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Viscerality, faith, and skepticism

2016; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 6; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14318/hau6.3.033

2575-1433

Michael Taussig,

Anthropological Studies and Insights

Previous articleNext article FreeViscerality, faith, and skepticism Another theory of magicMichael TaussigMichael TaussigColumbia University Search for more articles by this author Columbia UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore“Underlying all our mystic states are corporeal techniques, biological methods of entering into communication with God.”– Marcel Mauss, “Les techniques du corps,” 1960“The sorcerer generally learns his time-honored profession in good faith, and retains his belief in it more or less from first to last; at once dupe and cheat, he combines the energy of a believer with the cunning of a hypocrite.”– Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive culture, 1871Habituated as we are these post–9/11 days to the dramaturgy of Homeland Security—who can still remember the color-coded warnings of terror whenever the president’s ratings were falling or the advice to place plastic sheeting on the windows?—there is one act of theater that still seems fresh and daring: the revealing glimpse of stately being provided by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft when he ordered Justice have her fulsome breast covered by suitable drapes. It was as if he had taken to heart what, according to students’ notes, the learned anthropologist Marcel Mauss had said in Paris sometime in the 1920s, that “underlying all our mystic states are corporeal techniques, biological methods of entering into communication with God” (Mauss 1979). Later on with untold millions watching the 2004 Super Bowl on television, the singer Janet Jackson had a wardrobe malfunction in which her dress slipped to reveal for an instant the breast that the attorney general had had to cover up. Laws were instantly drafted against indecency in the media. A year later the noted evangelist Pat Robertson told viewers on his television show that the United States should kill Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, described in the New York Times as “a leftist whose country has the largest oil reserves outside of the Middle East.” Claiming that “this is even more threatening to hemispheric stability than the flash of a breast on television during a ballgame,” the Reverend Jesse Jackson called for the Federal Communications Commission to investigate, just as it did when Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed (Goodstein and Forero 2005, A10).Mauss hardly needed to add that clothing—that second skin—goes hand in hand with “corporeal techniques” for reaching the holy. One has only to think of the passions aroused by the veil in Islam, nuns’ and priests’ habits in Christianity, the scarlet robes of cardinals, the pope’s miter, the orange robes and haircuts of Buddhist monks, and the layers of black and white cloth, white string, and large black hats of Jewish men’s orthodoxy, let alone the postures and body movements for praying, to get the point, strange as it may seem. Even nudism is a kind of religion. It is strange, is it not, that something so intensely spirited and spiritual as communicating with God should be so tied to the flesh and, at the very same time, be so tied to covering it, uncovering it, and even mutilating it?Intense it certainly is. Those of us fortunate enough to live in the United States have become acutely aware these days of such “corporeal techniques” that in media form allow the populace to enter into communication with God, techniques so downright earthy and body-saturated that they leave the Christian and Muslim penitents lashing themselves to bloody frenzy far behind, no less than the nuns of early modern Europe glorying in their infected wounds. In Flemish painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it is common to see Christ the Crucified with a neatly made, vagina-shaped, incision on his right chest, level with the nipple. In one painting I know of, the wound emits golden rays of fine droplets that take up a good third of the painting. Leo Steinberg has dedicated much of his formidable scholarship to the ubiquity in Renaissance painting, north and south of the Alps, of what looks like a large, sometimes very large, erection on Christ’s part while on the cross (Steinberg 1996). What is just as noteworthy is the cover-up. For not only is Christ naked except for an awkwardly bulging sheet, but centuries have passed without mentioning this unmentionable, as likewise with the equally large number of paintings of the Virgin adoring the baby Christ’s dick. If it wasn’t for the fact that people choose, perhaps unconsciously, not to see this, one can only imagine what a busy time people like the attorney general could be having in the War against This Terror.But fortunately for us those barbarous displays of spiritual devotion devoted to covering and uncovering the body are long past. Today in the West, church and temple have long been sanitized, and the evidence lies safely ensconced in the no-less-sanitary and no-less-hallowed rooms of art museums. Instead, religion has found other and better “corporeal techniques for entering into communication with God,” absolutely life-and-death issues including fanatical opposition to abortion, gay marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia, condoms, and the sale of “morning-after” pill. (But not Viagra.) That this opposition wins national elections and hence shapes the fate of the world is now painfully obvious, and thus these corporeal techniques merit closer examination.In the sorts of societies traditionally studied by anthropologists, in which religion was in the hands of so-called shamans, witch-doctors, and sorcerers, such corporeal techniques can be viewed as forms of conjuring based on sleight of hand, which is what assures them their ability to enter into communication with God. This is conjuring, but with a twist. And what is this twist? It is quite marvelous and amounts to the skilled revelation of skilled concealment—witness Janet Jackson’s briefest of brief revelations and the attorney general’s cover-up. Witness the crucified Christ’s erection that nobody sees. What we have here is an art form dedicated to cheating, or should I say contrived misperception, a corporeal technique that not only evokes something sacred but that involves deceiving oneself as well. Religion is certainly strange. In the mid-nineteenth century in Oxford, England, the celebrated founder of anthropology, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, put it like this: The sorcerer generally learns his time-honored profession in good faith, and retains his belief in it more or less from first to last; at once dupe and cheat, he combines the energy of a believer with the cunning of a hypocrite. (Tylor 1871)By “sorcerer,” Tylor was not necessarily thinking of attorneys general, but it is established in the ethnographic record that law in so-called primitive societies is very much a matter of sorcery, if by that term we include, as is generally the case, medicine and religion. What is more, Tylor puts his finger on something timeless here, fascinating and timeless, which is that faith seems to require that one be taken in by what one professes while at the same time suspecting it is a lot of hooey.At once dupe and cheat, Tylor said—truly an amazing state of affairs, mixing recognition with denial, blindness with insight. Here faith seems to not only happily coexist with skepticism but demands it, hence the interminable, mysterious, and complex movement back and forth between revelation and concealment. Could it follow, therefore, that magic is efficacious not despite the trick but on account of its exposure? Let me flesh this out, beginning with what for me stands as the primal scene of conjuring on the part of the sorcerer.Uttermost parts and humbuggeryIn his wonderfully evocative and informative autobiography, Lucas Bridges, son of a missionary turned sheep farmer, tells us how he grew up playing with Indian children around 1900 on Isla Grande, one of many islands, peninsulas, and waterways that make up Tierra del Fuego. He learnt at least one of the native languages, and by the time he was an adult he was tempted to learn the ways of the sorcerer, ways which were, in essence, very puzzling because the fear of magic coexisted with disbelief in the magicians. Note that magic, in the form of killing by means of sorcery, was common. The first among the Ona Indian superstitions, according to Bridges, was “fear of magic and of the power of magicians, even on the part of those who, professing that art, must have known that they themselves were humbugs. They had great fear of the power of others” (Bridges 1951: 406). He went to say that “some of these humbugs were excellent actors,” and it will be useful for us to follow him in his description of what he calls “acting” and observe the focus, if not obsession, with the “object,” an object withdrawn from the interstices of the living, human, body.Standing or kneeling beside the patient, gazing intently at the spot where the pain was situated, the doctor would allow a look of horror to come over his face. Evidently he could see something invisible to the rest of us. . . . With his hands he would try to gather the malign presence into one part of the patient’s body—generally the chest—where he would then apply his mouth and suck violently. Sometimes this struggle went on for an hour, to be repeated later. At other times the joon would draw away from his patient with the pretense of holding something in his mouth with his hands. Then always facing away from the encampment, he would take his hands from his mouth gripping them tightly together, and, with a guttural shout difficult to describe and impossible to spell, fling this invisible object to the ground and stamp fiercely upon it. Occasionally a little mud, some flint or even a tiny, very young mouse might be produced as the cause of the patient’s indisposition. (Bridges 1951: 262)1As an aside let us take note of the eyes of the great medicine man, Houshken, perforce an expert in physiognomy. He was over six feet tall and his eyes were exceedingly dark, almost blue black. “I had never seen eyes of such color,” muses Bridges, and he wondered whether Houshken was nearsighted. Far from it. For not only was the man a mighty hunter, but it was said that he could look through mountains. These are also the sort of eyes that can look through the human body, as was brought out when Bridges allowed another famous medicine man, Tininisk (who twenty years later became one of Father Martin Gusinde’s most important informants), to induct him into the ways of the medicine man. Half-reclining naked on guanaco skins by the fire sheltered by a windbreak, Bridges’s chest was gone over by the medicine man’s hands and mouth as intently, said Bridges, as any doctor with a stethoscope, “moving in the prescribed manner from place to place, pausing to listen here and there.” Then come those eyes again, those eyes that can see through mountains, the mountain of the body. “He also gazed intently at my body, as though he saw through it like an X-ray manipulator” (Bridges 1951: 406).Having eyes like these eyes is helpful for seeing through the world, but perhaps the implication this carries is misleading. For penetrating as these eye are, it could be the nature of the material looked through that is special. For it seems that solids, like the body, are, under certain conditions at least, unstable and transparent.The medicine man and his helper stripped naked. The medicine man’s wife, one of the rare women healers, took off her outer garment, and the three of them huddled and produced something Bridges thought was of the lightest gray down, shaped like a puppy and about four inches long with pointed ears. It had the semblance of life, perhaps due to the handlers’ breathing and the trembling of their hands. There was a peculiar scent as the “puppy” was placed by the three pairs of hands to his chest, where, without any sudden movement, it disappeared. Three times this was repeated, and then after a solemn pause Tininisk asked whether Bridges felt anything moving in his heart or if he could see something strange in his mind, like in a dream?But Bridges felt nothing, and eventually decided to abandon what he had found to be a fascinating course of studies because for one thing, he would have to frequently lie, “at which I was not very clever,” and for another, it would separate him from his Ona friends. “They feared the sorcerers; I did not wish them to fear me, too” (Bridges 1951: 264).2 Yet, although his desire to learn magic waned, it never completely left him.Some twenty years later Father Martin Gusinde was informed by the Indians that the “puppy” was made of the white feathers of newborn birds and a shaman’s entire body, other than the skin, was made of this stuff. It was this substance that gave the shaman his special powers—his penetrating sight, his ability to divine, to reach out and kill, and sing as well (Gusinde 1982: 18).When he later met up with the famous Houshken, about whom he had heard so much, Bridges told him he had heard of his great powers and would like to see some of his magic. The moon was full that night. Reflected on the snow on the ground, it cast the scene like daylight. Returning from the river, Houshken began to chant, put his hands to his mouth, and withdrew a strip of guanaco hide three times the thickness of a shoelace and about eighteen inches long. His hands shook and gradually drew apart, the strip stretching to about four feet. His companion took one end and the four feet extended to eight, then suddenly disappeared back into Houshken’s hands to become smaller and smaller such that when his hands were almost together he clapped them to his mouth, uttered a prolonged shriek, and then held out his hands, completely empty.Even an ostrich, comments Bridges, could not have swallowed those eight feet of hide without a visible gulp. But where else could it have gone but back into the man’s body? He had no sleeves. He stood butt naked in the snow with his robe on the ground. What’s more, there were between twenty and thirty men present, but only a third of them were Houshken’s people and the rest were far from being friendly. “Had they detected some simple trick,” writes Bridges, “the great medicine man would have lost his influence; they would no longer have believed in any of his magic” (Bridges 1951: 285).Houshken put on his robe and seemed to go into a trance as he stepped toward Bridges, let his robe fall to the ground, put his hands to his mouth again, withdrew them, and when they were less than two feet from Bridges’s face slowly drew them apart to reveal a small, almost opaque, object, about an inch in diameter, tapering into his hands. It could have been semitransparent elastic or dough but whatever it was, it seemed to be alive, revolving at great speed.The moon was bright enough to read by as he drew his hands apart, and Bridges realized suddenly the object was no longer there. “It did not break or burst like a bubble; it simply disappeared.” There was a gasp from the onlookers. Houshken turned his hands over for inspection. They were clean and dry. Bridges looked down at the ground. Stoic as he was, Houshken could not resist a chuckle, for there was nothing to be seen. “Don’t let it trouble you. I shall call it back to myself again.”By way of ethnographic explanation, Bridges tells us that this curious object was believed to be “an incredibly malignant spirit belonging to, or possibly part of, the joon (medicine man) from whom it emanated.” It could take a physical form. Or it could be invisible. It had the power to introduce insects, tiny mice, mud, sharp flints, or even a jellyfish or a baby octopus into the body of one’s enemy. “I have seen a strong man shudder involuntarily at the thought of this horror and its evil potentialities” (Bridges 1951: 286). “It was a curious fact,” he adds, that “although every magician must have known himself to be a fraud and a trickster, he always believed in and greatly feared the supernatural abilities of other medicine-men” (Bridges 1951: 286).Viscerality and The gay scienceAt this juncture I want to draw your attention to several things about the sleight of hand involved here in the manipulation of the human body. First, there is the use of the body as a receptacle, a “holy temple,” whose boundary has to be traversed. This is the basic, the essential, staging for the perpetual play of moving inside and outside, implanting and extracting . . . whether it be the shaman’s body, the patient’s body, the enemy’s body, or the body of a novice shaman during training.Then there is the exceedingly curious object that is said to be a spirit belonging to the body of the medicine man; it appears to be alive yet is an object all the same; it marks the exit from and reentry into the body; it has a remarkably indeterminate quality—note the weird elasticity of the guanaco strip and the semitransparent dough or elastic revolving at high speed—all acting like extensions of the human body and thus capable of connecting with and entering into other bodies, human and nonhuman.There exists a Central European version of this weird doughlike spinning thing and it is called Odradek, the hero of a one-and-a-half page story, “The cares of a family man” (Kafka 1983). The author, Franz Kafka, tells us that the origin of the name Odradek is perplexing, and from his account it is impossible to know whether Odradek is a person, an animal, or an object. Odradek seems like a person in some ways, can speak and respond to questions, for instance, and can move fairly nimbly, like an animal. Yet it is nothing but an old star-shaped cotton reel with bits of different colored thread and a couple of little sticks poking out either end. It lurks on thresholds and cul-de-sacs, on the stairs and in the hallway. When it laughs it is like the rustling of dead leaves. We are unsure as to whether he can die.Kafka himself did not employ sleight of hand. His writing was sufficient. Odradek was an extension of Kafka, his body no less than his mind, similar to the “puppy” of white feathers of newborn birds emerging from Tininisk to enter the body of his patients or victims. Kafka’s stories are not stories at all. They rely on gesture, the bodily equivalent of words, words that suddenly shoot out of syntax and take on a life of their own, like the Selk’nam revolving dough emergent from the shaman’s mouth. Kafka never felt at home in his body. He was bound to empathy and metamorphosis. Remember the man who became a bug? And the facial tic that tics away on its own?In Kafka’s account, Odradek is both exotic and familiar, fantastic and ordinary. Perhaps this is the same for the “puppy” among the Selk’nam described by Lucas Bridges and by Father Gusinde. Such creatures are more than creaturely; they are sudden appearances and equally mysterious disappearances; they are movement, most notably bodily movement, meaning not only the place of the body in space, nor simply rapid extension of limbs in what is almost a form of dance, but also movements of egress and ingress, of insides into outsides and vice versa combined with a movement of sheer becoming in which being and nonbeing are transformed into the beingness of transforming forms.Such creatures refer us to the metamorphosing capacity of curious unnamable animated objects able to become more clearly recognizable but out-of-place things such as baby octopi or mud or a flint in the body of the enemy rendered sick and dying, a capacity on the part of these creatures not only for change but also for an implosive viscerality that would seem to hurl us beyond the world of the symbol and that penny-in-the-slot resolution called meaning.Above all at this point, I want to draw attention to the spectacular display of magical feats and tricks and to wonder about their relationship to the utterly serious business of killing and healing people. This combination of trickery, spectacle, and death must fill us with some confusion, even anxiety, about the notion of the trick and its relation to both theater and science, let alone to truth and fraud. We therefore need to dwell upon this corrosive power creeping along the otherwise imperceptible fault lines in the sturdy structure of language and thought, splicing games and deceit to matters of life and death, theater to reality, this world to the spirit world, and trickery to the illusion of a world without trickery—the most problematic trick of all. Here one can sympathize with Friedrich Nietzsche where he writes that “all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view and the necessity of perspectives and error,” no less than with the attempt by Horkheimer and Adorno to position not Eve and the tree of knowledge of good and evil but shamanism and its magic as the true fall from grace onto the first faltering steps of Enlightenment and what has come to be called science, imitating nature so as to control nature, including human nature, transforming the trick into techniques of domination over nature and people (Nietzsche 1968: 23; Horkheimer and Adorno 1969: 3-43).Faced with this world based on semblance, art, and deception, Nietzsche advises us not to labor under the illusion of eliminating trickery on the assumption that there is some other world out there beyond and bereft of trickery. The trick will always win, especially when exposed. What we should do instead is practice our own form of shamanism, if that’s the word, and come up with a set of tricks, simulations, and deceptions in a continuous movement of counterfeint and feint strangely contiguous with yet set against those weighing on us. It is something like this nervous system, I believe, that Nietzsche had in mind with his Gay science, a “mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art” built around the idea, if I may put it this way, that exposure of the trick is no less necessary to the magic of magic than is its concealment (Nietzsche 1974: 37).3“To describe any considerable number of tricks carried out by the shamans, both Chuckchee and Eskimo, would require too much space”When Catherine the Great opened up the wastes of Siberia to European explorers in the eighteenth century they were first not called shamans but jugglers—jugglers as in conjurers. The name shaman came later, being the name used by one of the indigenous cultures, that of the Tungus, for one of several classes of their healers. From its inception, the naming and presentation of the figure of the shaman by anthropologists was profoundly linked to trickery by means of startling revelations about ventriloquism, imitations of animal spirit voices, curtained chambers, mysterious disappearances and reappearances, semisecret trapdoors, knife tricks, and so forth, including—if trick is the word here, and why not?—sex changes by men and women.By the last quarter of the twentieth century, so-called shamans came to be thought of by anthropologists and by laymen as existing everywhere throughout the world and throughout history as a universal type of magical and religious being, and the trickery tended to be downplayed as the mystical took center stage. The term itself had become early on diffused throughout Western languages, thanks to the ethnography of Siberia begun in the late nineteenth century, the phenomenon thus joining an illustrious company of colonially derived native terms enriching European languages such as totemism, taboo, mana, and even cannibalism, words at once familiar yet mysterious as if freighted by their indigenous meanings and contexts.4Hearken to the wonderful tricks presented by Waldemar Bogoras for the Chukchi shaman he met in Siberia, Bogoras’s 1904 monograph being one of the high points in the birth of shamanism as a Western object of study (Bogoras 1969: 433-67). Bogoras was fascinated, for instance, by the shamans’ skill in ventriloquy creating soundscapes so complex and multiply layered that it seemed like you had become immersed in a spirit world. Bogoras took pains to capture the trick of voice throwing onto a wax cylinder, phonographic record, and was surprised that he could do so, delighted by his own trickery. The shaman sat over there, throwing his voice, but the voice emerged right here, out of the phonogram! I heard the same thing a century later, two years ago in the oral examination of a doctoral student who had gotten hold of a copy. This was one of those especially fine tricks from everyone’s point of view. To the white man it conflated two magics, that of the mimetically capacious shaman with that of the modern mimetic machine. To the native it must have been satisfying to have another happy client.Another form of trick performed by a shaman was wringing her hands to make a large pebble reproduce a continuous row of small pebbles on top of her drum. Bogoras tried to trick her into revealing her trick, but he was unable to. This is an important moment in the Western investigation of shamanism and we should not let it pass unnoticed no matter how much our attention is focused on the shaman’s tricks. It is a touching moment when the anthropologist tries to outsmart the shaman, something you don’t generally come across as recommended in standard texts on field methods such as Notes and queries. We shall observe it in detail later with E. E. Evans-Pritchard in Africa in the early 1930s.Another of this shaman’s tricks was to rip open the abdomen of her son to find and remove the cause of illness. “It certainly looked as if the flesh was really cut open,” said Bogoras. On both sides, from under the fingers flowed little streams of blood, trickling to the ground. “The boy lay motionless; but once or twice moaned feebly, and complained that the knife had touched his entrails.” The shaman placed her mouth to the incision and spoke into it. After some moments she lifted her head, and the boy’s body was quite sound. Other shamans made much of stabbing themselves with knives. Tricks are everywhere. As Bogoras concludes, “To describe any considerable number of tricks carried out by the shamans, both Chuckchee and Eskimo, would require too much space” (Bogoras 1969: 447). Yet can we resist mentioning a couple more? Upune, for instance, “pretended to draw a cord through her body, passing it from one spot to another. Then suddenly she drew it out, and immediately afterward pretended to cut it in two and with it the bodies of several of her children, who sat in front of her. These and other tricks resemble to a surprising degree the feats of jugglers all over the world. Before each performance, Upune would even open her hands, in the graceful manner of a professor of magic, to show us she had nothing in them.” The greatest trick was not that of being able to descend and walk in the underground but to change one’s sex, thanks to help from the spirits, a change that could well eventuate, at least in the case of a man, in his taking male lovers or becoming married to a man. Such “soft men,” as they were called, were feared for their magic more than unchanged men or women (Bogoras 1969: 447).A can of wormsEvery year from 1975 to 1997 I would visit the Putumayo region of Colombia’s southwest, a strikingly beautiful landscape of cloud forested steeply sloped ravines saturated in sorcery. I lived with my shaman friend, Santiago Mutumbajoy, a well-known indigenous healer using hallucinogens and music, and at onepoint, before the guerrilla war became really serious, we were thinking of setting up a dual practice. I would do the Western medicine, he would do the rest. He would laugh a lot and loved jokes, usually in the form of gossip or stories about people and the strange situations in which they found themselves. There was one joke he loved in particular. It summed up centuries of colonial history and the ways by which history played a trick on itself: Europe’s conquest of the New World imputed magical powers to the savage such that modern-day colonists of the region, poor whites and blacks, and lately well-to-do urbanites, would seek out forest Indians for their alleged shamanic powers. Santiago Mutumbajoy found this uproariously funny, a trick to beat all tricks, as if keeping in reserve the other sort of magic, the “true” magic we might say, that came from centuries if not millennia of Indian history and culture. But of course was it possible in practice to separate these two sorts of magics?But the joke was on me in other ways as well. Like when I asked him how he became a shaman. When he was young and recently married, he replied, his wife was constantly ill. He and she consulted shaman after shaman at great expense with no relief until, one day, they heard that a white doctor was being sent by the government to the nearby town to treat Indians. They dressed in their finery, including swathes of necklaces of tiny colored glass beads, and walked to town. “Make way for the Indians! Make way for the Indians!” people said. On the balcony of a two-story house was the doctor. To her consternation he made his wife take off her shirt and began to palpate her chest, drumming one finger on top of another, laid flat, such that hollow booms followed muffled ones. He said she was anemic and gave her parasite medicine. A small boy they met going home explained there was more than one type of anemia.When she defecated a day or so later she expelled a lot of worms. “Look here!” she exclaimed. Santiago Mutumbajoy went over and looked. A great rage seized him. All those shamans had been fakes. And at that moment he decided to become a shaman.“A peculiar state of mind . . . it would be wonderful if a man could talk with animals and fishes”“It is perfectly well-known by all concerned,” wrote the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas toward the end of his career, that “