Friday, June 24, 2011

Marcel Detienne: "The Creation of Mythology"

Introduction/Summary: “Once Upon a Time”
When myths are not simply dismissed as pleasant stories told for the sole purpose of entertainment, a certain paradox exists in scholarship on the subject of the “myth” or “mythology.” On the one hand, scholarship takes mythology to be a universal form in which human cultures are articulated. An entire “science of mythology” has grown around this understanding of myths, beginning with 18th Century comparativists, engaging different disciplines from linguistics, 19th Century “racial sciences,” anthropology, theology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, and most recently structuralism (this book was written in 1981). All of these methods of approaching mythology share a broadly hermeneutical method, separating “mythology” as one genre of literature that can be interpreted in a peculiar fashion apart from others. Particularly, mythology as a genre is purported to in some way describe the “origin” or the most “primordial” or “primitive” state of cultures, the form humans use to describe their most basic consciousness of themselves and the natural and supernatural worlds around them, prior to conceptual, philosophical, or historical thinking.
On the other hand, the definition of the term “myth” is notoriously difficult to specify. The terms “myth” and “mythology” have historically been used in a variety of ways: in Aristotle’s Poetics, for instance, a myth is both “a well-constructed plot and a well-told tale,” an understanding of myth in no way related to distinctions between conceptual and preconceptual thinking, history versus memory, etc. (xii) In an even stranger turn, the term “mythology” has been used to describe some of the methods used by modern scholars as well. Seen as the telling of tales, the difference between Hesiod describing the development of humanity as a decline from a golden age to the present iron age and the comparativists’ description of human development as starting from a “childhood of the race” characterized by fantastic and mythic consciousness to a mature rational age of Enlightenment diminishes to the point of irrelevance (x). The term “mythology” refers both to the telling of tales and to the interpretation and commentaries on those tales, making it very difficult to define as a separate and unique genre.
Ancient Greece stands at a key point in this paradox (representin’). Since the Renaissance Ancient Greece has been considered the society that gave birth to reason, the unique origin of rational, scientific, conceptual thought we have inherited in modern times. At the same time, however, Ancient Greece is famous for its rich mythology, stories of gods and goddesses that are so irrational and morally scandalous as to offend not only modern sensibilities, but those of the Ancient Greek philosophers and historians as well. The Ancient Greeks appear to be, in Detienne’s words, “two-headed:” irrational and rational, mythic and scientific, primitive and enlightened. The question Detienne asks is whether there is another way to understand mythology that avoids embroiling it in this paradox? Is there a way to describe mythology that avoids attempting to treat it as a unique genre of literature but still explains the power myths appear to have over us, inspiring pleasure while also possessing a peculiar sense of truth: “Subtarranean thoughts in which the eye hears ageless tidings”? (xii)
For Detienne, mythology is tied to cultural memory: “in the darkness of Time some beginnings have eclipsed others, that all discoveries have been made infinite times and that, after so many obliterated progressions, there only remain fossils or traces in the form of proverbs, souvenirs of antique wisdom which have come down to us thanks to their brevity and truth.” (xii) Mythology can be understood as the memories that have survived and continue to have an effect upon us despite their age. Certain experiences have resonance in different times and cultures, and if mythology is not a universal statement of human culture, it at least preserves the experiences, morals, stories, and insights that are so resonant as to be impossible to silence. Detienne argues that what Milan Kundera calls “the struggle between memory and forgetting,” not simply the struggle to retain cultural memories against the generational change, but the active preservation of memory against political and ideological oppression, is not new, but is essential to all history: “There is no paradise either for memory or forgetting. Only the workings of both and ways of working that have a history. A history has to be made.” (xii) Mythology for Detienne constitutes the ways in which memories are preserved, from fantastic narration to scholarly history.
Chapter 1: “Ambiguous Borderlines”
Mythology has a peculiar double signification: first, it refers to a “combination of discursive statements, of matter-of-fact narratives or even, as the saying goes, of narratives and stories.” (1) At the same time, however, mythology is also “a dissertation concerning myths, a scholasticism that understands myths in general, their origin, their nature, their essence.” (1) The genre of mythology includes both myths and interpretations of myths. Detienne thus asks the question of where this semantic doubleness emerged: “Why is it that what is called ‘myth’ resides in or is possessed by a need to discuss, a wish to know, to search out the meaning, the reason for its own manner of speaking?” (1)
Detienne begins to answer this question by looking at the stated reasons the 18th and 19th Century comparativists gave for their studies of myths. A common thread running through the comparativists’ reasons for studying myths regards the strangeness and offensiveness of myths: myths are “foolish, barbaric, and absurd,” not to mention “disgustingly immoral” and “repulsive.” (2) The comparativists, embodying Victorian moral and rationalist sensibilities, find the ancient myths both intellectually and morally offensive, and thus must utilize some form of “scientific” interpretation to explain the origin of mythology. Detienne describes three schools of scholarship on mythology. The first is that of the 19th Century school of “comparative mythology.” This school interprets the offensiveness of mythology as a product of ignorance, “but of an inquisitive ignorance trying to account for phenomena and for the world itself.” (5) Ancient human societies, ignorant of the scientific explanations of natural phenomena, resort to mythology to explain that which they cannot understand. Pre-rational societies create fantastic stories that seem offensive to modern enlightened intellect and sensibilities, but which can be explained away as the imaginings of more ignorant civilizations. Mythology therefore need not be interpreted as “none of this barbarism affects Reason which feigns fright without allowing itself to worry.” (6)
If this is the case, however, there is also no need for scholarship on mythology. If mythology is merely the product of barbaric imaginings, there is nothing to interpret about them as they have no real meaning. For the linguistic school of mythology, however, the creation of myths, the “mythopoietic age,” corresponds to a particular phase in the development of language (9). In Fr.-Max Müller’s schema, for instance, language first develops the terms to express essential ideas, and then separates into the “Semitic” and “Aryan” dialects. After this division into separate forms of grammar, however, words originally meant to denote natural phenomena become anthropomorphized. Natural phenomena had always been represented as possessing human faculties such as a will and sexual ability, but “once the primary sense of the names given to powerful beings by the language which created them spontaneously has been altered, mythic personages make their appearance: the names of natural forces are transformed into proper names. “Zeus makes the rain fall” arises from the expression “the sky weeps.” (10) Primitive humanity’s myths are a result of the excess of signification of the words used to name natural phenomena. Mythology is, in essence, a “disease of language,” a flaw in the signification of primitive words, only resolved when reason and scientific observation provide a basis for naming natural phenomena without recourse to anthropomorphic characteristics.
The linguistic school’s theory of myths, however, cannot explain a peculiar fact about myths noticed by the third anthropological school of mythology. While the argument that linguistic development eventually rid language of the anthropomorphic valences of terms for natural phenomena can explain why, for instance, the Greeks transitioned from mythmaking to philosophy, it cannot be considered a universal schema for human development. Anthropologists such as Edward Tylor and Andrew Lang noticed that “savage” tribes such as “the Australians, the Bushmen, the Redskins and the inferior races of South America” (Lang, quoted in Detienne, 11) “continued to tell the same barbaric stories no one could dream of explaining as the strange result of a few misunderstood expressions.” (11) Instead, the anthropologists describe myths as corresponding to a particular stage in the development of human consciousness, that of childhood. Infantile consciousness, according to the anthropologists, attributes human life to nature while only possessing basic terminology to describe it: “actions were named according to sounds; names of animals were given according to cries; later, the words are modified to adapt sound to meaning.” (12) The anthropologists thus find a way to describe both why the Ancient Greeks were able to literally outgrow mythology, while present-day “savage” tribes are unable to do so: the Greeks were able to develop reason (as yet without an explanation) while the “savages” remain within the childhood stage of human consciousness.
This developmental model of human consciousness has the advantage of being able to describe how to tell apart myths from science. With “savage” tribes existing in various locations, anthropologists have plenty of opportunities to study how the human infantile consciousness functions, and thus will be able to see what is rational within Greek myth and what is irrational. Modern culture, stemming from the Enlightenment, can therefore differentiate itself from its primitive origins and the savage cultures that still exist. Ground is also prepared within the anthropological theory of mythology for Christianity and “natural religion” theorists to differentiate themselves from primitive mythology. The universal human consciousness of a “supreme being” postulated by the theory of natural religion was perverted by the infantile consciousness of primitive civilizations, as scandalous actions were attributed to the supreme being in mythology. As the Greeks outgrew mythology, however, they developed a new conception of a deity that “does not differ essentially from our own.” (P. Decharme, quoted in Detienne, 15). While an understanding of science is all that is required to differentiate what is rational in Greek myths from what is irrational, for the natural religion theorists a sense of morality is all that is required to differentiate what is “heathen” in Greek myths from what is essentially proto-Christian.
In sum, Detienne’s genealogy of 18th and 19th Century studies of mythology demonstrates that mythology is a category used to describe what is other from modern Enlightenment culture and can be discarded from its heritage. For Detienne, “the anthropologist is a frontiersman: between savages and the civilized, between the childhood of mankind and its maturity, between ourselves and our ancestors.” (19) By better understanding irrational and immoral mythology, we can understand what is truly our own culture and that from which we have developed. In other words, the 19th Century study of mythology stems from a particular experience, that of attempting to solidify and entrench its own sense of identity. This is accomplished, though, by excluding what it finds anathema to itself, to root out the “savage in ourselves but in order to eradicate foreign matter, to uproot an excrescence.” (19) The ambiguity of the borderlines between civilization and savages, between myth as a genre and other forms of literature, must be removed to articulate a coherent identity for modern culture.
For Detienne, however, that the semantic duplicity of the term mythology is based in the attempt to root out the scandalous material in narrative myths cannot be the whole explanation for the distinction. While 19th Century mythology on myths may have its origin in attempting to prove the fundamentally rational and moral nature of contemporary culture, this was not the case in Ancient Greece. 19th Century mythology had the problem of attempting to preserve its Ancient Greek heritage from seeming primitive. Ancient Greece, the source of rationality and morality, cannot have been a haven for scandalous mythology according to the anthropologists, and so what is scandalous must be explained away. However, since the anthropologists also claim that their practice of expunging the scandalous within myths originated in Ancient Greece itself, so Detienne deems it necessary to create a new genealogy of the Ancient Greek understanding of mythology to find the origin of mythology’s semantic split.
Chapter 2: “By Mouth and by Ear”
The understanding that Greek civilization possessed a fundamentally oral, not written, culture, must for Detienne form the basis of any understanding of the status of mythology in Ancient Greece. For instance, it has long been thought that Homer’s epics are literary masterpieces and can thus be understood according to the interpretive practices of literary criticism. M.I. Finley, for instance, believed that Homer’s epics were internally coherent narratives, and thus constitute a separate genre of literature from “hopelessly contradictory” myths (Finley, quoted in Detienne, 25). However, it is now understood that the narrative arc of the epics are merely the skeletons upon which a mass of “genealogical lineages to verbose apologues through proverbs, tributes of praise for the living, legends, eulogies for the dead, theogonies or tales of marvelous happenings,” are added (23). The written versions of Homer’s epics that survive are merely one version among countless others that have been lost.
It is therefore also not the case that, as Eric Havelock believed, the one written version of Homer served as the “encyclopedia of community knowledge” shared by all of Ancient Greece (27). Writing throughout the Archaic and Classical periods of Greek history was hardly ever used as a repository for information, whether technical, administrative, or moral. Written record-keeping only truly began during the 4th Century B.C.E. The model of cultural transmission used both by written and oral communication was that of sharing statements publicly. Oral discourse was recited to an audience, writing was generally used to print city laws in open venues for all to see, and even the few existing books were read aloud in groups.
Memory, then, was not preserved in writing, and did not need to be. Oral transmission of cultural memory was the model practice during the pre-Hellenistic period of Greek history. Detienne makes use of Jack Goody’s understanding of how oral transmission of cultural memory creates both stability and variability in the repetition of traditional material. First, oral traditions belong to everyone in the society: all members are familiar with the traditional material, which generally takes narrative form, “taking as a guiding thread a plot, a history, and its logical conclusions.” (38) Second, spoken performance only transmits some aspects of cultural memory: “If spoken memory cannot help transforming what it wishes only to say and to repeat, this is because it cannot be confused with mnemonic activity, emphasized and exploited in our society and which consists in stockpiling and reproducing faithfully series of statements or pieces of information.” (38) Oral transmission of cultural memory is inherently creative, as there lacks a written text used as a reference for performances.
In an oral performance, a performer has the obligation of telling the aspects of a story that are familiar to his or her audience, while being able to improvise the details. This does not mean, however, that the performer has free reign to create as he or she sees fit: “In order to find a place in aural tradition, a tale, history, or words of any sort must be heard, that is to say, be accepted by the community or the audience to whom it is addressed.” (39) Transmission by word of mouth must also be accepted by the ears of the audience of the transmission (hence the title of this chapter) to become memorable, a part of a culture’s oral/aural (ba-dum chi) tradition. So, for instance, the narrative arc of Homer’s myths is made part of Ancient Greece’s oral/aural culture by repetition and acceptance by different communities over time, such that regularity emerges amidst the repetitions and improvisations of performances. The basic plot of Homer’s epics consists of the aspects of those stories that have been accepted by audiences throughout many performances over a long period of time, and have thus gained a greater significance for the group.
It is in fact the continuous acceptance of aspects of a narrative over time that makes a story into a culture’s mythology. Detienne quotes Lévi-Strauss’ definition of his neologism “mythism:” “Individual works are all myths potentially but it is their adoption through collective use, if this occurs, which actualizes their mythism.” (40) Myths are not a separate genre of literature apart from others, but rather the aspects and works and stories that have been adopted through repetition and acceptance into a set of narratives that form the content of social memory. Myths are what a society deems worth remembering, the “essential thoughts, ironic or serious, but always fashioned by the long-continued attention of a group of human beings, rendered homogenous and conscious of self through the memory of generations who have also been dumbfounded.” (41) For Detienne, no formula given by human sciences can explain what makes certain aspects of narratives memorable for a society, what makes a society deem certain aspects of narratives worth remembering, thus placing mythology beyond the reach of anthropological knowledge.
Chapter 3: “The Mythic Illusion”
If myths do not constitute a separate genre of literature but rather are simply elements of narratives generally accepted throughout a society, then the intellectual history of Ancient Greece outlined by the 19th Century comparativists can be corrected. The Greeks appeared in Detienne’s terms “two-headed” according to the comparativists, standing at the border between irrational consciousness of nature and rational/scientific thought. According to the comparativists, as philosophy in Ancient Greece developed, the new rational consciousness outgrew its infantile stage and became ashamed of the immoral aspects of their mythology. Moral indignation against the stories of incest, violence, seduction, and other scandalous acts of the gods began with the early 5th Century philosopher Xenophanes and reached its zenith in Plato’s banishment of poets, mythologists, and all stories that could corrupt the youth of Athens from the city. The comparativists claimed that the Greek philosophers’ moral criticism of mythology was combined with allegorical interpretation of mythology to provide a model of their own activity, rooting out the false and scandalous mythology from Europe’s past to provide space for true, moral, Christian theology.
Detienne finds this history far too selective and self-serving, and so creates an alternative genealogy of the Ancient Greek understanding of mythology. Prior to the 6th Century, the terms mythos and logos were interchangeable, both referring to a discourse, an account, or a story. Anacreon provides the only semantic specificity given to the term mythos, using it to refer to the rebellious talk lower of class fishermen on the island of Samos, thereby associating mythos with politically subversive and dangerous discourse (45). The morally neutral usage of mythos, however, predominated, even in the works of the supposedly anti-mythical philosophers Xenophanes and Empedocles, contrary to the opinion of the comparativists.
Mythos experienced its first significant semantic shifts in the work of Pindar and Herodotus. For Pindar, a myth is a rumor cooked up by people envious of the glory and status of others. Praise sung by a poet such as Pindar celebrating the victory of a successful athlete carried his fame to the gods, raising those who are truly great to the divine stature they merit. As with Anacreon, a myth is still a form of subversive discourse created by the weak, but is now a vicious rumor designed to sully the reputation of those more deserving, “rumor which threatens the word of praise, the voices of envy which stand in the way of the rise of truth.” (47) Myths are thus deceptive stories that attempt to delegitimize true glory and give in its place false praise to those less deserving: “Appearing in many guises myth, born of rumor, signifies to Pindar the bad traditional narrative; it is the badge of the fictional, the illusory, which must be cast aside, removed from the ranks ‘of reliable witnesses.’” (48) Herodotus only adds to Pindar’s understanding of myth as a traditional rumor designed to obscure the truth that a myth is also a fantastical account, an unbelievable fiction that denies obvious evidence to the contrary. Myths for Herodotus are rustic tales told by the uneducated and ignorant masses. A myth for both Pindar and Herodotus still does not constitute a particular genre of literature, but is rather a term of abuse: “sometimes it is a relic, sometimes a beclouded rumor, an illusory word, a lying seduction, an unbelievable account, a ridiculous discourse, an unfounded opinion. ‘Myth’ is still only a word, like a gesture pointing out what it denounces as unbelievable, what it rejects.” (51)
The true revolution in the attitude towards myth, however, comes with Thucydides. Pindar and Herodotus use the term myth to denigrate false memories in favor of true ones. Pindar and Herodotus want to create literary monuments to the memories of glorious Greeks deserving of divine recognition, and so the only difference between mythos and a logos alethes is that the latter is true while the former is designed to obscure that truth. Thucydides, however, is uninterested in creating a monument to Athens’ glory, writing after the military, economic, and political disaster of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides seeks to preserve useful memories, memories of Athens’ past failures which can guide political action in the future. Thucydides is a political historian, citing past actions and words in order to construct a theory of political power that can explain why the Athenians went to war and more importantly, why they lost. For the first time Thucydides explicitly opposes mythos and logos, claiming that myth is dangerous not only for preservation of worthy memories, but for the city: “Would it were possible for us to subsume that which pertains to myth (mythodes) into reason (logos), after being expurgated, and have it appear as history. But when the mythic so boldly imposes on credulity and has no verisimilitude, we ask the listeners to be indulgent and to submit to these old stories with patience.” (Thucydides, quoted in Detienne, 53)
Myths are now not only false but irrational and misleading stories. Logical thinking, the sort that should guide politics, is grounded upon true accounts of past deeds, actions, and events which can help leaders in the present make good decisions. Myths are traditional tales, “ready-made ideas” people resort to in order to explain phenomena they do not understand, thus having no place in a useful history (55). Myths are meant to provide pleasure to listeners, relaxing reason when good politics requires constant use of reason. Myths must therefore be expurgated from rational histories designed to prevent catastrophes like the Peloponnesian War in the future. Finally and most significantly, Thucydides banishes myths from his history because they rely on unreliable, oral methods of communication and memory transmission, whereas only written history can be considered reliable. Memory transmitted through speech according to Thucydides fades, whereas written truths are always available to the statesman and thus recorded are unchangeable. The oppositions 19th Century historians use between rational and irrational histories, between the true accounts of history and popular myths and legends, historians is set up in Thucydides’ work.
Chapter 4: “The Earliest Interpretation – and a Smile”
Despite the radical shift in the meaning of the term mythos stemming from Thucydides, the 19th Century comparativists do not cite him as their forerunner, but rather the philosophers. Xenophanes, however, the first philosopher to condemn Homer on moral grounds, does not attack mythology as such, but the tradition of attributing violent, immoral behavior to the gods beginning with Homer and Hesiod through a host of other artists who “exalt without respite violence and revolt.” (65) Two aspects of Xenophanes’ critique of the tradition of the violent Homeric tradition are worth noting. First, the tradition Xenophanes criticizes is not merely that of rustic and ignorant people, but is diffused throughout Greek society: “From the outset the Greeks derive their knowledge from Homer.” (Xenophanes, quoted in Detienne, 65) Second, Xenophanes criticizes the Homeric tradition from the perspective of “wisdom,” sophia, which for Xenophanes refers to the good character statesmen require to effectively govern. Xenophanes’ critique of the Homeric tradition is, in other words, a critique of the pedagogical impact of Homer’s epics. The veneration given to the name Homer and the “countless more or less anonymous stories familiar to everyone both through having heard them always and seen them on vase paintings and sculptures, on Doric friezes on pediments,” continually reinforce belief in blasphemous stories about the gods and make hubristic behavior seem justifiable (65). In order to purge the body politic of corrupting influences, Xenophanes decides that the Homeric tradition must be removed from the city entirely.
The important moment in the history of mythology comes for Detienne not in Xenophanes’ critique, however, but in the defense of the Homeric tradition given by the rhapsodists, the performers of Homer’s epics. Detienne is particularly interested in the rhapsodist Theagnes’ defense of Homer, as it gives the first interpretation of the Iliad, using a form of hermeneutics Porphyrus will eventually label “allegory.” The war between the gods in the Iliad is not meant as a literal account, but as a way to express the opposition between the elements as described by the philosophy of nature: “between the dry and the humid, between the hot and the cold.” (67) Homer merely expresses in poetic meter what philosophers describe using different words.
Detienne marks this defense of Homer as a critical point in the Ancient Greek understanding of mythology, for the simply reason that to interpret Homer, Theagnes must assume the existence of a stable work of Homer’s that can serve as the model for different interpretations, ie. a text fixed in writing. For Detienne, this defense marks the historical origin of the distinction between exegesis and interpretation. Detienne argues that exegesis consists of the ongoing usage of elements within myth and their adaptation to new circumstances. Exegesis gives symbols new and greater meaning by applying them to different situations, such that their signification continually shifts. Exegesis is the practice whereby myths interact with experiences in a process of mutual enrichment: symbols within myths are used to give significance to experiences, and the specificities of those experiences are added on to the meaning of that symbol. Myths are given meaning through exegesis in “living traditions,” whereas interpretation is the way myth is understood when a group of individuals gain critical distance from the myth. In interpretation, interpreters attempt to grasp the original meaning of a myth beyond the literal grasping of the words within them: as Lévi-Strauss says, “One does not discuss the myths of the group, […] one transforms them in the belief one is repeating them.” (Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Detienne, 68). Theagnes is the first interpreter of Homer rather than an exegete: instead of applying stories, images, and other elements of Homer to illuminate particular situations, he determines the “true” meaning of Homer’s “fictional” narrative by taking recourse in natural philosophical doctrines.
It is therefore Theagnes, not Xenophon, who is the true critic of Homer. Xenophon still accepts the “literal” version of Homer and its exegesis throughout a diffuse tradition of art, whereas Theagnes argues that the words of Homer, what Xenophon worries corrupt the youth, are not Homer’s true meaning, and that the true meaning of Homer’s words are to be found outside of his text in the doctrines of natural philosophy. Theagnes thus inaugurates critical distance from the Homeric tradition, based on written interpretation rather than oral dissemination of the epics. At this time, however, reading and writing are still technologies available only to an elite group of intellectuals. For the vast majority of still illiterate people, interpretation based on a readable text is not an option, so oral transmission remains the norm throughout Greece.
A curious middle ground, however, appears between oral exegesis and written interpretation in figures such as Hecataeus, a “fabricator of accounts (logopoios),” individuals ignored in the comparativist account of Ancient Greek intellectual development (70). The literate Hecataeus collects different versions of traditional stories and compares them, consciously redacting accounts and creating new versions of stories “as they seem true to him.” (Aelian referring to Hecateus, quoted in Detienne, 73). He then recites his new, more probable version of the old story, simultaneously engaging in exegesis, the application of old stories to explain new situations, and interpretation, the finding of the true version of a story based on his own understanding of physics, geography, and human action. Like Theagnes, Hecataeus engages in interpretive practices, but avoids the anxiety surrounding having to defend the morals of old mythology by simply altering it as he sees fit, preserving the elements of tradition he chooses according to rational principles of interpretation. While Theagnes struggles to defend the Homeric tradition in such a way that will eventually petrify it, cutting off the ability to improvise necessary to oral transmission and exegesis, Hecataeus is a “logographer who smiles” (back to the title of this chapter – that Marcel’s a clever one ain’t he?), using the rational tools of hermeneutics to create new myths and orally transmit them, a practice that Plato will attempt to make use of in the Republic (80).
Chapter 5: “The City Defended by Its Mythologists”
The protagonist of the 19th Century comparativists’ intellectual history of Greece, however, is Plato, whose Republic is notorious for indicting not just Homer or Hesiod but all “mythologists” for constructing stories that corrupt Athenian youth, and banishing all mythologists from the city to allow for philosophical rule. In Plato the comparativists find the clearest opposition and victory of reason over myth, of scientific thinking over the infantile consciousness of primitive humanity. And it is true that Plato uses the term myth as a term of abuse like Pindar and Herodotus: in the dialogues, Socrates labels an absurd argument a myth, and the sophists influence the masses of ignorant people “with the help of a mythology.” (Plato, quoted in Detienne, 83). Plato is the first author to use the term “mythology”, referring to a set of fictions orators repeat, or in other words mythologize (the verb “to repeat” in Ancient Greek is mythologeuein), in order to lend credence to an opinion. A mythology is a collection of tales in narrative form about gods, demons, heroes, the dead, and human beings, which provide an explanation of a group’s identity and a justification for a particular set of morals.
Mythology for Plato functions by creating genealogies and archaeologies. Genealogies for Plato belong to noble families who trace their origins to “heroes of divine origin.” (89) By demonstrating their relationship to the heroes of old, noble families legitimize their rank and status within society relative to others. Archaeologies, however, are for the entire city: “In very ancient cities archaeology is founded on search for an identity and by way of inquiries concerning the past, usually the immediate past. Therein resides an active memory, connected with the new practices in politics.” (89) The legendary origins of a city (for instance the contest between Athena and Hephaestus for tutelage of Athens or the model provided by Castor and Polydeuces for Spartan military culture) are repeated and enjoyed by all of a city’s inhabitants together. Both genealogies and archaeologies provide a sense of identity and purpose to a group based on a shared legendary history. Furthermore, the recitation (mythologizing) of these stories provides great pleasure to those who hear them, such that the moral message latent within these myths are passed on to all.
For Plato there is therefore an essential connection between the archaeologies told to entire cities and stories of ghosts and demons nursemaids tell their children to frighten them into behaving well. Both possess the critical pedagogical ability to instill maxims into their audiences, shaping them to behave according to the myths’ morals. Furthermore, myths are everywhere in the city, as oral traditions are repeated to all and throughout generations: “The faintest whisper, the slightest rumor, can be transformed into one of those stories ‘we do not cease to repeat and about which everyone is in agreement.’” (91) Rumors, then, are the most effective myths. Spread rapidly across a group of people, rumors give notice of events and opinions that can be true or false, and which therefore can have a great effect on culture. The rumor of a good law, for instance, can inspire virtuous and obedient behavior, whereas a malicious rumor can inspire revolt.
Plato thus reaches the conclusion in the Republic for which he is infamous: to foster virtue throughout the ideal city, the philosopher must create a myth designed to mould citizens according to an image of goodness. The philosopher must create the “beautiful useful lie” that citizens are made up of three classes: gold, silver, and iron mixed with bronze, and that these classes cannot mix in marriage, fooling people into only marrying others of similar physical and moral worth (as decided by the guardians) so that the strongest, most beautiful and intelligent citizens will produce ideal philosopher-guardians of the city and separating them from the corrupting influences of the mass of commoners, ensuring good governance across generations (95-96). And furthermore, in order to ensure that this myth is accepted by all, Plato will banish all other mythmakers from the ideal city, especially those who spread the vicious rumors of violent and rebellious activity in the Homeric tradition. Homer’s epics are to be censored such that only the parts that can inspire virtuous behavior remain, and no evil acts will be attributed to the gods.
Before the comparativists can declare that at least their interpretation of Plato is correct, however, Plato recognizes that the creation of a beautiful noble lie will fail, as no one will believe it. Even if Plato expunges the Homeric tradition, banishes lying poets, and attempts to spread his noble rumor, the state itself cannot ensure that people will accept and believe it: “And it is at a sudden whim that the philosopher of The Republic gives up his myth which no one will believe. A disabused act acknowledging the failure of the influence of political authority over mythology.” (98) If a myth is to change behavior, it can only spread as a rumor according to the practices of oral tradition, repeated, altered, and eventually accepted over a long period of time.
Plato recognizes the philosopher’s impotence to create and disseminate myths by the time he writes the Laws, and so changes his sociological model for inspiring virtue throughout a city. Virtue-embodying myths cannot be imposed on the population from the state, but must be transmitted diffusely by various groups of people. In the Laws, Plato’s last unfinished work, he divides the labor of making public the philosopher’s good laws into four separate groups: children who repeat maxims, men and women under thirty who sing paeans bearing witness to high principles, mature men between thirty and sixty, and most importantly, “men over sixty who ‘are no longer strong enough to sing’ will tell stories based on exalted principles and behavior; they will be the ‘mythologists’ of the city, ‘inspired by a flying report emanating from the gods.’” (Detienne, quoting Plato, 100) Old men have the most important task of all: recounting myths that provide pleasure to those who hear them. Plato, even as an authoritarian moralist, still recognizes an essential fact about myths: to be effective, they must be pleasant to their audience. People must enjoy listening to myths in order to receive their message and for the myth to be accepted. If the philosopher wishes to foster harmonious and virtuous thought, he must ultimately leave the task not only to his own sociological imagination, but to the invisible oral tradition that entertains, combining the most stringent moral codes with the most relaxed practices of transmission.
Chapter 6: “Two-Headed Greek”
The comparativists’ intellectual history of Greece falls apart when reminded that the Greeks never fully abandoned the recognition that an irrational, oral, culture of myths is essential to a live tradition, such that reason never fully triumphed over primitivism in Ancient Greece. Even Plato, the consummate philosopher, knew that rustic stories told by old men are the most effective way to achieve cultural transmission. However, theories of mythology always seem to make reference to Greece as the borderline between philosophy and mythology, where the two can be seen most plainly in their opposition. If the 18th and 19th Century comparativists saw Greece as the borderline between rationality and irrationality, as the Greeks negating their mythological thought to give rise to rational philosophical thought, the 20th Century sociologists and anthropologists, beginning with Durkheim, recognize philosophy as the fulfillment of mythic thought: “It is thanks to the philosophy of the Greeks that scientific thought becomes, as Durkheim says, a more perfect form of religious thought or mythology.” (107) Anthropologists like Ernst Cassirer and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl argued that Greek philosophy was a form of self-consciousness that could conceptually explain the world that was edified and articulated in narrative form in mythology. Lévi-Strauss universalized this progression as the “autonomous movement of mythic concept toward abstraction” undergone throughout humanity (116).
For the 20th Century anthropologists as well, then, the Greeks remain two-headed. Detienne asks, however, whether, given his own version of Ancient Greek intellectual history, it might not be possible to understand philosophy and mythology as coexisting within Ancient Greece, rather than remaining at constant conflict with each other. For Detienne, mythology remains primary in Greek consciousness, and in fact possesses its own form of logic: mythology for Detienne consists of:
the deliberate fabulation of governing ideas which cannot be put within everyone’s reach at any moment. Primary metaphysics, so fascinating with regard to existential thought that it goes so far as to consider its own metaphysics as a second mythology. The ‘transcendence’ recalled by Cassirer after Kant is erased and philosophy bows to mythic experiences, the abundance of its experience of life and its boundless advantage in revealing a reality so inherent in every person that it entirely controls his behavior. (121)
In other words, for Detienne, myth:
a) Is a form of existential metaphysics, the repository of fundamental human experiences that are so basic as to be transmitted, received, and understood by audiences across both cultures and generations.
b) Reveals basic aspects of human behavior that are so inherent to us as to be considered our automatic ways of interacting with the world.
c) Is not a more primordial or primitive version of philosophy. Rather, the opposite is the case. Philosophy attempts to rearticulate the truths of mythology in a way accessible to all, and is therefore always responsive to the experiences revealed in mythology.
d) Not an encyclopedic system, and so cannot be put into one library encompassing all human experiences. Mythology is the articulation of human life in a changing world, and so changes with human experiences.
Mythology is not, however, therefore an incoherent mass of feelings repeated to please crowds. Greek myth embodies a “rationalism favoring subjectivity, alone capable of rediscovering religious meaning in worldly experience through symbolic images: a rationalism other and wider than conceptual intelligence, the logos able to discern if proceeding by sections but amnesic of the meaning of the whole.” (122) Unlike philosophy (and the human sciences that have grown out of it), mythology does not segment human experiences into biological, social, psychological, etc., domains, but rather is able to treat human experience as a unified whole. Through narrative mythology is able to express “a part of the lived experience, sufficiently basic to be repeated, to be reproduced, and thus to resist intellectual analysis attempting to break up its unity.” (122) In other words, Zeus’ raining blood onto the Achaean lines in the Iliad more faithfully expresses the experience of panic in battle than a treatise on crowd psychology, preserving the different aspects of that experience in their unity, rather than breaking them up into the objects of different intellectual disciplines.
Myth preserves basic human experiences in their wholeness without artificially dividing them into separate domains of experience. As Detienne says, this rationality points towards a religious understanding of experience: the articulation of experiences so basic as to transcend not only conceptual boundaries, but also those between cultures and times. A myth preserves particular experiences, whereas “the plurality of tales in a mythology gains credence from an inner cohesion wherein each story refers to yet another, all of them tending toward a final meaning which cannot be codified to which the whole system orientates the mind, the mind of the Greeks and subsequently our own.” (122) As stated above, a mythology is not an encyclopedia of all human experiences, but the collection of stories lending coherence and definition to our own lives, orienting our understanding of our experiences within a shared framework of symbols within stories. The descriptive logic of myths can unify all aspects of experience within a framework of symbols that transcend individual worldly experiences, and is thus able to capture even the details of human life and give them significance. For Detienne, this is only way divine symbols can remain convincing and meaningful to people: symbols contained within a religious system must adapt through the exegesis inherent within mythmaking. Religious systems must continually adapt with people’s changing life-experiences. Greek mythology succeeded in accomplishing this, and so is still read widely and gives pleasure today: “is it not enough to listen to mythology in order to live it since, despite Christianity which has never stopped working against it, nevertheless the fundamental experiences in which it is rooted always remain ours?” (122-123)
The Greeks, then, are indeed two-headed, but the two heads of myth and philosophy coexist, rather than continually fight. Even Plato recognized that myth carries a power unavailable to conceptual thinking, such that philosophy’s abstract manner of thinking is an addition to, rather than a replacement for, mythology. The semantic duality of the term “mythology” originates in the fact that both mythological and philosophical thinking, the rational interpretation of mythology that stems from mythology itself, are ways to accomplish the same goal of orienting experience using different forms of discourse. If mythology remains more widely-read than philosophy, it is only because mythology is the purest form of articulation and expression of human experiences, more universal and faithful to the details of human life than conceptual thought. Mythology, rather than philosophy or science, will always remain the primary way in which human life is interpreted and comprehended: “One becomes a botanist or a geologist but one is born a mythologist.” (123)
Conclusion/Chapter 7: “Untraceable Myth”
It scare may be believed,
This tale of Donkey-Skin;
But laughing children in the home;
Yea, mothers and grandmothers too,
Are little moved by facts!
By them ‘twill be received.
These are the last lines of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale “Donkey Skin,” and Detienne makes reference to them to begin his conclusion. Except that it is not simply women and children who gain pleasure out of Donkey Skin (which is actually a really weird story: a king wants to marry his daughter so she demands a dress made out of the skin of the king’s favorite donkey who poops gold, silver, and gems, and then wears it to hide from the king, and some other stuff), but also Lévi-Strauss and Detienne as well. At the beginning of his history of Ancient Greek myths Detienne argued that the fundamentally oral mode of transmission is what allowed for the particular aspects of mythology’s dissemination that made it vital, such as improvisation to allow for exegesis. Can myths remain alive even in a literate world, where interpretation has overtaken exegesis due to technological change?
For Detienne our distance from myths has been exaggerated by scholars who have used myths as a screen to project what they disavow about contemporary culture. Anthropologists in the various schools in the 18th-20th Centuries have treated mythology as “a provisional site, an open camping place; like the wrong side of a borderline from which the eye takes in the proximate horizon.” (129) Scholarship has understood modern culture by reference to that of ancient mythology from which it originated, and so ultimately participates in the archaeology and genealogy Plato claims is essential to mythology itself. Mythology, whether in narrative or scholarly form, is still the story of the world in transition from the long past to now, helping us to recognize our experiences in today’s culture, “the language that makes it possible to put into words the world that is coming to be.” (130)
Mythology in fact still exists today, but not as a specific literary genre, something it in fact never was: “To cite today or tomorrow, that which everyone agrees to call myth is to endorse an out-of-date faithful acceptance of a cultural model that appeared in the eighteenth century when the sum total of accepted ideas concerning pagan divinities between Ovid and Apollodorus are in the realm of fable which scholarly erudition then called mythology. But no episode in that long span of time warrants attributing to myth a literary genre or a specific type of tale. Mythology, a fish emulsified in the waters of mythology, is an untraceable form.” (131-132) Detienne thus calls for us to recognize a “myth-less mythology:” the stories, maxims, and other writings and sayings that we all know and have been familiar with since our youths (132). Within three generations, Detienne argues, cultural material that has not been recorded is subject to “unavoidable and continual metamorphoses, no matter what the authority and the number of ‘memory administrators’ there may be.” (133) It is the redaction, conscious or unconscious, of old stories based on an individuals’ memory or sense of reality that alters the contents of stories over time, the basis for the exegesis that keep myths meaningful. The truth is, concludes Detienne, that literacy does not threaten mythology any more than Plato’s authoritarian state: as long as there are women, children, and Detiennians who take pleasure in myths and repeat them, changing them according to their own experiences, people who take up Hecataeus’ role of editing myths according to their believability, myths will be repeated and still give pleasure to people, lending their experiences coherence and sense.
Or, we could just do this instead:

Thursday, June 16, 2011

James Clifford “On Ethnographic Allegory” in Writing Culture Edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus


Summary: Clifford sets out to show that ethnography perform the dual function of telling about a culture and making broader, humanistic statements. In both form and content, ethnographies are allegorical, meaning that they encompass additional meaning (as constructed and told stories) beyond the local cultural meanings they presume to present. Clifford launches his argument about the ethnographic content being allegorical by arguing that all of the levels of the text are allegorical, not just the ones that are acknowledged to be the interpretive. He illustrates this by turning to Shostak’s Nisa, which he claims has three allegorical registers: Nisa as a way in to describing !Kung culture; question of what it means to be a woman and have a woman’s experience; and the dialogical interaction between the ethnographer and subject. Clifford argues that the three strands shed light on the dialogical, contingent, intersubjective nature of fieldwork, which cannot be thought of just as an empirical means to generalize about a culture; the “scientific” part is just one register, which fits uncomfortably with the messiness of translation, dialogue, and projection.
The second half of Clifford’s paper turns to an investigation of a repeated allegory in ethnography of his time, which he labels “ethnographic pastoral,” which is the frame to the part of his argument which deals with ethnography’s (written) form. Within this allegory, people being studied are pictured to be fleeting, past, Edenic—the ethnographer’s text is what preserves an ephemeral people. This is the allegory of salvage, which continues because the ethnographer sees his project as an inscriber of a culture into a stable, textual form. Clifford argues that all ethnographies share the practice of textualization. The very act of writing enacts the pastoral theme, making the spoken, living, into something embalmed and stable. Clifford suggests ways to subvert the allegory of textualization, most radical of which is his consideration of Derrida’s expanded conception of writing, whereby each culture has its own writing, thus making the ethnographer the primary writer of another culture, since the culture is “always already writing” itself. Clifford thus points out how pervasive the challenge to the allegory textualization is and suggests that this new conception challenges the ethnographer’s authority, for the native who can write his own culture challenges the ethnographer’s authority.
Clifford first lays out the argument:
“In what follows I treat ethnography itself as a performance emplotted by powerful stories. Embodied in written reports, these stories simultaneously describe real cultural events and make additional, moral, ideological and even cosmological statements. Ethnographic writing is allegorical at the level of both its content (what it says about cultures and their histories) and of its form (what is implied by its mode of textualization)” (98).
One of the key examples that Clifford deals with is Marjorie Shostak’s Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Clifford excerpt’s Shostak’s description of child birth and explains that the story is about the “local cultural meanings” as well as a general story about woman’s experience and more broadly human experience which transcend the particular. “Shostak’s life of a !Kung individual inevitably becomes an allegory of (female) humanity. I argue below that these kinds of transcendent meanings are not abstractions or interpretations ‘added’ to the original ‘simple’ account. Rather, they are the conditions of its meaningfulness. Ethnographic texts are inescapably allegorical, and a serious acceptance of this fact changes the ways they can be written and read. Using Shostak’s experiment as a case study I examine a recent tendency to distinguish allegorical levels as specific ‘voices’ within the text. I argue, finally, that the very activity of ethnographic writing—seen as inscription or textualization—enacts a redemptive Western allegory. This pervasive structure needs to be perceived and weighed against other possible emplotments for the performance of ethnography” (99).
What is allegory?:
Usually allegory is “a practice in which a narrative fiction continuously refers to another pattern of ideas or events” (99). The sense of allegory Clifford uses goes beyond this, following Angus Fletcher and Paul De Man: “A recognition of allegory [in ethnography] emphasizes the fact that realistic portraits, to the extent that they are ‘convincing’ or ‘rich,’ are extended metaphors, patterns of associations that point to coherent (theoretical, esthetic, moral) additional meanings. Allegory (more strongly that ‘interpretation’) calls to mind the poetic, traditional, cosmological nature of such writing processes. Allegory draws special attention to the narrative character of cultural representations, to the stories built into the representational process itself. It also breaks down the seamless quality of cultural description by adding a temporal aspect to the process of reading. One level of meaning in a text will always generate other levels. Thus the rhetoric of presence that has prevailed in much post-romantic literature (and in much ‘symbolic anthropology’) is interrupted” (100).
The acceptance of ethnography as allegory is a rejection of postivism, realism, and romanticism. Recognizing how ethnographic accounts are constructed narratives, Clifford argues that ethnographies should be understood in the framework of allegory: “Allegory prompts us to say of any cultural description not ‘this represents, or symbolizes, that’ but rather, ‘this is a (morally charged) story about that” (100).
The empirical/scientific cannot explain life humanly and to explain the human means to add allegorical meaning.
Coleridge explains a 2-level structure of the ethnographic: one set of agents or images is accompanied by a level of the super-sensual, the moral. As Clifford explains, “What one sees in a coherent ethnographic account, the imaged construct of the other, is connected in a continuous double structure with what one understands” (101). There is the level of difference then the level of similarity, which shares common symbols (101).
Cultural anthropology of the 20th century builds off a tradition of describing the other that presupposes that the other is some earlier form within a teleological narrative of the West; cultural anthropology still assumes some transcendent truth, but now that truth is humanist instead of teleological (101-102). Clifford illustrates this with the Mead-Freeman controversy: Mead reflected issues of her American, pluralist context in her “scientific” description of Samoans. As Clifford explains, “The entire project of inventing and representing ‘cultures’ was, for Mead and Benedict, a pedagogical, ethical undertaking” (102) that makes Samoa into a symbol of America. Freeman exposes Mead’s allegorical portrayal but replaces it with his own (102-103).

Clifford takes up Nisa as an example of the multiple registers of allegory in ethnography:
Clifford argues that there isn’t just one level that is the interpretive while the other levels are the factual: “A scientific ethnography normally establishes a privileged allegorical register it identifies as ‘theory,’ interpretation,’ or ‘explanation.’ But once all meaningful levels in a text, including theories and interpretations, are recognized as allegorical, it becomes difficult to view one of them as privileged, accounting for the rest. Once this anchor is dislodged, the staging and valuing of multiple allegorical registers, or ‘voices,’ becomes an important area of concern for ethnographic writers” (103).
Shostak’s Nisa has 3 registers of allegory, which do not blend together but remain as three strands within the work: description of a !Kung woman, questioning about what it means to be a woman (humanist project, looking for commonality), and the dialogical relationship between ethnographer and subject (103-4). The second two registers are particularly intertwined in Clifford’s description. He discusses the three registers:
1) First register is description of Nisa to try and describe the culture, though Clifford critiques that there is a tension in how the particular is meant to speak for the general. Shostak struggles between thinking Nisa is idiosyncratic and that she is generalizable. This attempt at generalizing, to be scientific, is in turn in tension with the personal and intersubjective nature of the other two registers.
2) Clearly dialogical, shaped by the scholar as well as the subject. Nisa’s reflections are organized into a full life-span. Creating autobiography is non-natural, requires organization into a narrative that is not a given. Shostak intervenes to organize, frame transcripts, etc. The narration makes “‘human’ sense” (106).
3) Shostak’s account of her experience in the field. Shostak told her interlocutors that she wanted to better understand womanhood in her own culture by understanding its meaning in theirs. Nisa speaks to Shostak like she is giving her advice, it takes part in a feminist discourse of shared female experience (such as oppression) (107). There are moments where Shostak herself acts as the older, advice giver to younger girls of the tribe. “Ethnography gains subjective ‘depth’ through the sorts of roles, reflections, and reversals dramatized here. The writer, and her readers, can be both young (learning) and old (knowing)” (108).
“Anthropological fieldwork has been represented as both a scientific ‘laboratory’ and a personal ‘rite of passage.’ The two metaphors capture nicely the discipline’s impossible attempt to fuse objective and subjective practices” (109). There is a new recognition of intersubjectivity and contingency in fieldwork (from projection, dialogue, translation), which changes the mode of authority. This raises problems for generalizing from the particular, which is more recognized to be personal as opposed to an example of what is common in a collective (109). The “scientific” generalized stuff now seems to be “just one level of allegory” (109).
Clifford now turns to the second part of his argument: that the textual form of ethnography is also allegorical. This argument is couched in a discussion of a pattern of allegories, the “ethnographic pastoral”:
There are multiple ways to read, and critics like De Man argue that to suggest a dominant narrative or metaphor is to impose a limit on an open-ended interpretive process. Clifford suggests, however, that there aren’t limitless readings, but a limited number of plausible readings based on historical moment (110). Clifford recognizes a pattern that has become prominent in ethnography, which he wishes to critique, a political and ethical task. This allegory, or pattern of allegories, is the “ethnographic pastoral” (110).
Clifford turns to Michelle Rosaldo’s argument that ethnography is stuck in a teleological framework, where the “simple” culture is studied to shed light on the West (110). This is particularly true for research objects that are presented as ever present, not historical—people who are presented as trapped in the “ethnographic present.” “This synchronic suspension effectively textualizes the other, and gives the sense of a reality not in temporal flux, not in the same ambiguous, moving historical present that includes and situates the other, the ethnographer, and the reader”—this is what Johannes Fabian called “allochronic” and has been popular in 20th century scientific ethnography (111). Clifford illustrates his point with Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer, which presents its subjects as “the cultural islands out of time” that seems “prelapsarian” and uncorrupted by the Fall (111). Thus the Nuer become “lost qualities, textually recovered” (112).
He discusses the prevalence of ethnographic writing about “the vanishing primitive” (112). “Ethnography’s disappearing object is, then, in a significant degree, a rhetorical construct legitimating a representational practice: ‘salvage’ ethnography in its widest sense. The other is lost, in disintegrating time and space, but saved in the text” (112).
Clifford questions that cultures are vanishing because of change and that the ethnographer needs to come in and save the authentic culture by recording it (113). Though these ideas are less popular than they once were, the idea of salvage is built into the ethnographic project, which involves textualization (113). The allegory of salvage continues as long as the ethnographer sees himself as inscribing the culture into a stable written form as opposed to taking part in dialogue or transcription (113).
Clifford then contextualizes the Western tradition of the pastoral, discussing Raymond William’s The Country and the City, which traces “responses to social dislocation and change” from antiquity, including a pattern of mourning the loss of the authentic. The pattern is a constant critical nostalgia, looking back to better times, with the primary time being Eden, and recognizing an alternative to the present (113-4). George Eliot’s novels, which look back a generation, are another example. Clifford notes that the look back to a “passing reality, ‘traditional life’” is also what the ethnographer does (114). The ethnographic version of the pastoral expands the pastoral beyond the narrative of the West to include the primitives societies that are “constantly yielding to progress” (114-115). Clifford asks what the ethnographic possibilities would be if the pastoral allegory with the constant pushing of the present into the past were replaced with a vision of other societies as part of a future (115).
To affect change to the ethnographic:
Beyond the pastoral allegory of loss being reevaluated, the connection between the written and the ethnographic would have to be reevaluted: “For allegories of salvage are implied by the very practice of textualization that is generally assumed to be at the core of cultural description. Whatever else an ethnography does, it translates experience into text” (115). Each ethnography enacts the oralàwriting transition (115), and in this, there is a strange mixture of death and live: “The text embalms the events as it extends its ‘meaning’” (116). The very act of writing echoes the pastoral theme: “The text is a record of something enunciated, in a past” (116).
Clifford shares a parable of an ethnographer who deals with a chief of a tribe which had been studied by an earlier ethnographer; the chief refers to the earlier ethnography to answer the present ethnographer’s questions. Clifford wants this to show that there is no longer a smooth flow form oral to written, but there is transcription from text to text not just inscription of the written (116). There are new ethnographic conditions, where the ethnographer is not the first to transfer the culture into writing yet ethnographers tend to discredit earlier work and ignore the textual; also informants are now oftentimes literate, so they too can work to inscribe and transcribe their culture; there is also no longer the power dynamic of part of the globe which is literate and part which is not, which has also helped to open eyes to alternative forms of writing that cultures have undertaken for a while. The challenge posed by Derrida is what Clifford sees to be the greatest challenge: writing expanded past alphabetic to things like gestures or other marks (117). Since all cultures have some means to textualization, “in Derrida’s epistemology, the writing of ethnography cannot be seen as a drastically new form of cultural inscription, as an exterior imposition on a ‘pure,’ un written oral/aural universe. The logos is not primary and the gramme is mere secondary representation” (118). The people of the culture are “always already writing themselves” thus demoting the special status of the ethnographer (118). Clifford thus points out how pervasive the challenge to the allegory textualization is (118-9). Referencing Geertz, Clifford explains, “If the ethnographer reads culture over the native’s shoulder, the native also reads over the ethnographer’s shoulder as he or she writes each cultural description” (119). This adds a level of constraint on the ethnographer, for the native can now challenge the ethnographer’s authority (119).
Clifford argues that we should not abandon allegory, but resist the “impulse” to make the transient permanent and to “open…ourselves to different histories” (119).
Conclusions:
The factual and allegorical narrative cannot be separated; there is no pre-referential fact (119).
How a work is read is uncontrollable, but there are limited readings depending on context (120)
“A recognition of allegory inescapably poses the political and ethical dimensions of ethnographic writing. It suggests that these be manifested, not hidden” (120).
Recognizing allegory leads to fruitful new ways to read ethnography, opening reader to new forms of analysis and recognition of different strands within the text and to temporal relations (120-1)
Recognizing allegory makes us take responsibility for how we construct the other and thereby ourselves (121)

Victor Turner: The Ritual Process

Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process is divided into two sections. The first half deals with the structure and the role of symbolism in Ndembu rituals, and the second, forming the main theoretical argument of the book, meditates on the relationship between the concepts of liminality and communitas that arise from his analysis of rituals, and their codependence with the concept of structure. Briefly stated, communitas and structure are two opposed yet mutually necessary modes of social life: the concept of structure is defined as “society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of ‘more’ or ‘less.’” (96) Communitas, on the other hand, is defined as “society as an unstructured or rudimentary structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders.” (96) For Turner, societies must maintain a balance between communitas and structure in order to survive, generally taking the form of a cycle where structure is temporarily suspended during rituals that reignite a sense of communitas in various ways depending on the type of ritual. I’ll fill in these definitions soon, but this is the general direction his philosophical musings take.
Victor Turner’s understanding of ritual relies heavily on the theoretical framework developed by Arnold van Gennep in his 1909 book The Rites of Passage, so it’s helpful to lay this out up front. Van Gennep articulates a tripartite analytic framework describing the structure and progression of rituals:
1) Separation from everyday activities, social relations, and/or cultural conditions, undertaken as a response to some crisis, either in an individual’s life or in the life of a society, where the individual or group undergoing the ritual suspends their involvement in everyday social life.
2) Liminality, the result of the exit from normal social life and the entrance into a threshold phase where everyday notions of identity, time, and space are suspended. During the liminal phase, ritual participants engage in mimetic activity reenacting the crisis motivating the ritual. In so doing, the structures of everyday social life are both given a mythical explanation and justification and also challenged, or to use van Gennep’s terms, in the liminal phase “structure” and “anti-structure” are simultaneously enacted.
3) Reintegration or reincorporation of the individual or group back into normal social life, but more deeply than before. Having confronted both the justification for and the problems arising from social structures and practices, ritual practitioners reenter society with a clearer understanding of the norms and obligations incumbent upon them, and of their role in society.
Crises are brought about by “every change of place, state, social position and age,” (van Gennep, quoted in Turner, 94) undergone either by an individual (eg. coming-of-age, marriage, assumption of a social or political station, death, etc.), a group within society (eg. a birth or death within the family), or the society as a whole (eg. war, the harvest, changes in leadership, etc.). For van Gennep, all rituals share this general structure, which effectively integrates individual life processes and social events into a unified framework that fosters social stability and cultural vitality.
Chapters 1 and 2: “Planes of Classification in a Ritual of Life and Death,” and “Paradoxes of Twinship in Ndembu Ritual”
These first two chapters are mostly dedicated to in-depth analyses of particular Ndembu rituals, so I decided to ignore the argumentative and descriptive structure of these chapters and focus on his main theoretical points. If you want more detail on Ndembu rituals, ask me:
The Importance of Studying Religious Rituals in Social Science – Turner criticizes just about every social scientist he can think of for either ignoring religious ritual entirely in their analysis or engaging in inadequate analysis of it. Social scientists studying Central Africa have altogether ignored the central importance of rituals in understanding tribal societies, while other anthropologists, even those who dedicated their lives to studying religion (some of the highlights of this list include Lévi-Strauss, Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Freud, and Weber) and recognize its importance in social life, explain (and ultimately explain away) religious rituals by regarding them as “the product of psychological or sociological causes of the most diverse and even conflicting types, denying to them any preterhuman origin.” (4) Turner argues that this mode of explanation is implicitly theological, interpreting “primitive” religions as reflections of socioeconomic or psychological factors. Turner, on the other hand, recognizes that “religious beliefs and practices are something more than ‘grotesque’ reflection or expressions of economic, political, and social relationships; rather are they coming to be seen as decisive keys to the understanding of how people think and feel about those relationships, and about the natural and social environments in which they operate.” (6) A society’s religion is its repository of values and ways of interpreting not only their individual and social lives, but also their universal relationship with nature.
The Practice of Ethnography – Turner also criticizes ethnographers who engage in field work solely to conduct quantitative studies on social practices. Turner begins studying the Ndembu tribe in this way, but consistently feels that “I was always on the outside looking in, even when I became comfortable in my use of the vernacular. […] Eventually, I was forced to recognize that if I wanted to know what even a segment of Ndembu culture was really about, I would have to overcome my prejudice against ritual and start to investigate it.” (7) In order to understand how Ndembu culture functions and what its meaning is, Turner realizes that he has to discover what a ritual’s “movements and words mean to them,” and so engages in a series of interviews with the local Chief Ikelenge, and both ritual specialists and ordinary practitioners to discover their interpretations of each aspect of a ritual. Turner looks for patterns and consistencies between different accounts, and eventually is able to articulate the “standardized hermeneutics of Ndembu culture,” the ways the Ndembu people understand their ritual and the meaning they attribute to it (9).
Rituals as Responses to Social Crises – A ritual is required either when a social norm is violated or when different social norms come into conflict with each other. For instance, female infertility is explained in Ndembu culture by the contradiction between two obligations incumbent upon married women: to stay with and please her husband, and to honor her maternal village, as the Ndembu practice matrilineal descent. Infertility is understood as the wife’s obeying her husband to too great an extent and moving away from her maternal village, thereby angering the spirits of her maternal forebears who consider their daughter to have abandoned them, and who thus curse her with the physical malady of infertility. The Isoma ritual resolves this crisis between social obligations placed upon the wife by enacting a healing ceremony where the woman (a) proceeds away from an ikela (hole in the ground) representing death and witchcraft and towards an ikela representing health, restoring her fertility. The woman in this procession (b) walks from one ikela to the other through a ditch in the ground, representing the power of death and her ancestors’ shades, and ends with her rising out of the burrow, representing her liberation from the power of her forebears. Around the burrow on the left are female adepts (past Isoma veterans) and on the right male adepts (men whose wives are Isoma veterans), and the woman in her procession (c) walks between these groups, representing her balancing of the contradictory obligations placed upon her by her male husband and her female ancestors.
Symbols – The hermeneutics of rituals are expressed in symbols. Turner defines symbols expansively as the “basic building-blocks, the ‘molecules,’ of ritual,” (14) since in Ndembu ritual “almost every article used, every gesture employed, every song or prayer, every unit of space and time, by convention stands for something other than itself,” and the Ndembu practitioners are well aware of this (15) A symbol for Turner has three separate but closely related properties:
1) Condensation – one concept represents many things at the same time. For instance, in the Ndembu Isoma ritual, the binary of red rooster/white hen represents oppositions such as death/life, blood/water, hot/cold, while a white rooster/red hen represents female/male, novices/adepts, ghosts/living, among others. These associations need not be logically related, and can even be contradictory.
2) Unification of disparate referents – built on the property of condensation, symbols are able to represent concepts drawn from different “domains of social experience and ethical classification.” (52) So again, the opposition white rooster/red hen can simultaneously represent concepts drawn from sexual, political, familial, and individual growth experiences.
3) Polarization of meaning – A symbol’s different referents unite concepts drawn from (a) physiological and (b) social and moral experience. For instance, the mudyi tree represents breast milk and matriliny, while the mukula tree represents blood from circumcision and masculine maturity. Symbols thus “unite the organic with the sociomoral order, proclaiming their ultimate religious unity, over and above conflicts between and within these orders.” (52)
If the organization of symbols in terms of binary oppositions sounds a bit Lévi-Straussian, it should. A single symbol (ie. red hen) represents a host of concepts from different spheres of experience and forms of classification, organizing the totality of social experience into a unified (if sometimes paradoxical) schema, lending it coherence and intelligibility. Symbols are organized in terms of binary pairs that also organize thought.
There are, though, a few key differences between Turner and Lévi-Strauss. First, Turner argues that symbols and binary oppositions only appear “as the confrontation of sensorily perceptible objects,” rather than that of axioms or concepts that underlie the meaning of objects (42). In other words, while for Lévi-Strauss binary oppositions are oppositions between concepts that transcend any given application in a ritual or myth but act as their organizing principles almost as a set of unwritten rules unconsciously circumscribing a culture’s thought-patterns, for Turner oppositions between concepts are revealed within ritual contexts by the ways different objects are interpreted and understood when placed in relation to each other. Symbols are physical objects or actions that represent different aspects of daily life and give them coherence as elements of a unified framework within the context of a myth. Second, Lévi-Strauss argues that symbols are solely cognitive classifications for experiences, whereas Turner believes that symbols have an emotional or evocative aspect as well. The emotions encountered in people’s life-experiences are evoked by and channeled into ritual symbols, such that not only can people experience joy in a ritual, but also so that negative emotions such as hate, fear, and grief, can be given a safe outlet that doesn’t threaten actual social unrest. Therefore, “the whole person, not just the Ndembu ‘mind,’ is existentially involved in the life or death issues” symbols represent (43).
Ritual Space – Once practitioners enter the liminal phase of ritual, ordinary conceptions of space are abandoned. Ritual space is organized by binary oppositions articulated along three axes: longitudinal (backwards/forwards), latitudinal (right/left), and altitudinal (up/down). As seen above in the Isoma ritual, each spatial axis represents a different element of the actions required to resolve the wife’s crisis, and symbols have different meanings when placed along each different axis. For instance, the white hen/red rooster in the latitudinal axis represents women/men, in the altitudinal axis it represents ancestral spirits/living people. Symbols gain their multivocality through representing aspects of each spatial axis, and space is organized in rituals in terms of the symbols lying along each axis.
Chapter 3: “Liminality and Communitas”
As individuals enter into rituals, they become “liminal entities,” and thus gain special attributes while losing their normal identities. First, liminal entities lose their identity as defined by social structure: they have “no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system – in short, nothing that may distinguish them from their fellow neophytes or initiands.” (95) Liminal entities have no social identity, but are rather united as equals within the ritual context as uniquely lowly beings who are utterly obedient to their ritual instructors or masters. This is especially noticeable in situations where liminal entities are undergoing a transition towards a higher social status. In Ndembu chieftain rituals, for instance, the future chieftain is, the night before his accession to his new office, portrayed as a slave and is submitted to the abuse and arbitrary power of the entire community, forced to undergo violent and humiliating abuse. This treatment, far from being a gratuitous display of hatred by the weak, in fact has a formative function. The future chieftain in his liminal state learns the true meaning of arbitrary authority and abuse of power, and in suffering this violence displays the self-mastery and control over vicious characteristics such as greed, pride, and anger, required to perform his duties as a good ruler. Thus, following van Gennep’s formula, the liminal entity is reintegrated into social life with a deeper understanding of his obligations as chieftain.
Second, united as abased equals, liminal beings also gain a peculiar status recognized as both sacred and dangerous. As they leave social structure, liminal beings encounter each other for the first time as social equals, stripped of the social identities which previously divided them, “giving recognition to an essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society.” (97) This bond between equals without status, what Turner terms communitas, is often associated with a sacred status attained by individuals who “(1) fall in the interstices of social structure, (2) are on its margins, or (3) occupy its lower rungs.” (125) Communitas is constructed by individuals who are marginal or weak figures in society, and whose special social bond hence falls outside of normal social relations. This gives rise to a society’s recognition of communitas and the liminal beings out of whom communitas is constructed as simultaneously sacred and dangerous. Liminal beings possess what Turner calls “the mystical powers of the weak,” or magical powers and sacred potency attributed to those who lack social influence and political power (109). Turner notes a number of instances across cultures where marginal or weak figures such as strangers, foolish people, women, millenarians, and even hippies, while socially separated and even at times ostracized, possess peculiar spiritual capacities and powers. At the same time, however, as these groups fall outside of social characterizations and structures, the rest of society looks upon them with suspicion and fear, such that liminal states are surrounded with “prescriptions, prohibitions, and conditions.” (109) Referencing Mary Douglas, Turner argues that liminal entities and the communitas that arises around them challenge social boundaries and classifications, thus being labeled “polluting” or “dangerous” and become surrounded by restrictions and taboos strictly regulating where and when communitas can occur.
Chapter 4: “Communitas: Model and Process”
Here Turner describes in full the opposition between structure and communitas. Structure and communitas are two models of social organization, normatively describing opposed forms of social identity and practice of social interaction. Structure as a model describes society as a “system of social positions,” based on socioeconomic or political status (131). Individual identity within structure is based on an individual’s status, role, or occupation within society, along with their standing relative to other individuals within society. In essence, structure describes society as it normally exists in light of socioeconomic and political realities, with divided segments or hierarchies that separate individuals from one another and give them regulated and mutually recognized identities. Structure’s model of regulated identity is complemented by regulated forms of relationships that exist between individuals. Certain acceptable forms of interaction are prescribed for relationships between peers and between superiors and inferiors that delimit and regulate social interaction and exchange.
Communitas, on the other hand, describes relationships “between concrete, historical, idiosyncratic individuals.” (131) In communitas, individuals lack social identities and therefore confront each other as concrete, unique, and equal individuals. Without a regulated form of social identity, communitas also lacks a regulated form of human interaction. Turner makes use of the spontaneous form of interaction and community Martin Buber describes in his book I and Thou. Whereas structure is governed by norms and institutions, in communitas individuals are engaged in a “direct, immediate, and total confrontation of human identities.” (132) However, communitas is also fragile. As a spontaneous and immediate form of social organization, communitas eventually succumbs to the pragmatic requirements of social life, thereby becoming structure once again. Turner therefore differentiates three types of communitas:
1) Existential or Spontaneous Communitas – this is the communitas that arises among concrete individuals when social structure is abandoned, generally within liminal situations such as rituals.
2) Normative Communitas – communitas that has evolved into a type of social system due to “the influence of time, the need to mobilize and organize resources, and the necessity for social control among the members of the group in pursuance of these goals,” (132) but still retains the influence and purpose of achieving existential communitas. This often occurs when sectarian schisms separate originally unified movements, prompting individuals to exert top-down control over the different sub-movements, creating social structures. Two examples Turner gives of this history are the Franciscan Order and Caitanya’s Vaisnava bhakti movement.
3) Ideological Communitas – utopian models for societies that permit permanent communitas. Utopias are visions of social structures that embody the “optimal social conditions under which such experiences [of communitas] might be expected to flourish and multiply.” (132) These utopian communities are very rarely implemented (one example he gives is that of groups organized around an apocalyptic revelation), and when they are they invariably fail due to the base necessities of replicating biological and social life within a community (as a professor once said to me, “all utopias fail when deciding who has to take out the trash and who has to clean the bathroom”).
The ideal type of communitas is existential communitas, the state where liminal beings confront each other without such dividing factors as social position, private property, rank, age, often times sex or race, instead embodying universal principles of justice, solidarity, and equality before a deity. Individuals therefore exist in a state of perfect equality, giving rise to community based on Buber’s “essential We,” or “a community of several independent persons, who have a self and self-responsibility.” (Buber, quoted in Turner, 137) There is an existential aspect to Buber’s We: as social structures are abandoned, the interests and divided consciousness of individuals under structure also departs, allowing for individuals to experience the independent being of each other. Individuals no longer recognize each other in terms of themselves and their own identities (eg. I am your boss; you are thus my underling, etc.), but rather allow others’ uniqueness to present itself independently. For Turner, this We relationship between equal individuals who appreciate and respect each other’s uniqueness is the quintessential social experience arising out of liminal states.
The necessities of practical existence, however, inevitably assert themselves, forcing even individuals within conditions of communitas to recreate a form of structure. From the perspective of existential communitas, this necessity appears as a degeneration, a sliding of ideal spontaneous community back into regulated and structured social life, but Turner suggests that communitas also exercises a restorative or regenerative function upon the individuals within these shifting forms of community. In communitas individuals experience ecstasy, standing “outside of the totality of structural positions one normally occupies in a social system.” (138) Turner argues that communitas and structure are best conceived as opposed but alternating phases in a functioning society’s life. During periods where communitas predominates, individuals liberate themselves from the difficulties of living within social structures, thus experiencing power and joy with a magical quality, giving rise to symbolic thought, art, and religion. In other words, the generalized social bond existing between individuals during periods of communitas provides vitality to a culture and restores the sense of unity that makes possible social life. Both structure and communitas require each other to exist: without communitas, structure’s regulated patterns of social interaction and inequality eventually deteriorate and give rise to tensions between groups, and without structure communitas cannot reproduce life. Turner therefore concludes that “spontaneous communitas is nature in dialogue with structure,” or that the two models of social existence are required in order to maintain social life (140).
Chapter 5: “Humility and Hierarchy: The Liminality of Status Elevation and Reversal”
To return to some of the themes elucidated in Chapters 1 and 2, Turner argues that the communitas created within rituals is a way of revitalizing social structures in light of a crisis they experience. For instance, in the Ndembu Isoma ritual, communitas is created in the process of healing the wife’s infertility, allowing her to reestablish normal social relations with both her husband and her matrilineal village and ancestors. Contradictions within structure are thereby resolved through the ritual enactment of the tension. Ritual, however, can also serve as a platform to critique social structure, as well as providing an outlet for the resentments that build up as a result of inequalities. In no case is social structure actually threatened, but liminality can suspend social structure in certain ways that ameliorate the negative aspects of structure. Turner therefore differentiates two types of liminality and the rituals in which they are found:
1) Liminality that characterizes rituals of status elevation – a ritual subject becomes a liminal entity when irreversibly raising their position within social structure.
2) Liminality that characterizes rituals of status reversal – collective calendrical rituals that generally correspond to some point in the seasonal cycle are characterized by a reversal of social relations, where those who normally hold low status within social structure become for a time authorities over those who are normally superior, who in turn have to accept ritual degradation.
An instance of a ritual of status elevation we have already seen is the Ndembu chieftain ritual, where the man who is about to become chieftain must submit to communal abuse. Individuals who are undergoing critical points of transition in their biographies, including birth, puberty, marriage, death, entry into certain organizations, and political status elevation, are subjected to ritual abasement. For individuals to raise their status, Turner argues that in ritual they must become “some kind of human prima materia, divested of specific form and reduced to a condition that, although it is still social, is without or beneath all accepted forms of status. The implication is that for an individual to go higher on the status ladder, he must go lower than the status ladder.” (170) As we saw earlier, the point is that individuals, when raising social position, gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of that position by confronting the possible abuses of that condition (eg. the Chieftain experiencing the abuse of power), thereby gaining a deeper understanding of that transition’s ethical significance.
Calendrical rites are often associated with points on the harvest cycle, when the society undergoes a crisis regarding whether it will be able to reproduce biological life and thus social structure as well. At the time when social structure is reproduced, the inequalities and tensions latent within that structure are most keenly felt, so a kind of ritual release is used to allow for social life to continue. Turner uses an argument of Anna Freud’s to demonstrate how rituals of status reversal have this releasing function. The weak mimic those who cause them fear as a defense mechanism against the object of their fear, such that they are “unconsciously identifying themselves with the very powers that deeply threaten them, and, by a species of jujitsu, enhancing their own powers by the very power that threatens to enfeeble them.” (174) Children, for instance, mimic their parents, particularly the punitive aspects of their personality, as a way of domesticating the fear their authoritarian parents inspire.
In rituals of status reversal, then, social underlings mimic their superiors as a way of domesticating the resentment they feel over their conditions of inequality, using a panoply of symbolic devices such as masks and animal representations of their superiors to mock them and/or deny their humanity, thereby debasing them. At the same time, the inferiors also engage in illicit behavior, temporarily mimicking their superiors in an exaggerated fashion to symbolically balance the normal hierarchies that divide societies. In so doing, inferiors gain the “mystical powers of the weak” described above to temporarily balance social hierarchies, while releasing their resentments. The essential aspects of social inequalities, however, are not challenged. Social rank is reversed, not eliminated, such that the idea of hierarchy is retained even within ritual, while the caricatured representation of the strong and the ritual enactment of illicit behavior reaffirms “the reasonableness of everyday culturally predictable behavior between the various estates in society,” thereby recreating the roles and social relations involved in structure (176).
In rituals of status reversal, a type of communitas is created not only between different groups of inferiors, but throughout the society. By mocking the superiors, the inferiors bring the strong down to their level at the bottom of the social ladder, causing the superiors to “merge with the masses, or even to be symbolically at least regarded as the servants of the masses. […] For here too there is not only reversal but leveling, since the incumbent of each status with an excess of rights is bullied by one with a deficiency of rights. What is left is a kind of social average, or something like the neutral position in a gear box, from which it is possible to proceed in different direction and at different speeds in a new bout of movement.” (202) Rituals of status reversal essentially wipe the social slate clean, allowing for normal social hierarchies to continue without the tensions that build up as a result of them.
Conclusion:
(Note: A lot of the last two chapters are filled with different examples Turner gives of rituals embodying the types of liminality and communitas he has been describing. For space purposes, I haven’t included these, but if you want some, ask me.)