Ship of Fools Page 9

  My objection is supported by the fact that archaeological evidence about the origins of human culture shows that self-decoration with coloured ochre, and simple shell necklaces, only started occurring around 100,000 years ago, but even this is not symbolic behaviour. (What, for example, is the symbolic meaning of a woman’s lipstick?—nothing whatever.) The first clear evidence for symbolic culture comes from Europe about 40,000 years ago with the discovery of the Hohlenstein Lion Man (Cook 2013: 28-35). This is a statue carved from mammoth tusk which is a composite image with both human and leonine features; nothing like this exists in nature, of course, so there must have been some special conceptual association between humans and lions in that culture, and how could this association have been conveyed within the community except by language? The person who carved it must therefore have lived in a linguistic culture so that the statue could be given a meaning, even if this was as simple as “This is Ug, our lion god”. Indeed, many scholars consider that it was in this period that fully grammatical language finally developed. Ritual, too, because of its many symbolic elements, can only inhabit a linguistic culture and cannot be derived from instinct as Girard attempts to do.

  We can now move on to his general theory of imitation or mimesis. There is no doubt that human culture could not exist without imitation, notably by children imitating their parents and other adults. We all have a natural tendency to imitate our peers as well, and important people or classes also have a very powerful influence on fashions of all kinds. The overall effect of imitation is therefore to create social solidarity so it seems very strange, even perverse, that Girard considers it the principal basis of conflict. A fundamental weakness in his theory is that he assumes as the typical example of mimesis that only one object is available to be desired by the model, so that he and the imitator then inevitably come into competition over it, like the two children in the earlier example. But in fact this must be very rare, and what is far more typical is imitation of something that is readily reproduced and plentiful, such as a form of dress like a New Guinea penis-sheath, or some form of bodily decoration. We may imagine a prominent hunter who puts a streak of red ochre down his nose which is then imitated by all the other hunters in the band. Since there is plenty of red ochre to go around, how could this act of mimesis possibly bring about conflict? The obvious outcome is far more likely to be solidarity—the group now has its own emblem to distinguish itself from others.

  This example also reminds us that imitation by itself is quite unable to explain culture, because someone has first to create or discover the desirable things that are imitated. The hunter who first put the red stripe down his nose, the child who first noticed the interesting toy, and the man who carved the Lion Man statue were all creators, not imitators. Societies, too, potentially have a wide range of traits which can be imitated, and this means that people must choose in some way between these possibilities. Here again, mimesis is not enough to explain the facts.

  It has also been pointed out that as well as the “acquisitive mimesis” that principally concerns Girard, there is also what can be called “beneficial mimesis”, as when individuals provide models of good behaviour, such as settling disputes, kindness, and generosity. But if there is such a thing as beneficial mimesis this means that social peace can be re-established by other means than scapegoating and sacrifice, as we know from the many ceremonial forms of peace-making in primitive society. (In fact, the more alternative forms of peace-making we can find, the weaker Girard’s whole theory becomes.)

  2. Violence and sacrifice among the Tauade of Papua New Guinea

  We can now consider the next part of Girard’s theory, which is his claim that acquisitive mimesis is actually the basic cause of violence in primitive society. The Tauade of Papua New Guinea, with whom I lived for a couple of years (Hallpike 1977), used to be one of the most violent societies on record, so the ample data which we have on this should provide us with an excellent test of Girard’s hypothesis. We find, however, that acquisitive mimesis has nothing whatever to do with violence in their society, which is most typically provoked by insult or other behaviour thought to show disrespect, theft of pigs or other property, quarrels caused by pigs destroying gardens, or by the sexual promiscuity of women. Violence from these quarrels is then exacerbated by vengeance from the relatives and friends of those involved. People feel that acting according to their feelings of the moment is quite normal and appropriate, and impulsiveness is natural for them. The following scene of village life taken from local court records is a good example of what I have in mind:

  A man called Borowai Kowe described in court how “At Kavinivi one day my uncle Avui Avila wanted to kill a pig so that he could buy a cross at the Mission store. So he asked his wife Kite to round up a pig but she refused [probably because she was angry about killing a pig for such a trivial reason]. Avui was cross, so he took some money and went down to another woman, also called Kite, and asked her for sex. She called out to her husband, Inawai, “Come quickly, Avui wants to have sex with me, make him give us a pig [in compensation for the insult].” Inawai called back, “It’s only talk. He hasn’t done anything, so let it go.” Avui then went back to his own house, and after a row with his wife hit her on the back of the neck with the flat of his axe, and she fell down unconscious. Liam the Councillor, Sipitai, and Kinau ran past my house towards Avui’s, all carrying axes, to help his wife Kite. [They were all her relatives.] Shortly afterwards I heard Avui call out, “They have killed me”, [he had been axed in the chest by Liam the Councillor]. I went inside and got my bow and knife-bladed arrow and ran up towards Avui’s house. [He was the narrator’s uncle, remember.] There I saw Avui lying on his back on the ground, and his feet were kicking wildly. Around him were Liam, and two other men. Liam saw me and came towards me; as he stepped over the fence I shot him with my knife-bladed arrow in the stomach, and he stumbled forward and hit me with his axe on the arm. I ran on, and later I heard that my relative, the boy Kuruvu, had also been killed, as well as Liam and Avui.”

  According to Girard the Tauade and other societies in this situation of extraordinary community violence should have controlled it by the sacrifice of an animal or human scapegoat, which he assumes is the only mechanism available for defusing social conflict in primitive society. Now it is perfectly true that nothing unifies a group more effectively than a threat, particularly an enemy. This may be external, but an internal enemy, a traitor, a trouble-maker, a deviant, will do as well, and the group feels better if it has someone to bully and despise. But while every group and society contains despised groups and individuals, they are not normally killed or even necessarily ill-treated, let alone selected for slaughter. Not surprisingly, it is very hard to find eyewitness accounts of human sacrifice, but the following example is nevertheless very instructive. On Tonga in the early nineteenth century it is described (Martin 1827(I): 189-91) how in the course of warfare a warrior killed a man within a sacred enclosure, which was a very serious act of sacrilege. The priest of the temple was consulted, and revealed that a child must be sacrificed to appease the anger of the god, and the victim had to be a child of a chief by one of his concubines. The chiefs met to decide which of their number must provide the sacrifice, and one of the chiefs present agreed to allow his child, a little boy of two, to be the victim. He was then ritually strangled, and his body carried round all the neighbouring temples to appease their gods as well, before it was released to be buried. This sacrifice had nothing to do with restraining the warfare itself, which continued unabated, and the general emotion among the people involved was acute fear of the anger of the gods, not the rage of communal violence. The only other sentiment recorded was sadness for the little child—“Why are the gods so cruel?”. Nothing here provides any support for Girard’s theory of the human scapegoating sacrifice restoring community harmony. Among hunter-gatherers there are cases of notorious witches, or violent homicidal troublemakers who are collectively put to death by the rest of the ba
nd, with the consent of the victim’s kin, but this, too, is rare and in any case is a perfectly rational procedure by people in fear of their lives.

  So, returning to the Tauade, how then did they restrain communal violence? They had no class of elders, of respected senior men who could mediate in disputes, and while Big Men could control who used clan land, they, too, did not act as mediators in disputes. One method of controlling the spread of violence was avoidance, when a man who had killed someone would go and live elsewhere with his relatives in another group until tempers had cooled. The other principal method was compensation paid in pigs, dogs’ teeth, or shells for homicide in particular, and for other offences like insults or property theft or damage. But where two groups had been fighting a communal pig feast was part of the procedure for re-establishing peaceful relations.

  But, Girard might say, it is well-known that pig-killing is a central feature in traditional societies of Papua New Guinea, and the sacrificial relevance of this should be obvious. So let us see what light this throws on the significance of pig-killing among the Tauade as a means of restoring social harmony. In the first place, social harmony was never fully restored because people nursed grudges for generations and could suddenly take vengeance for killings that had happened many years previously. This is why the Tauade could not live in large villages but only in small hamlets. When asked why this was so, they would always reply, “Because of our fathers”. They did have many ceremonial occasions when they killed pigs and distributed the meat, always accompanied by speeches. Traditionally it seems that the pigs were consecrated in a ritual manner when they were laid out for slaughter in the dance-yard, though this had lapsed by the time of my field-work. Girard would perhaps say that this was because the Australian Administration had imposed law and order. But it was still regarded as shameful to kill even a single pig without a formal distribution of meat and the giving of a speech and we may take this as a form of ritual consecration. For the Tauade, a great pig feast, accompanied by a dance and speeches, is kova’ karo namutu , “really big power”. Kovata has the meaning of physical energy, sorcery, and mystical power in general, and inheres in the blood in particular. It would be reasonable to think of the pig killings as releasing mystical power and so strengthening the community and its individual members. They will not kill their own pigs because, as they say, “they are like our own children”, but they are quite willing to kill each other’s and the pigs in the dance-yard are beaten to death with great ferocity, and traditionally were regarded as the enemy.

  Major pig feasts of this kind were held at intervals of some years. They were not, however, responses to any crescendo of violence between local groups but rather to the size of the pig-herd that the prospective hosts had managed to build up. It is a matter of great prestige to be able to invite enemy groups in particular to such occasions, and the whole occasion is an opportunity for the hosts to humiliate their guests by their generosity, especially in the boastful speeches by the hosts’ Big Men. The guests may have been sleeping in the dance village for weeks, being fed by their hosts, who are proud to see their own gardens devastated by the need to feed the visitors because it shows how generous they are and how productive their gardens are. The presentation of meat by the hosts after the pig killing is therefore ambivalent; in one respect it is a peace-offering, but the guests also feel humiliated by all this generosity, as they are intended to, and the hostility between guests and hosts, permanently simmering since they almost certainly have blood scores to settle, is given ritualised expression in the licence granted to guests to destroy pandanus and other trees, decorations, and gardens, and to fire arrows into or even destroy the men’s house. In the past guests with their presents of pork might be sent on their way home with showers of arrows and abuse.

  So while the ceremonial killing of pigs among the Tauade can be described as an example of sacrifice, in which the animals are treated as the enemy, it is essentially a competitive act that is simply one aspect of the eternally hostile relations between local groups. “Sacrifice” here is not a solution to communal violence in the sense of restoring amicable relations—indeed, the Tauade have no word for “peace”; it involves the slaughter of animals and not people but it is still a form of competition. There are also pig killings that are confined to the members of the local group, and their friends and relatives. Many of these are “rites of passage” held at significant points of individual life: birth, the initiation of boys, marriage, and death, or recovery from some injury or illness, or the return of a group member, and as such cannot in principle be responses to communal violence, any more than the large pig-killings are. The gifts of pork at such occasions are certainly intended as friendly acts to cement social relationships within the group and repay debts, but these occasions are also competitive displays intended to enhance the social status of those who provide the pigs. One of the marks of the “rubbish men” at the bottom of the social scale is that they are too pathetic to act as hosts on these occasions.

  3. Violence and sacrifice among the Konso of Ethiopia

  It is worth considering some comparative material from the Konso of Ethiopia here as a further test of Girard’s general theory (Hallpike 2008). They have traditionally lived in large walled towns of some thousands of members in a complex and well-organised society that is very different from the Tauade. Battles between the towns frequently occurred in the traditional society before the Ethiopian government conquered the area. Occasions for these battles had nothing to do with acquisitive mimesis, however, and seem to have been acts of disrespect, such as trespassing on hunting territory, preventing people of another town using a path, throwing stones at their goats, and similarly trivial provocations. Within towns accusations of theft or of having the evil eye, drunkenness, or disputes over field boundaries were the sorts of thing that could lead to violence, but the whole ethos encouraged peace, social harmony, and good neighbourliness.

  The Konso have a much more effective system of social control than the Tauade which, again, has nothing to do with scapegoating and sacrifice. First, everyone in a town is a member of a patrilineage whose head, the poqalla , can adjudicate disputes between its members, make land available to them, and is also a priest who sacrifices every year for the benefit of the lineage and its herds and crops. Each town is divided into wards with elected councils who can hear disputes between members of different lineages. Town members who misbehave can be publicly fined, and the disorderly arrested by the members of the warrior grade, and in the past serious thieves were executed. A man I knew who threatened to burn down his neighbour’s house was expelled from the town altogether. A body of sacred office holders, the Nama Dawra , can also intervene if there are fights between the members of different wards and throw down their staves of office between the combatants. Bravery is highly admired, however, and men who had killed enemies in battle used to be commemorated by wooden mortuary statues, and age-sets whose warriors had killed enemies were also honoured by stone pillars in their name being erected in the public squares, or moora . On the other hand, they also think that warfare and the spilling of human blood pollutes the Earth, the source of life, so that in peace-making ceremonies after battles sacrifices were made to purify the Earth. But the towns are also organized into regions, at the head of which is a regional priest who was responsible for carrying out these sacrifices, and he also had his own Nama Dawra who would try to bring battles to an end by coming between the combatants and throwing down their staves.

  Despite their various institutions for controlling violence, a number of ceremonies involving animal sacrifice are or were also performed. These were never a response to communal violence, but were dictated by the calendar or by some purely ritual necessity. The sacrificial animals are cattle, sheep, or goats, always male, and the victim is always consecrated before being killed, and the meat is always consumed by the “congregation”. A few portions are reserved for certain categories of person, like the elders or the Nama Dawra , but
unlike Papua New Guinea it is never given away as part of any system of gift exchange and hence this competitive element of Tauade feasts is absent. There is a basic belief that men’s virility is threatened by sexually mature women or by bulls. So a bull that climbs onto the upper level of a homestead, the human level or oita forbidden to animals, is a threat to the virility of the head of the household, and has to be sacrificed. Similarly, a bull might climb on to the platform in the moora where the sacred emblems, the ulahita , of the warrior grade are standing. This platform is known as the miskata , and is forbidden to sexually mature women because they threaten the virility of the warrior grade. (It is thought that women make men soft, so that warriors should be unmarried.) So a bull that climbed onto the miskata , like the oita , has to be sacrificed. In a ceremony that I observed, after being consecrated the bullock was held up in the air by a group of young warriors, and one of them stabbed it in the chest with a spear. It was essential that it cried out when it was stabbed, and when it did so they all responded with a loud ceremonial shout, clearly signifying the conquest of an enemy. After this, the meat was eaten by those present. The same procedure was followed when an ulahita was erected and a he-goat was sacrificed. On the other hand, when a bullock was sacrificed for the annual feast of a working-party, or marbara , it was consecrated in the usual way, but its throat was simply cut and it died peacefully because the aim of the feast was to reinforce the comradeship of the marbara in a communal meal, and the bullock was not seen as a threat.

  The other main type of sacrifice is performed at a certain time each year by the lineage head, the poqalla , for the health of the lineage members, their crops and animals. Here, a ram is the sacrificial animal; it is consecrated, then laid on its back on the ground, its mouth held tightly closed, and its throat cut. The meat is then eaten by all those present as an act of lineage harmony. It is said that it is a present to the Earth, just as the bullock held up and speared in the moora is a present to the Sky god. None of these sacrifices is engendered as the result of any social crisis of impending violence and disorder but are for religious purposes of one kind or another, and it is believed that social harmony itself produces harmony with nature. One can see no sign here either of acquisitive mimesis or scapegoating. The ram sacrificed by the poqalla is not treated as an enemy of any kind. The young bullock sacrificed in the moora is treated as a ceremonial enemy, but is not ill-treated beforehand, and is only an enemy in relation to the warrior grade.