To say that a way of thinking [myth] is disinterested and that it is an intellectual way of thinking does not mean at all that it is equal to scientific thinking … It remains different because its aim is to reach by the shortest possible means a general understanding of the universeand not only a general but a total understanding. That is, it is a way of thinking which must imply that if you don’t understand everything, you can’t explain anything.53
That is a view of myth that would indeed see it as “impelled by a deep drive for conceptual clarification,” one we will explore further below.
Although Donald mentions ritual among the resources of mimetic culture, he does not make it central, as Deacon does, to the emergence of language. But I think on Donald’s own terms we could see that Deacon is right. If myth moves just beyond the most complex form of mimesis, isn’t ritual the likeliest candidate for that most complex form? Mimetic ritual models society, and conceivably even some of society’s environment, such as animals. But even at the mimetic stage, cannot we imagine something more? Ritual, after all, does not just mirror reality. It gives a picture of reality as it ought to In mimetic ritual the society overcomes all the incessant bick ering, the factional disputes, the injury, anger, and resentment, that are endemic in any society, and shows society united instead. Even if mimetic ritual could have been complex enough to show disorder as well as order, as all known (linguistically linked) rituals do, it would be disorder transcended that would be the message of the ritual.
Among the disruptions to which Paleolithic society was heir, illness must have been very important, especially if we mean by illness not only somatic, but also psychosomatic and sociosomatic disorders. Children in such small and fragile societies must have been especially vulnerable, and the loss of an adult through illness or death would have placed a great burden on other members of the group. Thus healing rituals would likely have been significant from early times, as they have remained so to this day. Without getting into the problem of shamanism, which to some is endemic in all ancient cultures and to others is a figment of the Western mind, the earliest ritual specialist was probably the curer, the one who knew curing ritual, a ritual that could vividly present the experience of health in the face of the existing trouble ss
If, however, it is right to imagine mimetic ritual as straining to present an idea of society not as it is but as it ought to be, then Donald’s notion that language emerged in the effort to attain a larger understanding of the world through myth makes a great deal of sense. Jonathan Z. Smith characterizes (linguistically related) ritual in a way that perhaps helps us understand the “drive toward conceptual clarification” that led to myth:
I would suggest that, among other things, ritual represents the creation of a controlled environment where the variables (i.e., the accidents) of ordinary life may be displaced precisely because they are felt to be so overwhelmingly present and powerful. Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things.56
In ordinary life things keep coming apart. Of ritual, what the Mazatec Indian shaman said, “I am he who puts undoubtedly applies not only to physical healing, but to healing in general.
For over a hundred years the argument as to which came first, ritual or myth, went on without resolution. It was one of those arguments that many felt would be best abandoned because irresolvable. If scholars like Donald and Deacon are right, however, the argument is at last over. Ritual clearly precedes myth. But, although examples of ritual without myth have been discovered among various peoples, ritual as we know it is deeply embedded in myth, and usually unintelligible without it. On the other hand myth, though it has often come loose from ritual, is still recognizably liturgical in origin in many instances. It might be useful to look at some instances in which the connection is exceptionally close.
One of the things that is of interest when we look at ritual and myth in relatively small societies with oral cultures is the fact that ritual is often remarkably stable, whereas myth has many, not entirely compatible, versions. It is not that ritual doesn’t change; there is nothing in any society that doesn’t change. But ritual seems to be more resistant to change than is myth. Perhaps we can see it as the mimetic marker from which language in the form of myth took flight, as it were. I would like to turn to Roy Rappaport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, the most serious effort to think about ritual to appear in recent years, to consider his highly condensed, definition of ritual: “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the
Rappaport’s stress on “invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances” brings us back to features of musilanguage that may have been essential in the transformation of meaningless sound sequences into highly condensed, in the sense of undifferentiated, but still referentially-emotively meaningful, sound events, only a step away from myth. A key aspect of these transitional events is redundancy, essential in helping humans move from indexical to symbolic meaning. According to Bruce Richman, musical redundancy is communicated in three forms: (1) repetition, (2) formulaicness (“the storehouse of preexisting formulas, riffs, themes, motifs and rhythms”), and (3) expectancy “of exactly what is going to come next and fill the upcoming temporal slot.“59 In the redundancy created by expectancy, the most important element is tempo, the rhythm that may be created by drumming, the stamping of feet, or other means. We have already noted the uniquely human ability to “keep together in time.” In any case it is closely related to the “more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances” that are central to Rappaport’s definition of ritual. These aspects of ritual will be illustrated shortly with the example of the Kalapalo of South America, where ritual is entirely musical; myth provides the context but not the content.
I need to make a brief aside to defend my choice of cases. I don’t want to argue that the groups I will describe resemble in any exact way groups of humans from 50,000 or more years ago. Just as chimpanzees have evolved during the same number of years that humans have, so these groups have evolved for as many years as any other surviving human group. Nevertheless, not to look at some groups of hunter-gatherers or horticulturalists with a wholly oral culture as telling us something about earlier stages of human evolution would seem to be perverse, and though this is exactly what anthropologists who oppose the idea of cultural evolution do, their arguments have not been persuasive to archaeologists or other scholars for whom human evolution is an undeniable fact. The harder problem is, which tribal societies should we choose? Some have been tempted to see the tightly organized, heavily ritualized, “Durkheimian” tribal societies as late, and loosely organized, “individualistic” groups, lacking much in the way of ritual or myth, as representative of early stages of human evolution.60 Mary Douglas, rejecting evolutionary sequences altogether, argues that some tribal societies are quite “secular,” having little to show in the way of religion. She does, however, give a reason why some tribes are strongly ritualized and others nearly secular. In her own Durkheimian way, she links degree of religiosity to intensity of social organization. Where, in her terms, grid and group (we need not here worry about her way of thinking about social organization) are high, we can expect ritual to be prominent; but where they are weak, ritual will be largely absent.61
The question is, if we ask, in spite of Douglas’s objections to evolutionary schemes, which type is older, it is not obvious that we must choose the more loosely organized. It may turn out that small, loosely organized societies do not represent the main line of evolution. Dunbar’s inferential argument for 150 as the group size for Homo sapiens would suggest as much. Let us take one of Douglas’s examples of a secular tribe, the Basseri nomads of Iran as described by Fredrik Barth. Douglas writes: “Should not one suppose that a society which does not need to make explicit its representation of its
elf to itself is a special type of society? This would lead straight to what Barth says of the independence and self-sufficiency of the Basseri nomadic household which, enabling it to survive `in economic relation with an external market but in complete isolation from its fellow nomads, is a very striking and fundamental feature of Basseri Basseri society cannot, however, be taken as exemplary of early human society. For one thing, true pastoral nomadism, of which the Basseri are indeed exemplary, is a late phenomenon, becoming possible only after the emergence of agricultural societies, and always symbiotic with them. The symbiosis is clear in this case in that it is the market that allows the Basseri household to live in “complete isolation from its fellow nomads.”
I would argue that the Basseri, or any society in which households are completely isolated, would not have been able to attain mythic culture; I doubt that they would even have attained mimetic culture. Groups like Colin Turnbull’s Mbuti pygmies, or other pygmy groups found in various parts of the world that are extremely loosely organized, are generally symbiotic with agricultural neighbors (Mbuti) or are refugees defeated by and fleeing from enemy tribes, eking out a bare subsistence, and cannot be good exemplars of early Homo sapiens evolution.63 For different reasons neither can the Inuit or other small groups who live in the subarctic. The Inuit are the most recent arrivals in the New World and could only have occupied their territory after highly sophisticated technology involving hunting gear, clothing, and boating had evolved, only a few thousand years ago at most.
Both mimetic and mythic culture most probably evolved in the richest areas for hunting and gathering, areas that have long been taken over by agriculturalists. These are just the areas that would have supported the population density necessary for cultural innovation. In most of the world, huntergatherers have been driven to the peripheries, and no longer occupy the areas of original cultural florescence. But there is one notable exception: Australia. Except for very recent European incursion, the Australian Aborigines have gone their own way, not without some outside cultural influence to be sure, for 50,000 years or more. They are not “typical” of hunter-gatherer societies, as has often been pointed out, but they may be closer to our ancient heritage than any other such societies.64 The other possible candidates are from the New World, where Mesoamerican civilizations influenced, but perhaps did not decisively transform, hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies on their outer perimeters.
As a thought experiment, I would like to look at several cases, one from Australia, one from South America, and one from North America, to see what mythic culture, relatively uninfluenced by archaic, much less historic, civilizations, might have looked like.
The Kalapalo
My first example is a Carib-speaking group in the Upper Xingu Basin of central Brazil (Mato Grosso state), the Kalapalo, as studied by Ellen Basso.65 When Basso lived with them in 1966-1968, the population of the village was 110, but it had been severely depleted by a measles epidemic in 1954; when she returned to do the fieldwork for her second book in 1978-1980, the population was around 200, so during the whole period it hovered around Dunbar’s hypothetical norm of 150. The Kalapalo are one of eight villages in the area that share a common culture and are linked by significant ties of kinship and ceremonial, although they speak several different and mutually unintelligible languages. They live in an area so remote that they have been little disturbed since precontact times. At present they are within the borders of Xingu National Park, within which “non-Indian settlement, missionary activity, commercial exploitation of natural resources, and even casual tourism were prohibited.” The result of this policy, according to Basso, was “the continued cultural vitality of a basically healthy population, in many important respects unchanged from the time” they were first discovered by Europeans in 1884.66 At the time the park was formed, however, the Kalapalo had to move to their present location within the park boundaries. They still return to their old village location, some three days’ journey away, to collect fruit from the trees there and to see again sites with great sentimental interest because of their association with specific events in Kalapalo myth.67
The Kalapalo are horticulturalists, whose main crop is manioc, but they get a significant portion of their food from fishing and gathering wild plants. Their year is divided into two seasons, wet and dry. During the dry season, roughly between May and September, there are many ritual events that last for weeks and sometimes months. In nonritual contexts Kalapalo society is organized in terms of households and kinship networks, but in the time of ritual, social organization shifts to a more inclusive community level, transcending kinship and affinity. Economic activities are organized by ritual officers more intensively and productively than in nonritual contexts, and the products are shared by the community at large.
What is particularly interesting is that Kalapalo ritual is primarily musical, with myth operating more as comment than scenario, yet the idea of the dominance of music is itself embedded in myth. The Kalapalo classify various beings according to the sounds they make. The “powerful beings,” who were there “at the beginning,” express themselves though “music.” Human beings use “speech.” Other animate beings, including animals, have “calls.” Inanimate things make “noises.“68 Among the powerful beings are Agouti, Taugi, Thunder, Jaguar, and others. “Agouti is a sneak and a spy, Taugi an effective trickster who can penetrate illusions, Thunder the most dangerous of powerful beings, Jaguar a violent bully who is easily deceived.“69 Some of the powerful beings have animal traits, as is evident from their names, and they utter “calls” as well as speech, though music is their preferred form of expression. Along with the powerful beings are the Dawn People, human beings who existed at the Dawn Time and who interacted easily with the powerful beings.
According to Kalapalo cosmogony, human beings were created by Taugi, the trickster, “who speaks deceptively about himself,” which is why human speech is always potentially deceitful, and people are concerned to give evidence for their truthfulness, including frequently an expression that means something like “that’s no lie.“70 The earliest human beings, the Dawn People, lived in close relation to the powerful beings and were in many ways like them. People today, descended from the Dawn People but lacking their ability, must be wary of powerful beings, with their enormous creative but also dangerous energy.71 They can appear in dreams or in unusual circumstances, usually in human form, but sometimes in animal form, and such encounters often require protective ritual because of the danger involved. Nonetheless it is the powerful beings who are the focus of ritual life and their form of ex pression, namely music, which provides almost the entire content of the rituals.
According to Basso, the world of the powerful beings and the Dawn People involved language, but above all music:
This world is reproduced during ritual performances, in which Kalapalo collectively adopt the powerful mode of communication through which they engender the experience of a unity of cosmic forces, developed through the unity of sound formed by creative motion. In rituals, too, they most vividly realize their powers of presence. For by collectively performing music, they not only model themselves upon their images of powerful beings, but they feel the worth of those models by experiencing the transformative powers inherent in human musicality.72
The great festivals, which take weeks-in some cases as much as a year-of preparation and rehearsal, involve elaborate body painting, flower decoration, and sometimes masks. Integral to the musical performance is its accompanying bodily movement, which Basso calls “shuffling” rather than dance, and the lines of performers change direction as the musical lines shift. While the performers enact the powerful beings, they also charm them, for music calms and soothes them and contains the dangers of their otherwise unrestrained power. It is clear that the powerful beings are not “gods” and that ritual is not “worship.” Rather, as Basso puts it:
Musical performance is associated with powerful beings and is a means of communicating with t
hem although it is not directly addressed to them … Communication may be said to occur not by singing to a powerful being but by singing it into being. Highly focused mental images of the powerful being are created in the minds of the performers by means of the performance … There is a consequent merging of the self with what is sung about; just as in myth powerful beings participate in human speech, so in ritual humans participate in itseke [powerful being] musicality and thereby temporarily achieve some of their transformative power. In public ritual, this is power of community. Rather than implying danger and ambivalence, however, it is collective solidarity emerging out of a performative experience of social restructuring and communal labor, representing a transformative power with markedly creative effects, including the ability to create its own social organization and to help cure the most seriously
Basso discusses the intense “communitas”-she uses Victor Turner’s term for the communal emotion of the ritual-that she finds among the Kalapalo not so much as a kind of “anti-structure,” as Turner argued, but rather as an alternative structure. Rituals last too long and involve too much highly organized economic effort to be seen as brief periods when the differentiations of everyday life are overcome. Rather they move the people from their usual nonritual divisions of households and lineages, with all the jealousies and conflicts that that implies, into a period of intense collective effort in which they identify as Kalapalo, not as family members. The ritual dance groups deliberately separate siblings; husband and wife dance in different sets. “Common humanity,” which may extend to no more than the Kalapalo and their neighboring allied tribes, takes over from the divisions of everyday life. Thus Kalapalo communitas, though temporary, is, according to Basso a “structured The appropriate attitudes underlying and creating effective collective work are communicated by collective, repeated, patterned musical performance, in which the joy of collective experience is realized. This collective musical performance allows the economic events to be successful, indeed, to occur.”
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age Page 21
