Freud, Durkheim and Otto all recognized the importance of the numinous; they understood that religion established the foundation for many cultures. Holy dread, taboo, and the numinous were the religious phenomena that served to uphold and stabilize societies. These were the fundamental source of religious power. Incredibly, the matters are given almost no discussion today. Otto was particularly perceptive and noted: “with a resolution and cunning which one can hardly help admiring, men shut their eyes to that which is quite unique in the religious experience, even in its most primitive manifestations. But it is rather a matter for astonishment than for admiration!” These words are even more true now than when they were written eighty years ago.
This state of affairs should command extended analysis. The problem is severe in academe, and science is particularly antipathetic to the mystical and irrational. But this is found not only among academics. Today the liberal denominations of Protestant Christianity substantially downplay the supernatural and the wrath of God. Responding to secular trends in society, those denominations have become more rationalized, and their conceptions of deity largely lack the mystical and irrational aspects.
All this is part of the rationalization and disenchantment of the world, and as Max Weber recognized, this has been progressing for millennia. Protestant Christianity eliminated priests and largely did away with monastic orders. Unlike priests, Protestant ministers do not serve as mediators between their human congregations and the divine realm. Otto also noted the decline of the miraculous in religion. He commented: “on the more enlightened levels, ‘miracle’ begins to fade away; how Christ is at one with Mohammed and Buddha in declining the role of mere wonder-worker; how Luther dismisses the ‘outward miracles’ disparagingly as ‘jugglery’ or ‘apples and nuts for children’; and finally how the ‘supernaturalism’ of miracle is purged from religion as something that is only an imperfect analogue and no genuine ‘schema’ of the numinous.” Here Otto himself contributes to the rationalizing trend whether he recognizes it or not, equating the decline of the miraculous with progress toward enlightenment. This is not fully compatible with his other statements.
Rationalization strengthens the boundary between the human and the divine. God is pushed ever further into heaven. Supernatural contact between humans and gods is minimized and repressed. The irrational is shunted from consciousness. Otto referred to ghosts and miracles as aspects of the numinous, though as degenerate forms of it. Both are now embarrassments in academe; they seem superstitious. Nevertheless, ghosts and miracles continue to be reported. They have not been cleansed from the world. Max Weber was perceptive regarding rationalization, but his formulation needed a slight elaboration. Rationalization did not really entail the elimination of magic from the world, but rather the elimination of the conscious awareness of it among cultural elites. Even with liberal Protestant churchmen, there is often an embarrassed silence regarding the efficacy of petitionary prayer, which is a magical practice by any reasonable definition (such embarrassment is not seen among conservatives). Although magic has not been expunged from the Western world, it has been forced to the margins, repressed, and although individuals are well aware of it, it has no place in our major bureaucratic institutions of government, industry, and academe.
The writers covered above produced a foundation for understanding the role of the supernatural in society. Amazingly, this work emerged in a mere decade and a half; Table 7 lists the crucial works. (The profusion of the 1903-1917 period is often obscured by writers who do not list dates of original publication in references they cite. Many give only the date of the copy they have most readily available. Such laxity is a disservice to readers and misleads them. Readers then fail to appreciate the historical context and the full implications of the writings.)
Several salient themes emerge from this early work. The scholars recognized that it was difficult to comprehend totemism and magic. Even though they were labeled as irrational, there was a grudging admission that the primitives’ beliefs and practices allowed their societies to function. Nevertheless, many scholars displayed a revulsion toward magic. They decried similar beliefs in their own culture, and people holding such views were compared to neurotics and infants. The taboos surrounding magic and the sacred were still operating, and the scholars who enforced them were unaware of doing so. Not surprisingly, discussion of the fundamental issues faded from academe.
Levi-Strauss and the Second Era of Totemism Debates
The debates on magic and religion continued within anthropology of course, but since that early period, relatively little of consequence was published. In 1962 Oxford anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard prepared a review and critique. He presented it in a series of lectures that were later published as Theories of Primitive Religion (1965). He spent considerable time discussing Durkheim, Frazer, and Levy-Bruhl, and the fact that their works were then half-a-century old is a subtle indication of the fertility of the earlier period.
Evans-Pritchard meant his lectures for a general audience, and thus they are relatively accessible. Evans-Pritchard was not an advocate of a particular theoretical school but rather made a wide range of contributions; accordingly, he was well positioned to offer diverse insights. His writings are generally lucid, and his books Social Anthropology and Other Essays (1962) and A History of Anthropological Thought
Year
Author
Title
1903
Emile Dürkheim & Marcel Mauss
Primitive Classification
1905
Max Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
1909
Arnold van Gennep
The Rites of Passage
1909
Robert Hertz
“The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand”
1910
James George Frazer
Totemism and Exogamy
1910
Lucien Levy-Bruhl
How Natives Think
1912
Emile Durkheim
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
1913
Sigmund Freud
Totem and Taboo
1913
Max Weber
Economy and Society
1916
Ferdinand de Saussure
Course in General Linguistics
1917
Rudolf Otto
The Idea of the Holy
Table 7 Important Works for Understanding the Role of the Supernatural In Society
(1981) provide excellent overviews of anthropology, especially of theory.
Evans-Pritchard pointed out that the first anthropological theorists faced considerable obstacles. The cultural evolutionist paradigm, modeled on Darwinism, was prominent at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it had severe flaws. Further, during anthropology’s early decades, ethnography was not a developed discipline, and anthropologists did little or no fieldwork themselves. They relied upon reports of explorers, missionaries, travelers, writers, and the like. The descriptions of totemic beliefs appeared extremely foreign, and yet as more and better ethnographic data became available, the situation grew more confused. There was much controversy, and writers were diffident about their interpretations. In their antagonism toward religion, many theorists avoided consulting relevant religious scholarship. Totemism began looking untractable, and the topic languished for decades.
Evans-Pritchard was very critical of Frazer but more sympathetic to Levy-Bruhl. Evans-Pritchard argued successfully that we are not substantially different from the primitives and that there are many irrational aspects in our culture today. One of his primary criticisms was that Levy-Bruhl made too sharp a distinction between the civilized and primitive mind. Evans-Pritchard was right in this, yet, for all the force of his argument, he did not effectively deal with the differences between the primitives and us in regard to magic. Though magic is alive today, Max Weber was correct—rationalization
and disenchantment continue. We really are different from the primitive, and Frazer and Levy-Bruhl were right in bringing this point to the fore.
Evans-Pritchard delivered his lectures in 1962, and that year the eminent French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss published two important works: Totemism and The Savage Mind. In them he tackled the problem of classification. Years earlier he had achieved some fame for his study of kinship structures, and Levi-Strauss was about to attract even more attention with a series of books on myth, but in the interim, he addressed classification. He understood his studies of kinship, totemism, and mythology as attempts to find underlying patterns of human thought, and the issue of classification was central to that effort.
Levi-Strauss needs a bit more introduction than most others. He was exceptionally influential, but it is difficult to give a comprehensive background to his ideas because he drew from so many sources. He acknowledged his youthful interest in geology, but also in Freud, Marx, Marcel Mauss, linguists Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, philosopher Henri Bergson, among others. He cannot be easily situated.
Ambiguity is an innate part of his thought. In fact Levi-Strauss admitted that he didn’t understand some of the anthropological theorizing that his work stimulated, and conversely some of those who borrowed his ideas admitted that they didn’t fully understand him either! Edmund Leach’s Claude Levi-Strauss (1970) is perhaps the best introduction to his work, though Levi-Strauss might not agree.
Levi-Strauss was the leading figure in the French intellectual movement known as structuralism, which flourished in the 1960s. It encompassed anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism, religious studies, psychoanalysis, and others. Because it was so diverse, it is difficult to summarize. In 1966 a symposium on structuralism was held at Johns Hopkins University, and papers from it were compiled into the volume The Structuralist Controversy (1970). That collection includes a diversity of approaches. Michael Lane’s Introduction to Structuralism (1970) presents articles on some of the wider ideas.
As an intellectual movement, structuralism was short lived, and I suspect that the vast majority of my readers never heard of it. Its descendants are deconstructionism and post-structuralism, and those now have currency. They are commonly discussed in academe, and the terms sometimes appear in the popular media, but very few, even in academe, understand from whence they came. The intellectual lineage is important for understanding the controversies, their implications, and the severe deficiencies of most presentations.
Levi-Strauss’ work serves as a bridge from totemism and primitive mentality, on the one hand, to literary theory and post-structuralism on the other. At a fundamental level these all concern communication, representation, and the limits of logic.
Levi-Strauss recognized that the problem of classification arises because the mind grasps the world in chunks. It perceives contrasts, differences, and opposites. He was familiar with the anthropological works on binary oppositions, and he recognized the similarities with the ideas of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure pointed out that in language, sounds must be distinguished from each other; they are in opposition. They thereby designate differences in their referents in the world. Patterns of differences are seen. Binary oppositions such as life-death, man-woman, like sounds of language, form structures. The similarities are at an abstract level.
Binary contrasts are perceived, but the parallels and relations among them are not observed directly. Those are encoded in totems. For instance, it is not that members of the eagle clan are like eagles and members of the bear clan are like bears, rather the relation between the eagle clan and bear clan is like the relation of the eagle and the bear. The eagle is associated with heights and the sky, the bear with the ground and caves. Thus totemism can serve as a method of abstraction and can express properties that are not directly observable. The parallels between structures allow a kind of generalization about relationships. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, writing on Levi-Strauss, points out that “Consciously, of course, people are aware of concrete manifestations rather than of relations per se; but the tendency to perceive relations is fundamental.”
Levi-Strauss found inspiration in the writings of Henri Bergson, a Nobel laureate and also a president of the Society for Psychical Research. Bergson had written on the interplay between the discrete and the continuous (wholistic), and Levi-Strauss cited passages showing
Bergson to have had a more wholistic understanding than typically found among academics. Bergson saw the continuous and discrete as complementary and refused to choose between them. In such refusals, tensions are generated between separatenesses and unities; intermediaries are needed to resolve them.50
Admittedly, these ideas are a bit vague, and the relationships between Levi-Strauss’ schemas and the real world are sometimes difficult to grasp. Howard Gardner commented that his “major argument about the nature of thought and society centers on the role of contradiction, opposition, and paradox in the experience of man.”51 The problems of explication are a direct consequence. Others who are sympathetic to the ideas also acknowledge the difficulties. Kathleen Ashley, a scholar of medieval studies who has also written insightfully on tricksters, noted that “Structuralist theory … founds itself upon ambivalence and ambiguity,”52 and Edmund Leach, readily admitted the obscurity of Levi-Strauss but said that he “often manages to give me ideas even when I don’t really know what he is saying.”53
Levi-Strauss compared both myth, and the primitive mind, with a bricoleur. This is a French term that refers to something like a handyman, though there is no exact English-language equivalent. (Trickster scholars and some post-structuralists are introducing the word to English-language readers.) A bricoleur collects a hodgepodge of materials and then incorporates them into a work, or he makes do with things immediately at hand. No outside theoretical or conceptual structure guides the fabrication of a bricolage (the product of a bricoleur). Like a bricoleur, myth works with materials directly available, concrete images rather than abstract concepts. Many mythologists consider the trickster to be a bricoleur. This is appropriate as Levi-Strauss notes that there is something a bit devious about the bricoleur. Some think that Levi-Strauss was a bit devious himself, and a number of writers have commented on his sometimes-seeming intellectual sleight of hand. His foremost British interpreter, Edmund Leach, commented on his structural approach saying “some English-speaking readers might begin to suspect that the whole argument was an elaborate academic joke … we must try to take the matter seriously. This is rather difficult.”55 56
There are limits to clarity in discussing these issues. Categorizing lies at the very root of our thought and communication. Beyond some point, we are forced to the inarticulate; the ineffable of mysticism is not far away. Levi-Strauss has been accused of being Jungian, and indeed the deep structures of which he speaks are not so very different from the archetypes of Jung. Both had important things to say about the trickster and about binary oppositions. Both dealt with fundamentally difficult issues, and both are known for their obscurity. They drew upon very different sources: Jung researched alchemy, and Levi-Strauss studied natives of the Americas. The parallels reflect real underlying patterns, but by their nature we may be unable to fully grasp them by rational means.57
It is probably no accident that Levi-Strauss’s ideas came to the fore in the 1960s, a time of rapid cultural change, a period of antistructure. During the same decade Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, and Edmund Leach also made lasting contributions to understanding magic and the primitive mind.58 That period was intellectually hospitable to addressing those issues in academe, and a similar interest was seen in the wider culture.
The reader might be puzzled as to why I gave all this attention to Levi-Strauss when his writings are so ambiguous. In grappling with totemism, primitive classification, and the deep structures of the human mind, Levi-Strauss was forced into areas of ambiguity. This should not be seen as a failure so much as an illumination of the proble
m.
Structuralism’s successor, deconstructionism, probed foundations even more explicitly and raised disconcerting problems. As will be described in the next chapter, it asserted that all communication is ambiguous. All statements are open to interpretation. The idea of objective reality is only a myth. Deconstructionism is justifiably labelled as irrational, but so are primitives’ beliefs in magic.
Rationalization and the Disenchantment of the World
The intellectual history of totemism includes: charges of irrationality and erroneous thinking hurled at the primitive, the acknowledged incomprehensibility of totemism to academicians, unresolved debates, and ambiguous scholarly theories. The muddle-headedness occurred because the scholars failed to comprehend the inherent limitations of Western rationality. All this needs to be seen in light of rationalization (in Max Weber’s sense), which has been a dominant process in the development of Western civilization. Totemism must be understood in opposition to rationalization. Totemism incorporates magical interconnections. Rationalization entails the elimination of magic and severs magical interconnections (in reality, only the conscious awareness of them).
Just because totemism is “irrational” does not mean that it was maladaptive. On the contrary, it survived for thousands of years. Most cultures did not rely upon our science and logic. Their success should make us examine our prejudices regarding the rational. Western logic requires entities to be discrete, separate, distinct, differentiated. We assume a clear distinction between subject and object. The primitives did not; they understood themselves as mystically connected to the cosmos. They participated in it. (The issue of participation also arises in conjunction with reflexivity, a source of paradox for Western logic.)
The Trickster and the Paranormal Page 44
