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On not understanding symbols

2012; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14318/hau2.2.023

2575-1433

Roger M. Keesing, Jordan Haug,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeOn not understanding symbols Toward an anthropology of incomprehensionRoger M. KEESINGRoger M. KEESINGPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreA major thrust in contemporary social anthropology has been a deepened concern with meaning—with the ways in which "a particular system of symbols…confers order, coherence, and significance upon a people, their surroundings, and the workings of their universe" (Basso and Selby 1976: 3). In anthropology this focus has most often been narrowed to ritual, viewed as a domain where cultural symbols are used in quintessential form.In their concern with meaning, anthropologists have undoubtedly become better interpreters of cultural symbols, both more clever and wise. But I am concerned that in their sheer interpretive virtuosity, many symbolist anthropologists may be overlooking, even disguising, some mundane realities of the ritual process. Too often they assume, without examination, that when culturally patterned meanings can be discerned in ritual, native participants have access to these meanings—and that rituals "work" because they evoke and orchestrate shared understandings.Here I will suggest that native actors participating in ritual need not share the same meanings; that a great many of them probably make very superficial interpretations of ritual symbols; and hence that the evocation and orchestration of "deep" interpretations of symbols among a congregation cannot be necessary to the performance or perpetuation of ritual. I will deal almost entirely with ethnographic material from the Kwaio of Malaita. But as Devil's Advocate I will generalize the argument to suggest that the same is probably true of most societies anthropologists study. Let me set out the argument more explicitly.My thesis briefly summarized is this: 1. The symbolic systems of a community are structured, as it were, in layers—from outer, transparent, meanings down to inner ones, access to which requires increasing degrees of esoteric knowledge / poetic imagination / philosophical insight / and global perspective.2. Distribution of the knowledge required for deep interpretations is a matter of the political structure of the community. Who knows what depends on age, sex, sacredness, etcetera, and on the intellectual abilities and personal predilections of individuals.3. Because meanings depend so heavily on what individuals know, the same ritual sequence or myth may evoke highly diverse meanings for members of the community—from literal, superficial, mundane constructions to "deep" and global ones (see Sperber 1975: 119–49).4. The "function" of ritual, and ritual symbols, in the community thus cannot be to evoke shared understandings of the latter sort—even if a highly coherent structured system of symbolism is part of the cultural heritage of a community.5. The existence of such a coherent symbolic structure requires only that enough members of the community have access to the deeper symbolic layers of the culture to perpetuate these structures, progressively add to and modify them, and maintain their coher-ence—and these need be only a small minority in each generation.At first glance, such propositions may seem easily accommodated within symbolist anthropology. But my doubts are aimed not only at "overinterpretation" of cultural symbols, but also at a way of thinking about "culture" that has underlain much of the anthropological quest for meanings (Keesing 1974, [1987a; cf. Keesing 1990]);1 a view of culture as transcending partial realizations in the minds of individuals that disguises the social and political contextualization and historical dynamics of knowledge in communities [Keesing 1982c; cf. Keesing 1991].Before I turn to the Kwaio data, an epistemological caution is needed. Most interpreters of ritual symbolism assume that native actors understand meanings at unconscious "levels" whether or not there is a public exegesis. The evidence supporting a symbolic analysis, where there is no exegetic tradition, must be indirect. Internal consistency and coherence, elegance, and sheer plausibility become prime criteria that the analysis is correct—sometimes supported by the idiosyncratic exegesis of a Muchona the Hornet (Turner 1967: 131–50) or Ogoternmeli (Giaule 1965). Within such an epistemological paradigm it is virtually impossible to demonstrate that some or most native actors do not make the interpretations, and construe the meanings, attributed to them. One must attempt to do so by indirection—by showing, for example, that knowledge is distributed in the community in such a way that only some people command the information they would need to make "deep" interpretations of symbols, that only a limited number of individuals in each generation contribute to the creation and modification of ritual, that native actors regard one another as more or less knowledgeable about symbolic meanings, and so forth. I shall adduce evidence of these sorts for the Kwaio—evidence that, within the prevailing paradigm, can only be suggestive, not conclusive. But that in itself should serve, in Devil's Advocacy, to make a wider point: that symbolist anthropology teeters precariously on a thin database, propped up by the faith of the anthropological community.Kwaio religionThe Kwaio of Malaita, Solomon Islands, are one of a dwindling number of Pacific peoples whose traditional religion and ritual system is still fully followed [Keesing 1982a]. About 2,000 Kwaio speakers living in the mountainous area above the east coast of Malaita continue to practice their ancestral religion in communities that are sociologically substantially intact.Kwaio propitiate adalo, the "shades" of the dead,2 both immediate forebears and ancient ancestors, to sustain a protective mantle of mana,3 and thus to maintain stability, good living, and prosperity (Keesing and Fifi'i 1968; Keesing 1970, 1976, 1977). Maintaining ancestrally defined boundaries between the polluted and the pure, the sacred and the profane,4 male and female, the ancestors and the living, is an everyday preoccupation. Focal concerns in ritual are with restoring proper boundaries when they have been breached by pollution, by death, or by procedural error; and in doing so, restoring mana.In very young childhood, all Kwaio learn that their immediate social world includes unseen spirits. They see their elders talking to them, receiving messages from them. The occurrence of rain, one's illness, the death of a pet pig, are talked about as the result of ancestral displeasure. A child learns that the complicated rules the adalo impose, and enforce as all-seeing in and around the clearing, are a matter of life and death—what foods can and cannot be eaten, what water can be drunk by whom, where the water bamboos must be put, and where one sleeps and sits and defecates.5 House and clearing are partitioned by invisible lines, to which rules separating male and female attach. A boy of five or six partakes of sacrifices in shrines, undergoes a sacrament, and stays in the men's house with his male relatives overnight before he is desacralized. A young girl takes part and undergoes a sacrament, and stays in the men's house with his male relatives overnight before he is desacralized. A young girl takes part and undergoes a sacrament when her group stages a major ritual cycle.6 Divinations, magical cures, and procedures are part of daily life in a tiny Kwaio settlement. Some of the more complex ritual sequences, particularly those preceding a mortuary feast, are likely to have taken place in one's immediate group every three or four years, through one's childhood. A girl will have seen a rather different range of ritual events than a boy, from a different perspective; she is likely to have attended a mother in childbirth seclusion, and to have gone through elaborate rites of purification.There are few procedures, in Kwaio ritual, that are esoteric and hidden from public view. What happens in a shrine or a men's house can be seen and heard by all males beyond infancy. There are no initiation rites, no esoterica restricted to elders. I am not dealing with a case where ritual is hidden in folds of secrecy from which women, young people, initiates, commoners, or non-priests are excluded.Kwaio religion is unusual in another respect: the virtual absence of myths. Kwaio oral tradition centers around epic narratives recited with chanted accompaniment at feasts. Most of the narratives recount chains of killings in the distant or fairly recent past; some describe other events in the lives of powerful ancestors. They describe a world like the one Kwaio live in and, with few exceptions, events that are naturalistic rather than "superempirical" (Keesing 1978). Kwaio rituals do not enact or dramatize mythic events, as is so common in the aboriginal Americas, Australia, and other parts of the tribal world.Kwaio cosmological schemes define states and categories, establish oppositions of sacredness and pollution, nature and culture, ancestors and living, and map out the spatial correlates of these states. But there is little concern with explicating natural phenomena, or how the world got to be as it is—these are not matters of interest. The myriad detailed rules and taboos and procedures are accepted simply as "customs that originated with the ancestors" [Keesing 1982b; see Akin 2005]. Kwaio are pragmatically concerned with following the rules of human life, and singularly unconcerned with explaining its ultimate nature.Kwaio ritualKwaio ritualize their encounters with their adalo, particularly their collective encounters. These encounters are precipitated by illness, death, or misfortunes, which are attributed to ancestral displeasure because of desecration, defilement, or other human errors; or they are initiated to maintain a protective mantle of mana [see Keesing 1984]. These collective encounters bring a kin group into intimate, immediate contact with ancient ancestors and their awesome powers and dangers. The procedures for engaging in transactions with adalo, for enlisting their powers, and for then progressively removing the dangerous sacredness of these encounters are elaborate and complicated.The death of a decent group's priest is a time of special disruption and danger. Although in everyday life the living and dead are in constant communication, they exist in separate realms. The priest, as intermediary, is exposed to powers and dangers: he is, as it were, irradiated by sacredness. His death opens a kind of door between the living and dead, exposing descent group members (and close cognates and spouses) to sacred powers.While the bereaved group is in liminal sacredness, they are subject to food taboos, mourning restrictions, and rules isolating them from normal social life. Through a series of rites of desacralization, the restrictions that set them apart are progressively lifted; the boundaries and categories of regular life are restored.My primary "text" will be a ritual procedure that occurs in the sequence after a priest's death. In slightly modified form, it occurs in the sequence of desacralization rites after a high sacrifice; and in attenuated form, prior to a mortuary feast. Hence it is a procedure every Kwaio adolescent boy will have seen (and many will have participated in), and one Kwaio girls and women will know about although they are not allowed to see it. This sequence, beritauna, illustrates the themes and styles of Kwaio ritual, and will serve our purposes well. I will give a composite version, glossing over minor variations between the rite as performed by various kin groups.The rite physically circles around a lean-to shelter (taualea) in which the pigs to be sacrificed at the "feast of the dead" are tethered. The main mortuary feast then spans the next two days, coming to a climax the evening of the second day with the presentation of valuables to the men who buried the dead [Keesing 1982].In preliminary stages, the toualea has been constructed; a sacred post (bounimae), or "post of the dead," is planted in the ground inside the toualea, which is then thatched with fishtail palm fronds [Keesing 1982: 164–167]. A bunch of immature areca nuts, a cluster of complete taro plants with small corms (fo`ofo`o), sometimes an immature coconut, and a sprig of evodia (la`e) bespelled by the priest are hung up in the toualea. The pigs for the feast have been tethered in a prescribed order, with a prominent place reserved for pigs brought by the out-married women of the kin group. The cast of characters in beritauna is as follows: the man who has succeeded the dead priest; the man who has been in liminal seclusion keeping taboos for the death; a secondary priest who conducts rites for the kin group's women; and young men of the group (their number determined by the number of pigs tethered for the feast). Prior to beritauŋa, the participants, who have been in mourning dishevelment, shave and cut their hair in a specified order, decorate themselves, and go off into the forest to wash and then ritually rehearse the magic (`uiŋa). At this stage, women and girls retire to the dwelling houses and must stay there until the beritauŋa has been completed.When the men and boys performing the rite come back into the clearing, sacralized by their ritual purification and `uiŋa, each holds leaves of green cordy-line; the priest, leading them, holds an immature coconut and a sprig of evodia (la`e).I will quote verbatim a Kwaio priest's account of the procedure. Then they go up to the taualea, led by the priest, each one holding his cordyline. They shout as they enter the clearing [so the women will go into the house out of sight]. They go inside the taualea, entering the right side and circle to the right [counterclockwise], and stamp their feet when they get around, with the priest beside the bounimae: "two" they count. Then they go around again: "four." And then again: "six." And again: "eight." Then they crouch down at the foot of the sacred post. They tania adola [lit., "hold the ancestors"].The priest holds the coconut [at this stage referred to as siufa, from siu or "wash"]. The priest calls on the adalo naa mamu [the ancestor that conveys powers of attracting wealth, for this particular kin group] He calls the ancestor, the others repeat after him. He begins with the first siufa ["washing"], and goes on until ten; each time the others repeat. The priest says "siufa maamamu [I mamu-ize the attraction of pigs]," and the others repeat. The priest says "siufa maamamu [I mamu-ize the attraction of money]," then the others. He says "siufa maamamu [I mamu-ize the attraction of men]," then "siufa maamamu [I mamu-ize the attraction of women]," then "siufa maamamu [I mamu-ize the attraction of coconuts]." The others repeat each time. He names ten things [the rest being kinds of ritually used taro and fish]. Then the priest calls the names of the ancestors, from the most ancient to the most recent.Then the priest husks an immature areca [betel] nut, and mixes it with lime and evodia leaf in a bamboo tube [that has been hanging on the sacred post]. Then he paints the cheek of the consecrated pig tethered at the base of the sacred post, then the expiatory pig, then the women's pig, then the women's priest's pig, then the pig of the senior out-marrying women; then those brought by her juniors in order of age. Then the priest paints the betel mixture on the chests of the men. All this time, the women have been in the houses. The men go outside the taualea. The priest bespells a sprig of evodia, and then chews betel. He chews evodia with it, then ribasia [spits on the chests of] the men. Then they husk coconuts and make taro-and-coconut puddings [separate puddings for the priest, taboo-keeper, and women's priest, and one for the rest, each made with a different coconut husked in a specified order]. The priest chews betel and evodia again, and ribasia [spits on] the puddings. Then the men eat [cf. Keesing 1982: 164–67].The same ritual complexity continues in later phases. Who can eat the sacred parts of which pigs and other endless details continue to be specified. But for our purposes, this will be a large enough slice.Taking the beritauŋa rite as text, I will ask what these symbols and symbolic acts "mean" to the participants, spectators, and, in this case, the women temporarily excluded in the nearby houses.What do the symbols "mean"?The problem I encountered in analyzing and interpreting beritauŋa and other Kwaio ritual sequences is this. An understanding of what the rites "mean," in terms of the goals they seek to achieve, and how the ritual acts represent or enact the major themes, is widespread if not universal among culturally competent participants. Yet such publicly recognized, more or less explicitly, interpretations are quite limited in two ways. First of all, many of the specific acts and objects remain uninterrupted, in this more-or-less public tradition: they are simply the conventional way "it is done," the ways enjoined by the ancestors. second, the interpretations and understandings in this exegetical tradition are relatively shallow and superficial.It may be possible, by drawing on esoteric knowledge about magic and ancestors, deriving insights from gifted and specially knowledgeable informants, looking at the whole symbolic system in structural terms, and drawing on western metatheories of symbolism, to construct more deep and global interpretations of Kwaio ritual symbolism. This, of course, is conventional procedure in symbolist anthropology; but here my doubts begin. Can we legitimately attribute these deeper symbolic structure to Kwaio actors? To some of them? All of them? Can we reasonably speak of these structures as part of "Kwaio culture"?Let us look at the case of beritauŋa Culturally competent Kwaio actors (that is, almost all adolescents and adults) know that beritauŋa is performed to generate mamu, and that mamu is the invisible attraction that will draw people and their shell valuables to the mortuary feast that follows the ritual performance.7Mamu, in its most literal sense, is the emanation of odor that irresistibly draws fish to bait and bees to flowers.Beritauŋa is seen as directed at the living through the mediation of ancestors. The offerings of sacrificial pigs will enlist general ancestral support through the medium of mana. This generalized ancestral support is then channeled to specific ends by performance of magical routines, including beritauŋa, weather magic, magic to keep the peace among the guess, and magic to ensure they do not go hungry.The two sides of beritauŋa, as offering to ancestors and magic directed at potential guests, are recognized in the commonplace exegeses and indeed explicit in the rite itself. The "washing" of the pigs with coconut water and painting of their cheeks with betel mix makes them so irresistibly attractive to potential guests that if necessary they will dismantle important valuables to secure the length of shell beads that is the minimal contribution for a guest. But the painting and splashing also renders the sacrificial pigs consecrated to ancestors especially desirable, and marks the participants, and the men and boys who are splashed and painted as well, for special mana. The mamu theme could scarcely be missed by participants since what they recite aloud in unison is a magical spell, which "mamu-izes" the pigs, and so on. The immature taro, coconuts, and betel hung in the taualea represent the attractions of the feast to potential guests—attractions of food, enjoyment, and sociality.The presence of the ancestors in the rite, with their locus around the "posts of the dead," is also explicit. The sacredness of the whole "feast of the dead" centers around this ancestral presence, with the taualea shelter and the posts within as focal points. Just as the ancestors who first cleared the land and still are its ultimate owners receive first fruits of taro pudding or yams before the living can partake, so they—as the senior members of the kin group and the source of its power—are the first to partake of a mortuary feast.Some of the objects and substances used in the rite are explicitly interpreted at this level of public, surface interpretation. Evodia (la`e), a powerfully aromatic flowering shrub cultivated in Kwaio settlements, is explicitly an agent of mamu. This usage is pervasive in Kwaio ritual, and generally understood. Prior to a desacralization rite (molaŋa) after the death of a priest, the bereaved group presents valuables to a coastal fisherman, who contracts to provide fish for the feast; the new priest then throws bespelled sprigs of evodia and another aromatic shrub into the water, to magically attract the fish that have been ordered. The association of evodia as magical "bait," here and elsewhere, is overt and inescapable.Evodia (la`e), catalyzed by an officiate's saliva, also serves as an agent of the desacralization rite (ribaŋa) done before meals and communion with spirits, in the beritauŋa rite, and in many other contexts, prior to the sharing of food with ancestors. Here evodia bespelled, chewed, and spat upon food and those partaking of it, is an agent of molaŋa, as a message to the ancestors: it neutralizes the dangerous sacredness to which commensality would otherwise expose the living. Evodia as agent of desacralization in these contexts, as well as agent of attraction in other contexts, is quite explicitly understood.The publics interpretative tradition is less developed in regard to the cordyline the participants in beritauŋa hold. Cordyline varieties are used over and over again in Kwaio rites, and are cultivated in and around most settlements. The public tradition associates green cordylines in a general way with ancestors, as agents for warding off and as markers of sacred places. Red varieties are associated, at this surface symbolic level, with feuding and vengeance.But for many specific acts, objects, stances, and procedures, this interpretive tradition provides no keys, and indeed motivates no search for hidden meanings. Why fishtail palms? Because that is what you put on taualea. Why these and not something else? Because they are the thatching of the ancestors. Why? A pointless question—Why a coconut? Because that's what you have to break open to get coconut water—Why are taro puddings with coconut cream filling used in some contexts but puddings with grated coconut used in other? Why round puddings or square, "fresh" pudding or baked? The public tradition offers no answers, indeed it neither poses nor entertains such questions.But when I first undertook serious analysis of Kwaio symbolism, in 1969–1970, I of course was not content with surface interpretations. Armed with a vague theory of ritual symbolism derived mainly from Victor Turner (1967, 1974) and T. O. Beidelman (1966), a superficial knowledge of psychoanalytic theory, and conversance with French structuralism, I sought deeper meanings. The whole span of Kwaio ritual became a field of meanings that could be deciphered only in systematic terms; the individual objects or acts, I supposed, would be multivocal symbols whose deployment with one another in particular contexts in terms of a covert grammar, expressed a particular constellation of meanings.Access to this grammar, and the polysemy of particular key symbols—coconuts, cordyline, betel mix—could come partly through the exegeses of a Kwaio Muchona, if I could find one. It would come partly from strategic guesses about symbolism based on the physical nature of the acts, objects, and substances: was the coconut water symbolic semen? Was the "post of the dead" phallic, a sort of primitive cosmic pillar? Was the betel mix blood, and if so, did it represent death, war, or sexuality? Access to the grammar would come partly from probing the cultural uses and natural properties of plants, trees, and substances: what was it about fishtail palm that might make their fronds symbolically salient? It would come in part from global analyses of cosmology, from analyses of texts and fragments of myth.8So I probed deeper, using such clues as I could find—though a Kwaio Muchona never arrived on my doorstep. A series of pervasive structural oppositions emerged in Kwaio cosmology, posing sacredness and pollution as mirror images; and this scheme was mapped in the spatial organization of Kwaio settlements and dwelling houses (Keesing 1977, 1979, [1982a: 58–64]). The cosmological inversion of sacred and polluted realms emerged in many ritual contexts. The procedures whereby, after the death of a priest, a man of the bereaved group retired to his bed in the sacred men's house, out of sight of women and attended and fed by a young man, was a striking mirror image of childbirth seclusion, where the mother retires to her bed in a hut in the forest below the clearing, out of sight of men, and is attended by a young girl. The liminality of the taboo-keeper (suru`ai), in symbolic death and with the ancestors, as the inverse of the mother creating life was in turn illuminated by the cosmology of Lau, in north Malaita, where a similar inversion of sacredness and pollution is developed around the opposition of skull and uterus (Maranda and Maranda 1970).In probing deeper symbolism I arrayed systematically the ritual uses and associations of color, looking for a symbolic code of the sort Turner (1967) describes for the Ndembu. For Kwaio, color symbolism is less developed, but systematic patterns emerged nonetheless: green as symbolic of life, fertility, permanence, stability; red as symbolic of war, violence, anger, and of course blood, with its many associations; black associated primarily with darkness, hence most commonly expressing secrecy or concealment.Color symbolism is deployed, of instance, in the ritual use of cordylines. Cordyline, in Kwaio as in many other parts of Melanesia, is used as a symbol of stability and continuity. The leaves, kept dry above the fire, can be preserved for decades; the plant, long-lived, serves to mark ancient shrines and men's house sites. Taking root easily, cuttings can actually be planted ritually. And the many green and red varieties of Cordyline fruticosa can serve as effective vehicles of color symbolism: red used in vengeance magic, green to keep away malevolent spirits and misfortunes, to symbolize ancient ancestors in yam first fruits rites, or to solicit ancestral communication, as in the beritauŋa.Kwaio cosmology defines a set of states and realms, and transitions between states and boundaries between realms are a focus of ritual and indeed of everyday life. The noumenal world of the spirits and the phenomenal world the living; the sacred, the mundane, and the polluted; nature and culture; socially open and closed to the outside world, are all marked off as states, and transitions between them are ritualized. Physical symbols of state transition—burning, breaking open, chewing, ascending or descending—represent transfers from the phenomenal to the noumenal, from the sacred to the mundane, and so on. Much of Kwaio ritual procedure iconically encodes such transitions, using smoke, spittle, aromatics, and other physical representations of transactions with the ancestors.An analysis of the beritauŋarite, in such terms, would divert us from the major point I shall advance. Let me illustrate the symbolic analyses I assayed on the basis of my 1969–1970 fieldwork by examining the "post of the dead" (bounimae). The post is not physically imposing—some four feet tall, three to five inches in diameter. For some groups for whom this element of the rite is particularly central, descendants of the ancestor from whom it is said to originate, the post is especially sacred, and is wrapped with consecrated forest leaves. For other groups it is simply a length of the tree fern.Most directly, as the public exegesis would have it, the post is an abstract physical representation of the ancestors. It is the locus of their presence in a rite whose composition includes living and dead member of the group. More abstractly, the post represents continuity back to ancient ancestors—a symbolism reinforced not only by its form but by its being implanted in the ground, in Kwaio a pervasive iconic representation of continuity and permanence. That continuity represented by the post bridges the gulf between the physical world of the living and the noumenal world of the spirits, making it an appropriate vehicle for the symbolic offerings of shell valuable and areca tied to it.The post, I inferred, represents as well the nurturance of the living by ancestors. The tree cut for the post in the fully elaborated version of the rite is Alstonia scholaris, the canonical milk tree of Kwaio ritual and magic, and Cyathea tree ferns used in the more mundane version, the pith of which is fed to children and pigs, is also an appropriate symbol of ancestral nurturance solicited in the rite.The evidence for a phallic theme is less substantial. If this is an underlying element, it is a sexuality, as in Indian symbolism (Leach 1958), of fertility and creative powers: it is noteworthy that the leaf wrapping is green, not red, despite the availability of red in the vegetable world as coded in Kwaio culture.Who understands the symbolism?In my subsequent Kwaio research I have been led, both by problems in the data and changes in my own theoretical perspectives, to question whether such symbolic meanings are part of "Kwaio culture," in the sense that understanding them is part of the cultural competence of fully socialized native actors. Given the gulf between the surface interpretations and the deeper ones I had postulated, given the often indirect and fragmentary evidence I had piece