Spirits Are Real: Vic Turner Betwixt and Between

I dreamed of attending a lecture by Victor Turner, a great cultural anthropologist who became famous for his studies of liminality, the "betwixt and between" state in the life of an individual or a culture when established norms are left behind and profound transformation may follow, with the challenge of reintegration looming beyond that. Vic has been dead in the world for many years but I found him to be very much alive in a betwixt and between state somewhere else.  

I loved the simplicity with which he addressed his audience. He told us, "I dedicated my life to explaining different peoples to each other." In my dream Vic Turner knows he's dead, in the sense that he's not on earth, in the Africa he loved, or in America, or Sri Lanka, or Manchester. He has had plenty of time to reflect on that life, though time works differently here.

I read in his wife Edie's memoir, Heart of Lightness (Berghahn Books, 2005) that he died relatively young in 1983. She describes the depth of their engagement with the Ndembu people of northern Zimbabwe. She gives a whizbang portrait of his personality: Vic was "a flat-out character; in a sense, he was out of control, his consciousness had escaped from him, it was flying ahead of him, like the arutam-souls of Jivaro Indians flying out ahead of their bodies over the battlefield."

Naturally he broke with the dialectcal materialism of his early Marxism and then with the British anthro penchant for reducing spirits to by-products of social structures. I did not have the pleasure of meeting Vic Turner before he passed on. I am glad to see that in his Bardo of Betwixt and Between, this passionate Scots scholar of liminality is still thinking about what his discipline needs to be - an anthropology of experience that requires the observer to become a participant and practitioner of the ways of another culture.

For more than two decades, his widow Edie upheld that cause like the milk tree the Ndembu call their flag, declaiming - after she watched a dramatic shamanic extraction - that "spirits are real".

In her memoir, Edie recalls how the Manchester set of Africanists agreed to uphold what later became for Star Trek the Prime Directive: leave the cultures you visit untouched. 

The Blob and Tooth Extraction

She went back to Kajima in Ndembu country a couple of years after Vic’s death. For many hours, she helped gather the tree parts and supplies required for an extraction healing. When the healer completed her operation, Edie saw a huge grey blob emerge from the patient’s back. Later she was shown a bloodied molar. She was told that the patient had been possessed by a spirit of the dead that was now trapped in the tooth. . 

The Ndembu call this type of operation a Tooth extraction and a bloody tooth is usually produced as evidence of success. The tooth is stuffed in the hole of a piece of antelope meat shaped like a donut and confined in a jar with cassava meal and blood. Edie did not doubt the blob was real (though she hints that the tooth may be just for show) and this this was true shamanic extraction. She made this the theme of a celebrated article affirming that spirits are real. * Truly, an anthropologist who stepped out from under the mosquito net. 

* E.B. Turner, "The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study?" first published in Anthropology of Consciousness March 1993.

Illustration: "Under the Milk Tree" RM + AI

 

Where Dream Worlds Are Lifeworlds and Anthropologists Break the Glass

 In his book Ways of Knowing, Canadian anthropologist Jean-Guy Goulet reports from the dream world of the Dene Tha of northern Alberta. Here it is understood that "the mind resides transiently in 'someone’s body' kezi, and permanently in 'someone’s spirit or soul', key-uné." Goulet tells us that Dene Tha conceive of dreaming, sickness and death as so many journeys of the soul. "Dreaming involves the soul’s journeying away from the body to explore areas in our land, to engage in a medicine fight with other powers, or momentarily to spend time in the other land in the company of dead relatives. At the end of each journey, when one wakes up, one remembers the events that took place beyond the confines of the body. …Sickness may be induced by a prolonged absence of the soul from the body, in which case Dene Tha healers can be called on to retrieve the soul, bring it back to the body, and restore health. Death is the definitive separation of the mortal body and the enduring immortal soul." [1] 
    Goulet is a leading practitioner and advocate of what my extraordinary friend the late Barbara Tedlock called "participatory observation", in which the ethnologist does not hesitate to dream with the people they are studying, to practice their rituals, meet their spirits and share dreams both ways. In a pathbreaking essay, Barbara wrote that there has been a major shift in cultural anthropological methodology away from interviewing indigenous dreamers to gather reports for statistical content analysis. “Instead, anthropologists today are relying more on participant observation, in which they interact within natural communicative contexts of dream sharing, representation, and interpretation. In such contexts the introduction of an anthropologist's own recent dreams is quite natural, even expected.” [2] Barbara and her husband Dennis entered the dream worlds of the Quiche Maya and the Zuni in this way. [3]
    As a young ethnologist, Goulet chose the Guajiro [4] of northern Colombia as the people he wished to study. At the start of his fieldwork, he asked to be permitted to stay in a village where the people spoke only Guajiro so he could learn the language by total immersion. The question from the elders came back: Does he know how to dream? They accepted him when assured that he did. He then found himself immersed not only in a different language, but in a different way of dreaming. Each morning, he joined an extended family of fourteen people in the kitchen area to share coffee and dreams. The sharing began when an adult asked “Jamüsü pülapüin,?” “How were your dreams?”  Family members then took turns to recount their dreams. The grandmother was usually the one to comment. [5]
    Goulet had only a limited understanding of what was being shared until he started dreaming in similar ways. He could now grasp that for the Guajiro, as for most if not all indigenous peoples, the dream world is a real world, a lifeworld no less real than ordinary reality and sometimes more so. Things that happen in the dream world are real experiences, not symbolic "contents:" for analysis. Goulet tells us, "I began to share Guajiro-like dreams, dreams that contained elements of the Guajiro world."[6]
     When he lived with the Dene Tha, Goulet learned their ways of "knowing with the mind" communicating without speaking, seeing without ordinary eyes, traveling without moving. He knew he was in on a night when, troubled by the smoke of a fire ceremony in a native lodge, he watched his energy double get up and fan the fire the proper way with his hat.
     He makes a passionate case for participatory anthropology, supported by his first-hand experience. In anthropological fieldwork, Goulet tells us, “ it is possible, and even useful, for the ethnographer to experience this qualitatively different world of ghosts and spirits, and to incorporate such experiences in ethnographic accounts.”  [7] He calls to his fellow-ethnographers Go on, break the glass.
   “Anthropologists may do more than listen to what others say about their lives. Anthropologists may pay attention to their own lives, including their inner lives, and listen to other peoples' response to their accounts of their dreams and/or visions experienced while living among them” And then they can publish! “An interpretive synthesis of data pertaining to another society and culture may fruitfully include the anthropologist's accounts of his/her own dreams and visions as they inform his or her interaction with others in their lifeworld.” [8]
     This is the surely the remedy for the phenomenon observed in the South Pacific where it is still said that “when the anthropologists arrive, the spirits leave.” Alas, reports of participatory observation are still far from standard in the literature

 

References

1.      Jean-Guy A. Goulet, Ways of Knowing: Experience, Knowledge and Power among the Dene Tha. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, p.142

2.      Barbara Tedlock, “The New Anthropology of Dreaming”  Dreaming, Vol 1(2), Jun 1991, p.161

3.      Barbara Tedlock, “Zuni and Quiche dream sharing and interpreting”  in Tedlock (ed) Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1992 pp.105-131

4.  An indigenous people of the Guajira peninusla in northern Colombia and northwestern Venezuala. Today generally called the Wayuu. 

5. Jean-Guy A. Goulet, “Dreams and Visions in Indigenous Lifeworlds: An Experiential Approach” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, p. 177.   

6.   Ibid, p. 178 

7.      Ibid, p. 171.    

8.  Ibid, pp. 173-4. See also David E. Young & Jean-Guy Goulet (eds) Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Peterborough Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998. In their introduction the editors of Being Changed note that "experiences which may be extraordinary for Western-trained anthropologists may be commonplace for most traditional peoples around the world" - and, we might add, for active dreamers anywhere who have not fallen into the trap of reductionist thinking about dreaming and the mobility of soul. Goulet and Young go on to observe that "extraordinary experiences force one to deal with the possibility that reality is culturally constructed and that instead of one reality (or a finite set of culturally-defined realities), there are multiple realities — or at least multiple ways of experiencing the world."

 

Photo: Bistcho Lake, northern Alberta

Tiki time

At thirty, the French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) was appointed chair of History of Religions of Uncivilized Peoples at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. In his inaugural lecture he declared that "uncivilized peoples do not exist." As Roberto Calasso observed, "Mauss had been appointed to teach a subject that he declared did not exist." [1]

Mauss deplored the use of the term "primitive" to describe nonliterate cultures. He had met Sir Edward Tylor, the first professor of anthropology at Oxford and author of the immensely influential work Primitive Culture (1871) . At sixty, Mauss told his audience at the Collège de France that "all the rest of humanity, who are called primitive and are still living, deserve instead the name archaic." [2]

Let us note that both Mauss and Tylor were armchair anthropologists, relying on the books and reports of field observers. Despite Tylor's Victorian language - "primitive", "savage", "lower races" - he made a great contribution with his theory of animism and his well- documented thesis that dream experiences had generated and sustained the near-universal belief in a soul that is sepaarble from the body and survives physical death. [3]

Mauss' imagination was fired up when he saw the hei-tiki of a Maori noblewoman - not even the jade talisman itself, but an illustration in John White's Ancient History of the Maori - with a list of correspondences between deities and parts of the body. Microcosm and macrocosm, sculpted in portable green stone.

When he was able to study all seven volumes of White's Maori cycle, he averred that this is "one of the most coherent bodies of cosmogonic myths that we know". The Greeks had nothing to match it. "Comparisons have been made with Hesiod's Theogony. The Maori version (and the Polynesian version in general) appears more coherent, better developed, closer to living institutions than that sort of Greek compilation." [4]

Coherent, cohérent. Mauss uses the word over and over in his commentaries on Maori cosmology. It becomes a drumbeat. The word comes from the Latin cohaerentem, present participle of cohaerere: com "together" plus haerere "to adhere or stick" If things are coherent, they "stick together". They are connected, consistent, in harmony. 

Around the little green man with the tilted head and the huge staring eyes, the powers of the greater universe muster and adhere, the war god and the god of peace to right and left, the gods of sky and intelligence and dreams at the head, the god or magic at feet. [5] And you can wear it all on a necklace. In the 1960s and 1970s, Air New Zealand used to routinely hand out plastic tikis to passengers on its plane. 

Instead of comparing Polynesian cosmology with Old World models, Mauss thought we should study how the conceptions of advanced civilizations might fit within the Polynesian cosmic plan. "All of the themes of the great ancient cosmogonies find their place there." [6]

References

1. Roberto Calasso, Ardor trans. Richard Dixon (London: Penguin Books, 2015) p. 272

2. Marcel Mauss, "Leçon sur l'emploi de la notion de 'primitif' en sociologie" Oeuvres (Paris: Minuit, 1969) p. 237

3. "Animism is, in fact, the groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion, from that of savages up to that of civilized men…Animism divides into two great dogmas, forming parts of one consistent doctrine; first, concerning souls of individual creatures, capable of continued existence after the death or destruction of the body ; second, concerning other spirits, upward to the rank of powerful deities." Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom 2nd edition(London: John Murray, 1873) Vol 1 p.426' 4, Mauss, "introduction aux myths" Oeuvres vol. 2. p. 269

5. Mauss, "Debat sur les visions du monde primitif et moderne" Oeuvres vol. 2 p.156

6. Mauss, "Leçons sur la cosmologie polynésienne"  Oeuvres vol 2 p. 189

Photo credits. Maori women (19th century): Wellcome collection. Hei-tiki: Pitt-Rivers collection. 

Defecation rites among the Azande

A woman postgrad tells me she chose defecation rites among the Azande as the theme for her dissertation. I ask why. She says she wanted to study the same theme among a different tribe, but more had been published on that one. There was a hole in Azande studies she intended to fill.
    I am surprised that the prolific Evans-Pritchard left room for anyone else in coverage of the Azande. I am even more surprised by her focus. Defecation rites?

Feelings after waking with this dream fragment in the early hours: Amusement.

Reality check: I wrote an article once, titled “Excremental Issues” on defecation in contemporary dreams. Many years ago, I read books and articles by Sir Edward “E.E.” Evans-Pritchard, a famous Oxford anthropologist. Regarded as the founder of social anthropology, he did a great deal of fieldwork among the Azande of southern Sudan and became a world authority on witchcraft and sorcery among the peoples of Central Africa. Having immersed himself in the lives of people among whom sorcery is the explanation for many everyday events, he converted later in life to Roman Catholicism. Some suggested that he did this in an effort to close the lid on experiences for which he had no rational explanation.

Action: Yes again, a dream has set me a research assignment, quite a curious one. I pulled out Evans-Pritchard’s book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. I will check whether anything has been published on “defecation rites” among this people. I am curious to see whether scatomancy (divination by excrement) is among their practices. It is often part of folk medicine, and there is an account of this in Augusten Burrough's hilarious memoir Running with Scissors, which I read a few years ago on a plane.

The snapper (or is it the crapper?) is irresistible: “Are you sh-tting me?”

Photo: Evans-Pritchard among the Azande.