Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

MYTH

The dilemma of anthropology: the study of phantom realities

As Shweder has argued (1991b:52–6), the anthropological dilemma is that we study phantom realities, other peoples’ creations and constructions of reality. We look at their culture, their ritual, their myths. All are understood by us as belonging to the world of the imaginary. Like narrative, and as narrative, they are fictive.Words, song, ritual and the postulates of myth, all are to be viewed with mistrust, and indeed as illusory in contrast to the real, objective world of physical nature (we know that the rain which fertilizes the crops is water, not the urine of the creator god). As Shweder notes, the paradox of our work is that a large part of our task is to translate for our readers the world as the ‘native’ understands it. The humanist, Collingwood, taught us (1940) that the creation of skilful history requires the historian to make the effort to understand the minds of other times. Like good Collingwood historians, our chore is to get into other people’s heads in order to perceive the universe as they understand it. At the same time, we are also Western academic specialists, who have inherited the Enlightenment materialist world-view. The great divide in Western theory of nature and culture ever raises its head. In the materialist example, nature is real, objectively knowable, while tradition (because of its subjectivity and diversity) is unnatural, and therefore unreal. One route that has been taken by anthropologists to escape the materialist predicament has been to reduce the cultural to the ‘hard’ facts of the natural. With this solution, we have the assumption that demons and gods have no relation to reality, while, for instance, laws of thought (which are of nature) are real, and therefore can be objectively known—the Lévi-Straussian solution.

It is this materialist world-view that creates real problems for the project of anthropology (cf. Shweder 1991b). Our view conflicts with the one we study. Another people’s interpretation is that they are presenting to us their own true postulates of reality (rain really is the supreme deity urinating). For the Piaroa of the Venezuelan rain forest, what we call ‘myths’ belong to a genre of what they call ‘old talk’, or ‘before-time speech’, to be contrasted to the ‘new talk’ of today. ‘Old talk’ is true talk, and the richer the language of the myth-chanter, the more complex the metaphoricity, the truer it is—and the more powerful. The Piaroa express their strong conviction, not only in the existence of spirits and gods, but also in the efficacy of these beings. The chanter’s intention is, through ‘mythopoetics’, to display knowledge of cosmology, of the cosmogonic events of creation-time history, and in so doing to

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cure illness and prevent it—and also to generate the fertility of people and the land and forest around them. The chanter of myths therefore demonstrates a deep knowledge of ontological matters, and also considerable power in dealing with them (Overing 1990, 1995). The methodological issue for anthropologists is how to reconcile these two contradictory concerns, that of translating as they understand, and that of how we understand (cf. Shweder 1991b).

Roy Wagner (1991) challenges anthropology to rid itself of the divisions of subjectivity and objectivity, to refuse the politics of doubt inherited from Enlightenment writers that leads us to distrust other people‘s certainties. As Wagner asks, how do we verify a poem? Or the design on a canoe paddle? How can we understand other people’s point of view and experience in the world if our gaze is filtered through what we believe is ‘the cool, aseptic skepticism of a scientist contemplating a world of stubborn fact’ (Wagner 1991:40)? For the Piaroa, the postulates of their ‘old talk’ are not only illuminating of everyday experience (Overing 1995), but they are also knowledge about the world. It is on this point especially that the materialist stance works against the anthropological task of understanding the judgement of knowledge made by others who patently hold different premises about existence in the world than those acknowledged by materialists.

Some new directions: from logos back to mythos

Myth and the poetics of everyday life

There is an increasing interest within anthropology to rectify the deletions and excesses of high functionalism and structuralism, along with their materialist-cum-rationalist world-view. The trend is to stress the foremost importance of understanding cultural expression, including the mythic, from indigenous points of view. As Malinowski observed (1926:18), for people who engage with mythopoetics, myth is ‘reality lived’. Many anthropologists now wish to understand the context of the use of myths in everyday life, their performative value as entertainment, as pedagogy, cure and explanation—and as evidence of knowledge and a rich poetics (cf. Brady 1991a;Turner and Bruner 1986). Anthropologists have only recently begun to pay attention to the central role of the poetic, performative side of myth in everyday life. In much of the modernist discourse of anthropology, where attention was focused upon grand theories of structure, society, or thought, there was a clear demotion of the status of the everyday. The land of the daily life, that drab place where women cook and babies cry, was of no consequence

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(Overing 1999). In contrast, a prevalent stance today is to recognize the salient connection of myth, poetics and aesthetics to everyday lived experiences (e.g. Witherspoon 1977; Brady 1991b; Guss 1989; Overing 1989, 1996b).

The writings of Dell Hymes (1981) on the poetics of the mythic narration of Native Americans are a ground-breaking endeavour for the enterprise of understanding everyday poetics. He unfolds the wellelaborated poetics of Native North American narrations, a poetical form neither recognized nor expected by anthropology in the past (‘primitives’ cannot have poetics!). His methodology is one that he frankly labels as ‘structuralist’, but it is a formalism that only hints at a precedent of French hue. In Hymes’s hands meaning is carefully contextualized to capture its culturally specific values, ones that are also attached to the individual narrator‘s style and intent. Style, individual performance and the dialogics of performance, entertainment value and a moral point of view—all of these elements are necessary to understand the grammar, the co-variation of form and meaning within the poetics of Chinook mythic narration. Here, context and performance, as in Greek mythos, are essential to meaning.

Nowadays more anthropologists are asking about the role of myths in the framing of much of daily practice, and about the relation of the poetics of myth to indigenous understanding of the everyday. In other words, the emphasis is more upon the conscious use of myths through which basic (conscious) postulates of reality are also expressed, and as such made constitutive of everyday practice. At the same time we are questioning (as did Lévi-Strauss) a representational view of myth, the idea that there is any one-to-one relation between the myth and social structure. Myths and mythic narration are more complicated than that, in that they are often more a reflection upon reality than a reflection of it. As the ancient Greeks understood, myths have the capability of delivering a shock, they inspire laughter and tears, all toward the end of providing greater insight. Roy Wagner suggests that mythic narration is a creative way of standing outside of convention. In other words, myths play an innovative role in dislocating conventional orientations through a process he refers to as ‘obviation’ (Wagner 1978:255).

Indigenous knowledges, and the reality of the really made up

Many anthropologists, such as Taussig (1993), are today looking at the reality of the really made up. It has become, for instance, steadily more obvious to Amazonian specialists that they can understand everyday behaviour of Amazonian peoples only by also learning how they

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understand and use the mythic. In other words, indigenous judgements are at last being taken seriously. The argument of Lévi-Strauss that the reality postulates of myth have no relevance to the real world refers to that actuality which is known and charted by the natural sciences.There is little reason why we should expect the two to coincide—the indigenous and the scientist’s realities, since we could not but agree that in indigenous metaphysics many of the basic propositions about modes of being in the world are at variance with many of those assumed by biologists and physicists. However, do we need then to conclude that indigenous peoples in their mythology have got it ‘wrong’? Our current dilemma is just this uncertainty about what it is that we wish to include in any real world. This is in contrast to the perspective of Lévi-Strauss who was more certain about such matters.

Nevertheless, current received wisdom more or less accepts two basic ‘rules’ for mythic interpretation: the acceptance that (1) myths express, evoke, explore and deal with, if not directly at least consciously, a people’s reality postulates about the world, and (2) mythic truths pertain more to a moral, evaluative, or significant universe of meanings than to a ‘natural’ one (in the sense of the physical unitary world of our scientists) (Overing 1995). Increasingly, anthropologists are also accepting a third dictum, namely, that knowledge is not tied solely to reason and the material world of natural law. Rather, there are many types of knowledges: among others there are empirical, rhetorical and metaphoric, social, moral and aesthetic knowledges (cf. Goodman 1978). It is time that the power of actors thinking as social and moral beings is accepted as knowledge about the world of human sociality (Overing 1985b). For those educated within a Western tradition, myth is a strange place indeed to discover ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’. Nevertheless, even the most absurd of happenings, at least within Amazonian myths, has its moral and ontological implications for what it means to be a human alive today on this earth (see e.g. Overing 1985d, 1997 on the Piaroa myth telling of the day they lost their blue crystal anuses and genitals— and thereby acquired social knowledge).

Amazonian myths typically often stress modes of power. Since myth concerns the adventures and battles of heroes or gods constructing the universe in which we live, it inevitably pertains to the mighty forces of creation and destruction which have allowed for our particular humanity, and those of our enemies of whom we must beware. Often tales of great moral complexity, these mythic episodes deal with the multiple faces of power that relate to a people’s images of selfhood. They state sets of identity criteria for a people and a community.Thus we find that myths of identity are equally myths of alterity, or significant otherness; for to

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state identity is also to speak of difference, for example between sensual and intellectual might, or the potency of the gun versus the power of thought. The images of identity and alterity that play such an important role in myth have obvious political as well as social implication. Myths are usually expressive of particular political visions that distinguish the relative worth of an array of modes of power. In these schemes the appropriateness or monstrosity of specific modes can usually be clearly spelled out (Overing 1996a). The Piaroa myths of alterity become a means through which the narrator explores the ambiguity of the human condition. While the root metaphor for alterity in Piaroa discourse is that of ‘the cannibal other’, such an image can hardly preclude in any absolute manner the Piaroa themselves.As eaters of animal flesh, they too are predators of the jungle. In the Piaroa highly egalitarian ontology of existence, predators are the prey of their own prey.Their mythic stress is upon the human predicament itself, and thus upon the absurdities and evil as well as the positive strengths of human power.

The Piaroa, who are very attached to their myths, live within a ‘meaningful’ universe, which contrasts with the unitary, objective, universe of the Western scientist. All postulates about reality in a meaningful universe, including those about physical reality, are tied explicitly to an evaluative universe. For example, personal malevolence, for the Piaroa, is ultimately the cause of all deaths. It is normal among the tropical forest peoples of the Amazon for postulates about ‘physical reality’ to be constitutive of other postulates which are social, moral and political in scope. This is why a main concern in anthropology today is the power of actors thinking as social and moral beings, and not as physicists.

The fact that indigenous postulates about reality are consciously not decontextualized from social, political and moral concerns, and thus from everyday practice, is not a trivial matter (Overing 1995). One methodological issue, especially pertinent for our understanding of other peoples’ mythology and mythic narration, is that local meta-physical postulates about reality (e.g. sorcerers exist, as do gods; time does not flow only in a linear fashion) should not be interpreted in the same light and in accordance with the same standards as those of physics. Since they are incommensurable, have distinct concerns, and belong to separate histories, they require different standards of judgement. Or another way of putting it, is that myth and physics can equally well be treated as particular types of local knowledge. We could at the same time happily argue that one set of postulates is just as true of reality as the other. However, the expertise associated with each set deals in the main with differing aspects of reality.

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