity and success in life. Such institutions arelegitimized by the “symbolic capital” they accruethrough the collective trust of many individuals.When that symbolic capital is devalued, when politi-cal and religious institutions undergo what theGerman social philosopher Jurgen Habermas hascalled a “crisis of legitimacy,” this devaluation of au-thority is experienced not only as a political problembut as an intensely personal one, as a loss of agency.

It is this sense of a personal loss of power in theface of chaotic political and religious authorities that

is common, and I believe critical, to Osama binLaden’s Al Qaeda group and most other movementsfor Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Buddhist, andHindu nationalism around the world. The syn-drome begins with the perception that the publicworld has gone awry, and the suspicion that behindthis social confusion lies a great spiritual and moralconflict, a cosmic battle between the forces of orderand chaos, good and evil. The government—alreadydelegitimized—is perceived to be in league with theforces of chaos and evil.

Secular government is easily labeled as the enemyof religion, because to some degree it is. By its nature,the secular state is opposed to the idea that religionshould have a role in public life. From the time thatmodern secular nationalism emerged in the eigh-teenth century as a product of the European Enlight-enment’s political values, it did so with a distinctlyantireligious, or at least anticlerical, posture. Theideas of John Locke about the origins of a civil com-munity, and the “social contract” theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau required very little commitment toreligious belief. Although they allowed for a divineorder that made the rights of humans possible, theirideas had the effect of taking religion-at least Churchreligion—out of public life. At the time, religious“enemies of the Enlightenment” protested religion’spublic demise. But their views were submerged ina wave of approval for a new view of social orderin which secular nationalism was thought to bevirtually a natural law, universally applicable andmorally right.

Post-Enlightenment modernity proclaimed thedeath of religion. Modernity signaled not only thedemise of the Church’s institutional authority andclerical control, but also the loosening of religion’sideological and intellectual grip on society. Scientificreasoning and the moral claims of the secular socialcontract replaced theology and the Church as thebases for truth and social identity. The result ofreligion’s devaluation has been “a general crisis ofreligious belief,” as Bourdieu has put it.

In countering this disintegration, resurgentreligious activists have proclaimed the death ofsecularism. They have dismissed the efforts of secu-lar culture and its forms of nationalism to replacereligion. They have challenged the notion thatsecular society and the modern nation-state are ableto provide the moral fiber that unites national





communities, or give it the ideological strength tosustain states buffeted by ethical, economic and mil-itary failures. Their message has been easy to believeand has been widely received, because the failures ofthe secular state have been so real.

The moral leadership of the secular state was in-creasingly challenged in the last decade of the twen-tieth century following the breakup of the Cold Warand the rise of a global economy. The Cold Warprovided contesting models of moral politics—communism and democracy—that were replacedwith a global market that weakened national sover-eignty and was conspicuously devoid of politicalideals. The global economy became controlled bytransnational businesses accountable to no singlegovernmental authority and with no clear ideologi-cal or moral standards of behavior. But while bothChristian and Enlightenment values were left be-hind, transnational commerce did transport aspectsof Westernized popular culture to the rest of theworld. American and European music, videos, andfilms were beamed across national boundaries,where they threatened to obliterate local and tradi-tional forms of artistic expression. Added to this so-cial confusion were convulsive shifts in politicalpower that followed the break-up of the SovietUnion and the collapse of Asian economies at theend of the twentieth century.

The public sense of insecurity that came in thewake of these cataclysmic global changes was feltnot only in the societies of those nations that wereeconomically devastated by them—especially coun-tries in the former Soviet Union—but also in eco-nomically stronger industrialized societies. TheUnited States, for example, saw a remarkable degreeof disaffection with its political leaders and wit-nessed the rise of right-wing religious movementsthat fed on the public’s perception of the inherentimmorality of government.

Is the rise of religious terrorism related to theseglobal changes? We know that some groups associ-ated with violence in industrialized societies havehad an antimodernist political agenda. At theextreme end of this religious rejection in the UnitedStates were members of the American antiabortiongroup Defensive Action; the Christian militia andChristian Identity movement; and isolated groupssuch as the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas. Sim-ilar attitudes toward secular government emerged in

Israel—the religious nationalist ideology of the Kachparty was an extreme example—and, as the AumShinrikyo movement has demonstrated, in Japan. Asin the United States, contentious groups within thesecountries were disillusioned about the ability ofsecular leaders to guide their countries’ destinies.They identified government as the enemy.

The global shifts that have given rise to antimod-ernist movements have also affected less-developednations. India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt’s GamalAbdel Nasser, and Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi oncewere committed to creating versions of America—ora kind of cross between America and the SovietUnion—in their own countries. But new generationsof leaders no longer believe in the Westernized vi-sions of Nehru, Nasser, or the Shah. Rather, they areeager to complete the process of decolonializationand build new, indigenous nationalisms.

When activists in Algeria who demonstratedagainst the crackdown against the Islamic SalvationFront in 1991 proclaimed that they were continuingthe war of liberation against French colonialism,they had the ideological rather than political reach ofEuropean influence in mind. Religious activists suchas the Algerian leaders, the Ayatollah Khomeini inIran, Sheik Ahmed Yassin in Palestine, Sayyid Qutband his disciple, Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, inEgypt, L. K. Advani in India, and Sant Jarnail SinghBhindranwale in India’s Punjab have asserted the le-gitimacy of a postcolonial national identity based ontraditional culture.

The result of this disaffection with the values ofthe modern West has been a “loss of faith” in the ide-ological form of that culture—secular nationalism, orthe idea that the nation is rooted in a secular compactrather than religious or ethnic identity. Although afew years ago it would have been a startling notion,the idea has now become virtually commonplacethat secular nationalism is in crisis. In many parts ofthe world it is seen as an alien cultural construction,one closely linked with what has been called “theproject of modernity.” In such cases, religious alter-natives to secular ideologies have had extraordinaryappeal.

This uncertainty about what constitutes a validbasis for national identity is a political form of post-modernism. In Iran it has resulted in the rejection ofa modern Western political regime and the creationof a successful religious state. Increasingly, even





secular scholars in the West have recognized that re-ligious ideologies might offer an alternative tomodernity in the political sphere. Yet, what lies be-yond modernity is not necessarily a new form ofpolitical order, religious or not. In nations formerlyunder Soviet control, for example, the specter of thefuture beyond the socialist form of modernity hasbeen one of cultural anarchism.

The Al Qaeda network associated with Osamabin Laden takes the challenge to secularism to yetanother level. The implicit attack on global economicand political systems that are leveled by religiousnationalists from Algeria to Indonesia are madeexplicit: America is the enemy. Moreover, it is a warwaged not on a national plane but a transnationalone. Their agenda is not for any specific form of reli-gious nation-state, but an inchoate vision of a globalrule of religious law. Rather than religious national-ists, transnational activists like bin Laden are guer-rilla antiglobalists.

Postmodern Terror

Bin Laden and his vicious acts have a credibility insome quarters of the world because of the uncertain-ties of this moment in global history. The fear thatthere will be a spiritual as well as a political collapseat modernity’s center has, in many parts of theworld, led to terror. Both violence and religion haveappeared at times when authority is in question,since they are both ways of challenging and replac-ing authority. One gains its power from force and theother from its claims to ultimate order. The combina-tion of the two in acts of religious terrorism has beena potent assertion indeed. Regardless of whether theperpetrators consciously intend them to be politicalacts, all public acts of violence have political conse-quences. Insofar as they have been attempts toreshape the public order, these acts have been exam-ples of what Jose Casanova has called the increasing“deprivatization” of religion. In various parts of theworld where attempts have been made by defendersof religion to reclaim the center of public attentionand authority, religious terrorism is often the violentface of these attempts.

The postmodern religious rebels such as thosewho rally to the side of Osama bin Laden are there-fore neither anomalies nor anachronisms. FromAlgeria to Idaho, they are small but potent groups of

violent activists who represent masses of potentialsupporters, and they exemplify currents of thinkingand cultures of commitment that have risen tocounter the prevailing modernism. The enemies ofthese groups have seemed to most people to be bothbenign and banal: such symbols of prosperity and au-thority as the World Trade Center. The logic of thiskind of militant religiosity has therefore been difficultfor many people to comprehend. Yet its challenge hasbeen profound, for it has contained a fundamentalcritique of the world’s post-Enlightenment secularculture and politics.

Acts of religious terrorism have thus been at-tempts to use violence to purchase public recogni-tion of the legitimacy of this view of the world atwar. Since religious authority can provide a ready-made replacement for secular leadership, it is no sur-prise that when secular authority has been deemedmorally insufficient, the challenges to its legitimacyand the attempts to gain support for its rivals haveoften been based in religion. When the proponents ofreligion have asserted their claim to be the moralforce undergirding public order, they sometimeshave done so with the kind of power that even a con-fused society can graphically recognize: the force ofterror.

What the perpetrators of such acts of terrorexpect—and indeed welcome—is a response as vici-ous as the acts themselves. By goading secularauthorities into responding to terror with terror, theyhope to accomplish two things. First, they want tan-gible evidence for their claim that the secular enemyis a monster. Second, they hope to bring to the sur-face the great war—a war that they have told theirpotential supporters was hidden, but real. When theAmerican missiles began to fall in Afghanistan onOctober 7, less than a month after the September 11attacks, the Al Qaeda forces must initially have beenexhilarated, for the war they had anticipated for solong had finally arrived. Its outcome, however, likelygave them less satisfaction: Their bases were routed,their leadership demolished, and the Muslim worlddid not rise up in support in the numbers and enthu-siasm they had expected. Yet the time line of reli-gious warfare is long, and the remnant forces of AlQaeda most likely still yearn for the final confronta-tion. They are assured that the glorious victory willultimately be achieved, for they are certain that it is,after all, God’s war, not theirs.




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Most of the family shows are namby-pambysentimentality or smarmy innuendo. We stayaway from that.

—Matt Groening

The story goes like this: Marge and Homer take sometime for themselves and leave Bart, Lisa, and Maggiewith Grandpa. Agents from child welfare discoverthe children running amok and place them into fos-ter care with the neighbors. The new foster father,Ned Flanders, faints upon hearing that the children

have never been baptized, so he packs up the chil-dren and his own family and heads for the Spring-field River. Homer, missing the point, panics because“in the eyes of God they’ll be Flanderseses.” At theriver Homer pushes Bart out of “harm’s way,” andthe baptismal water falls on his own head. WhenBart asks him how he feels, Homer responds, in anuncharacteristically pious voice, “Oh, Bartholomew,I feel like St. Augustine of Hippo after his conversionby Ambrose of Milan.” When Ned Flanders gasps,“Homer, what did you just say?” Homer replies non-chalantly, “I said shut your ugly face, Flanders!” Themoment of spiritual inspiration has passed, and thechildren are back with their parents, unbaptized andsafe (“Home Sweet Home-Diddily-Dum-Doodily”).

The prominent role of religion and the attitudetoward it are not unique to this episode. Once a weekfor nearly the past decade (and more in syndication)The Simpsons has proved itself unafraid to lampoon

52

Homer the Heretic and CharlieChurch: Parody, Piety, andPluralism in The SimpsonsLisle Dalton, Eric Michael Mazur, and Monica Siems

Although some might argue that watching TV is a form of ritual activity, actual depictions of reli-gion are conspicuously absent from most television programs. To the horror of some critics, and to thedelight of millions of viewers around the world, a significant exception is the animated comedy seriescreated by Matt Groening, The Simpsons. Authors Dalton, Mazur, and Siems draw examples fromthroughout the hundreds of episodes that have aired since 1990 to make their case that religion is oneof the most prominent themes in the show. Self-consciously utilizing stereotypes and irony, TheSimpsons holds a comic mirror to religion in contemporary America. As the present authors put it,the characters are “us” but “not us,” exaggerated and distorted images of ourselves as we strugglewith diverse forms of personal and noninstitutional religiosity. Through it all, the authors suggest,the show posits an underlying human goodness, exposing but not debunking the myths that orderour values.

“Homer the Heretic and Charlie Church: Parody, Piety, andPluralism in the Simpsons” by Lisle Dalton, Eric MichaelMazur, and Monica Siems from GOD IN THE DETAILS:AMERICAN RELIGION IN POPULAR CULTURE edited byEric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy, pp. 231–247.Reproduced by permission of Routledge/Taylor & FrancisGroup. Copyright © 2001.

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