Cosmos, Gods and Madmen

Frameworks in the Anthropologies of Medicine

Roland Littlewood, Rebecca Lynch, Roland Littlewood, Rebecca Lynch

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785331787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

The social anthropology of sickness and health has always been concerned with religious cosmologies: how societies make sense of such issues as prediction and control of misfortune and fate; the malevolence of others; the benevolence (or otherwise) of the mystical world; local understanding and explanations of the natural and ultra-human worlds. This volume presents differing categorizations and conflicts that occur as people seek to make sense of suffering and their experiences. Cosmologies, whether incorporating the divine or as purely secular, lead us to interpret human action and the human constitution, its ills and its healing and, in particular, ways which determine and limit our very possibilities.

Chapter 1

Why Animism Matters

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A. David Napier

Everyone who has seen visions while light-headed in fever, everyone who has ever dreamt a dream, has seen the phantoms of objects as well as of persons.

– E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture

In 1871 Sir Edward Burnett Tylor published Primitive Culture, at the time a radical book for arguing that animism represented a form of religious practice in which direct evidence of sensory experience got translated into embodied rules, norms and prohibitions about the body and its local moral world. Tylor’s evolutionary view had animism constituting a minimal definition of religion in which the belief that the soul travelled in sleep was evidence for religion’s spiritual universality.

That the body was, as Marilyn Strathern would later have it (1988), ‘partible’ – that is, divisible by and through experiencing the ‘self’ as a part of one’s behavioural world – raised developmental dilemmas for those who first engaged in studying it intellectually. This focusing on the effects of cosmology on notions of the body – and specifically on the permeability of the human body-image and body-image boundary – is why animism was then, as indeed it is now, so often thought of as an indicator of underdeveloped (or, as it were, ‘primitive’) inclinations.

In Tylor’s terms, religion evolved from less to more abstract thinking – from multiple spiritual forces to singular, omniscient ones. Just as in psychoanalysis, the baser forms of development (what Freud defined as ‘regressive’ behaviours) involved a looser body-image boundary, a problem of self-knowledge and a sense of not knowing that required transcendence for advancement and growth.

But Tylor’s views on animism remain, I would argue, as radical in our age as they were in his. In chapter 11 of Primitive Culture, Tylor lays out how animism – as a base belief that one’s local environment is moved by extranormal (i.e. ‘spiritual’) forces – constitutes a minimal definition of religion. This definition is predicated on the notion that a soul (or another spiritual entity) can be capable of an existence independent of that physical body one perceives of as ‘self’, and that such an entity (here Tylor followed Auguste Comte) constituted not only humanity’s primary mental state, but a condition of ‘pure fetishism, constantly characterized by the free and direct exercise of our primitive tendency to conceive all external bodies soever, natural or artificial, as animated by a life essentially analogous to our own, with mere differences in intensity’ (1913 [1871]: vol. 1, 477–78).

Though Tylor was later much criticized for his evolutionary perspective (where animism evolved into polydaemonism, polytheism and mono-theism), his basic argument had great merit – this being that the notion of the human soul was derived from the need to explain the, as it were, ‘real’ experience of dreaming, and that ritual activity (most dramatically, sacrifice) derived from the twin beliefs that the soul could exist outside of the body, and that it could thus function as a free medium consorting in the space between the living and the dead.

Animism, according to Tylor, depended upon an immediate contagious connection between humans and their physical environments, as well as upon the idea that the soul could be released through sleep, trance and other liminal psychic states (e.g. hallucinations). Animism was, in other words, unlike our culturally prejudiced (Judeo-Christian, Cartesian, Salvationist) versions of personhood, highly empirical. To wit (following Williams):

The Fiji people can show you a sort of natural well, or deep hole in the ground, at one of their islands, across the bottom of which runs a stream of water, in which you may clearly perceive the souls of men and women, beasts and plants, of stocks and stones, canoes and houses, and of all the broken utensils of this frail world, swimming, or rather tumbling along one over the other pell-mell into the regions of immortality. (Ibid.: vol. 1, 480)

For Tylor, it is as if the Cartesian artifice of a solipsistic, indulgent, individualism subverts the elegance and intellectual beauty of existential life. ‘Animism’ allows for the facing of experiential ‘reality’ head on – perhaps even in a way that today is only at all accessible to the so-called psychotic soul, as R. D. Laing had it. Viewed this way, animism requires a deep reshaping of psychology and philosophy in a manner reminiscent of the early phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. In Husserl’s initial attempts at hermeneutic transcendence, a basic empiricism is galvanized by a desire, as it were, to get back to the things themselves. Husserl would not have taken kindly to what anthropologists today call ‘lived experience’; he was not, like so much of contemporary anthropology, interested in how a perceived attention to high thoughts, heroic gestures and glamorous rituals could be challenged by a new and novel anthropological appropriation of the mundane and everyday.

For Husserl, assessing phenomena was not to engage in phenome-nology – as it regrettably (and quite mistakenly) is for ethnography. Once Husserl realized (as Susan Sontag much later did for metaphor) the folly of pure empiricism, he reversed his focus, recognizing that meaning was only meaningful when hermeneutically embedded. This is why phenomenology, and especially existential phenomenology, soon found its home in literature and the arts, and why reflexivity – as a theoretical practice – emerged not in ethnography but in French literary criticism. As Heidegger would later claim, the words of poets constitute the house of language, and philosophers are the guardians of that house.

Indeed, those who have tried to strip meaning of its cultural content have failed repeatedly, whether they be ethnographers focused on objectivity, postmodernists focused on individual experience or cultural theorists (such as Sontag) focused on metaphorical stigma. Time and again we see that deep meaning is carried precisely in the collective social exchanges that fuel what Mark Johnson has called the ‘nonpropositional and figurative structure of embodied imagination’ (1987: xxxv [see also Napier 2003, 2004]). Acknowledging this truth points if anywhere to the need to see poetry, art and ritual as the precise places where any social group will invest itself most thoroughly. But if you have ever had the desire to host a nice party, you will know why ritual matters.

In refining the opportunity to make meaning socially, we allow for the possibility of focused social meaning and also new growth. As David Hecht and Maliqalim Simone so aptly put it in critiquing development, ‘In their efforts to help, development workers forget, at times, that for the impoverished to survive from day to day they must ward off the hopeless reality that objectivity is constantly trying to impose upon them’ (1994: 16–17). Citing an imam from Mali, they add: ‘Change must discover unexpected reasons for its existence; it too, must be surprised at what it brings about. Only in the tension between the old and the new does the elaboration of a moral practice occur’ (ibid.: 17). And it is, of course, in art, in music, in dance and in ritual – that is in so many non-narrative places – where those nonpropositional structures of embodied imagination lead to the invention of new moral practices. In such nonpropositional spaces, we discover socially and collectively new ways of reframing the hegemony of internationalized categories of meaning – be they diagnostic, humanitarian or just plain colonial.

What Tylor sensed already more than a century ago was that the possibilities of what could be imagined by humankind could be profoundly evidenced in the extraordinary diversity of thought elaborated through collective agreement (i.e. through culture). He also was quite aware that the myopic nature of what his own society allowed to be defined as ‘religious’ indicated a near total failure to elevate the senses to the natural status they universally occupy in what we now call embodied meaning. Indeed, Tylor would have found the contemporary, politically correct tendency to homogenize all of human emotional life demeaning, pretentious and offensive. As he puts it adroitly: ‘the modern vulgar who ignore or repudiate the notion of ghosts of things, while retaining the notion of ghosts of persons, have fallen into a hybrid state of opinion which has neither the logic of the savage nor of the civilized philosopher’ (1913 [1871]: vol. 1, 479). Courageous words, these, in both his era (which so often found very real ‘primitive’ peoples to be subhuman and disposable) and in ours (which finds it impossible, or unacceptable, to imagine moral worlds other than our own righteous ones).

Remarking on the appearance of Hamlet’s father as a fully armoured ghost, Tylor develops a view of spirituality that is deeply phenomenal and culturally relative. Commenting on missionary accounts in North America, he offers multiple ethnographic (nearly universal) cases that exhibit how ‘souls are, as it were, the shadows and the animated images of the body, and it is by a consequence of this principle that [certain peoples] believe everything to be animated in the universe’ (ibid.).

In highly animistic settings, such immediate forms of connectedness – where all objects may be inhabited by sentient forces – allow humans to have an impact on the cosmos through ritual. And ritual, in turn, makes it possible to orchestrate one’s local world symbolically, to develop concrete connections with one’s immediate environment, to orchestrate innovative responses to moments of uncertainty and, in short, to manage one’s daily world creatively. At once, in other words, Tylor dispenses with what would one day become the ‘crisis’ of postmodernity by taking seriously what Marcel Mauss would later call ‘the techniques of the body’ (‘Les Techniques du corps’ [1935]). Animism was for Tylor a concrete, empirical technique for relating bodily sensations to embodied meaning, embodied meaning to moral judgment, moral judgment to decision-making and decision-making to action.

Indeed, combining animism with a local cosmography allowed, as Tylor demonstrates through countless examples, both for the concrete and direct orchestration of specific responses to uncertainty, and, when focused on ritual, for the mechanical practices that made it possible to read local environmental and experiential signs for paranormal content. If, for instance, an animist applies beliefs about the auspicious or inauspicious nature of the cardinal points or to various locations in the landscape, he or she has in place an operable mechanism for responding to, and possibly warding off, disaster.

Likewise, good intentions (the ‘techniques’ of ritual and prayer) can compound positive outcomes by intensifying auspicious forms of embodiment. Balinese, for instance, can ward off ill health by appeasing minor spirits in the landscape, as much as avoid major disaster through orienting homes and temples in auspicious directions from which feelings and the life force that carries them (rasa) can flow more directly to and from a relatively permeable body now tied directly to its environment (Napier 1986: chap. 6).

However, today (perhaps more than ever) we are obliged to discount what seemed remarkable to Tylor; for the stigma against envisioning genuinely different notions of personhood is, if anything, exacerbated by global narratives about the uniformity – the universality – of psychological experience. Placing the self literally in other things and people both reshapes concepts of responsibility, and also implies that unique notions of the body might give way to culture-specific forms of emotional life – all well and good when such differences are not thought of in any hierarchical manner – very dangerous, however, when they are; for once one acknowledges that a particular mode of culturally constructed selfhood could create unique skill sets, the idea that one culture might be better at one thing or another leads to a kind of biological determinism that suppresses the uniqueness of local experience in favor of broad structural generalization. Suddenly, a fascination with creative difference is condemned by recasting it as a glamorizing of the exotic. In so doing, the experiential baby, fragile though it may be, gets abruptly thrown out as the ethnographic rabbit runs for the bolthole.

Yet, we do know in fact that body techniques can be learned and culti-vated in exceedingly diverse ways, per force developing unique forms of perception and unusual skill sets. It is what we call cultural learning; those who are good at it recruit allies and succeed; those who are less good fall to the wayside, are thrown out by the pack, or choose isolation, if they can find it. Such ordering creates preferences and hierarchies (‘we’ become better or worse at something than ‘they’ are) – the very stuff of Social Darwinism (Napier 2004: 20–22).

Foucault’s early view of personhood – in which the discursive practices of collectively oppressed people were subjected to the regimes of power that would have us all participating in our own subjugation – is one form of such universalizing about personhood and collective meaning across cultural domains. Though this draconian construction was revised in Foucault’s later work on sexuality and desire (for after all what is animism if not an expression of sympathy and desire?), the idea that the character of individual identity is subject to regulation by the state, by culture or by one’s own compliant self was developed by many authors whose work relies on an assumed uniformity that defined persons as political – rather than, say, existential – actors.

The humanistic assumptions about the need to cultivate some global uniformity around what constitutes a person (as we see not only in human rights discourse but among anthropological and other high theorists [e.g. Butler 1991]) may build on anthropology’s diverse representations of what can constitute meaning for a person, while still assuming a more monolithic and normative view of societies as producing categories to which more or less uniform individuals respond and gain or lose membership.

Though there is a long lineage (from Socrates to Foucault) of theorizing about how people react to nations and states as hegemonic managers of what can be called meaningful, such universalizing concepts of what makes a person perhaps better integrate into contemporary normalizing views of the person than into earlier ones that focused on how diverse modes of thought have concrete implications for experience, for perceptions of experience, for forms of embodiment and for understanding of the body itself (see e.g. Leenhardt 1942). Indeed, globalization (if it exists at all) may be found precisely in that form of academic historiography where the uniqueness and diversity of local forms of meaning – how they fascinated, but mostly scared the hell out of, colonizers – is erased by the mad desire to write in homogeneity across the entire human landscape.

Not only, however, do such uniform constructs clash with the desire to see the body as culturally, rather than biologically, made; they also run against many widely described institutions that refuse to be so monotonous. While the universalists may discount other views of personhood and the body as ‘those exotic modes of thought made sensational by Victorian anthropology’, the common Indian (Hindu) system of dual inequality, for instance (where women do for men what men cannot do for themselves, and vice versa), is much less readily dismissed; for to be a functional man or woman in such a system requires a formal relation with one’s perceived opposite – a divisibility of self. Indeed, in such a system the smallest social unit is not an equally empowered man or woman, but a man and woman. Yes, replace dual inequality with plain inequality and the form of marriage becomes unacceptable; but what of the fact that the same notion, for instance, creates broad systems of care for the elderly (Cohen 1998)? What are we now to learn? And what is anthropology’s (now silent) response to the global process in which the aged are accorded far more individual autonomy than they may want?

Indeed, how individual rights and duties are understood in such a context becomes particularly problematic for those who deny that culture can so deeply influence concepts of the body – and by extension of individuality and freedom of choice. However, unless one can imagine such ‘partibility’ – or, similarly, imagine the Maussian notion that Melanesian gift-giving (1924) involves accepting the gift as a literal part of the giver – there is little chance of seeing why a concept like animism would present such powerful challenges to our assumptions about embodiment.

What is partible for a Melanesian may be connectible for an Indian; just as what is impermeable for a European may be permeable for the Balinese who, quite happily, will describe the carrying away of an illness by shifting its pathos onto an inanimate thing that can be taken from one person and pressed upon another for good or ill-intent. The power of such modes of thinking – their unique significance for collectivities of people – is, then, evidenced each and every time we take the creative abilities of other modes of thought in any serious way.

Seeing the importance of ritual – as the dramatic and creative coalescence of forms of heightened social agreement – was not only what allowed anthropology in Tylor’s day to rise as the core field in which alternate modes of thought became a real subject of investigation; it also made possible the birth of medical anthropology, through the work of W. H. R. Rivers, as the study of both human pathology and well-being; and it is worth, for this reason, quoting the first paragraph of Rivers’s pioneering investigation in full:

Medicine, magic, and religion are abstract terms, each of which connotes a large group of social processes, processes by means of which mankind has come to regulate his behaviour towards the world around him. Among ourselves these three groups of process are more or less sharply marked off from one another. One has gone altogether into the background of our social life, while the other two form distinct social categories widely different from one another, and having few elements in common. If we survey mankind widely this distinction and separation do not exist. There are many peoples among whom the three sets of social process are so closely inter-related that the disentanglement of each from the rest is difficult or impossible; while there are yet other peoples among whom the social processes to which we give the name of Medicine can hardly be said to exist, so closely is man’s attitude towards disease identical with that which he adopts towards other classes of natural phenomena. (2001 [1924]: 1)

The extraordinary power, diversity and elegance of what modes of thought humans have come to conjure cannot to this day (and despite our academic erasures) be underestimated – for they are also evidenced each and every time we acknowledge the diversity of ways in which people conjure together to feel better or worse; and we gain little by simply calling such views regressive or antique. Far better, in fact, to accept their remarkable diversity and durability as evidence of a human capacity to produce forms of meaning that are as powerful as they are special. To know something of them, then, is not a luxury, but a necessity of modern life; for, regrettably, the discounting of epistemological diversity is promoted by human rights activists and human rights abusers alike.

To claim, then, that the sympathetic animation of one’s environment is a ‘primitive’ (rather than another good) way of seeing the world is not only to reje...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Divinity, Disease, Distress
• 1. Why Animism Matters
• 2. Spreading the Gospel of the Miracle Cure
• 3. Madness and Miracles
• 4. ‘Sakawa’ Rumours
• 5. To Heal the Body
• 6. Addiction and the Duality of the Self in a North American Religio-Therapeutic Community
• 7. Religious Conversion and Madness
• 8. Cosmologies of Fear
• 9. Functionalists and Zombis
• 10. Religion and Psychosis
• Index