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Sacrificial “As-If” and Avuncular Hilarity

2023; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 30; Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/contagion.30.0069

1930-1200

Wiel Eggen,

Philosophy, Sociology, Political Theory

At my departure for anthropological fieldwork in the Central African Republic (RCA), just after Girard's seminal work La Violence et le sacré had come to upset my structuralist tutors in Paris, I was given a list of penetrating questions to probe in the field, since my research was to be conducted in an area known for its a-cephalous traditions with little or no political or religious centralization.1 The prime critique concerned Girard's apparent return to a bluntly utilitarian vision of myth and religion as the mental framework of society's ritual foundations, in line with Durkheim's functionalist analysis of archaic religion, which was finely reworded in Lord Raglan's recent preface to a cluster of Hocart's articles titled The Life-Giving Myth.2 The approach had come to dominate, as a way of unraveling outdated transcendentalist claims, and also underpinned Freudian and Marxist attacks on religion. After Kant's Critique of Pure Reason had given the lie to any claims of access to transcendent realms, the deontological view of religion as society's functionalist toolbox for orderly conduct became dominant. But, inspired also by such “masters of suspicion” in human sciences, structuralism had set out even beyond that utilitarian perspective. In a decisive bolt of relativism, it took myths to be a mere mental ordering of daily observations into a logical frame, independent of any ritual or social utility. So, how could Girard once again declare social control via rituals to be religion's true aim, allot a prime role to sacrificial rites, and, most alarmingly, thereby raise the suspicion of aiming to rehabilitate Christian dogmas?I was urged to go and check this theory on sacrifices, scapegoating, social rivalry, and on the shaping of archaic society, its forms of authority, and even sacred kingship. Reflecting on the questions, though, I noted that they overlooked a critical point in Girard's hypothesis, which I read as reverse functionalism. In fact, Girard viewed religion's social function and the issuing cultural regulations as rooted in a radical “lie,” or in what he labels méconnaissance. Worded in evolutionary terms, he hypothesized not so much a kind of Darwinian utilitarian adaptation, but rather the alternative of “exaptation,” or what has been called an oblique functionalism.After I had learned enough of the Banda language to start my research, though, my schedules were thrown in disarray on my first evening in the village that was to be my starting point. It presented me with a curious quandary. The village of Wademi, some 25 km north of Ippy, in the sparsely populated wooded savannah, was home to two exogamous patrilineal clans that straddle a little river and sit on a dirt road constructed by the colonial power for the collection of cotton. To oversee this two-clan unit a chief had been appointed with the title of makonji, a loanword from the national Sango language. This gentle, friendly man had offered to host me in his own cemented house and organized a welcome for me in the customary way of staging a pleasant storytelling session, punctuated with joyous songs and dances, lasting well into the night. Most of the stories and songs figured Tere, the famous trickster figure, who resembles Ture in neighboring Azande-land, well documented by E. Evans-Pritchard.3 The enjoyable, moonlit session was shot through with outbursts of laughter. It brought the two clans together, including the women and children. Before turning in, the makonji's junior son, who had been assigned my assistant and interpreter, came to convey his father's sincere but puzzling query, whether Tere actually was the same as Jesus Christ. Actually, his French name in Banda phonetics implied so: Christ Jésu = Tre se te jesu; and “Jesu Christ = Jesu Tre.”4 Taken by surprise and much in need of some rest after a rather demanding day, I politely asked to let the issue rest till the morning.This question was all the more disturbing, as Christians were wont to call Jesus the Lord, and relate this to chieftaincy, which contrasts with Tere's position, notably, as we shall see, in Banda logics, where the makonji is readily viewed as the chief witch.5 I had no real reason to consider the question a joke on the part of my host. Neither could I expect him to be versed in the intricate issues that Girard addressed concerning the relation between the myths collected by anthropologists the world over and the Western vision of Christ. In Girard's understanding, indeed, anthropologists had been comparing the two either to prove their similarity or even to claim the former's superior sophistication—both of which displayed a similar intent.6Two characteristics of the trickster stories stood out for me that night, as I pondered this association of Tere and the Christ. Tere's spectacular failures in his attempts to capitalize on social privileges proper to his avuncular position caused a constant hilarity that was further heightened by the interspersed dances with explicitly erotic gestures. Moreover, his awkward escapades with references to these avuncular privileges seemed to contradict the idea of myths being a support for the dominant patrilineal setup and the chieftain's authority—let alone that they might be compared to the missionaries’ message on the Christ. So, how was I to understand my host's enigmatic question? Having eliminated the idea of it being a practical joke, I faced a basic religious quandary: However preposterous the idea of identifying the trickster and the Christian Savior might seem, the question deserved an earnest reframing as more than an intellectual nosiness about a curious play on words. The issue to face was whether Jesus, whom the gospels report as saying “I am the way, the truth and the way” (Jn. 14:6) and who forbade people ever to abolish a single stroke of the Law (Mt. 5:18), could be identified with the protagonist of the Banda trickster stories. Actually, reading the latter as a support of the social order and its rituals looked totally out of place. So, whatever my answer, it needed to take into account the typical rules of the Banda kinship order and especially the question of whether this storytelling served as a support of the social order, with respect to both its contents and function.Girard has intensely reflected on the comparison between mythological tales and the Christian Gospel, stressing that the latter unravels the all-pervading scapegoating mechanism, by which myths justify the solution to a runaway mimetic crisis, while hinging on a méconnaissance to obfuscate the fact that it ousts a figure arbitrarily blamed for causing the fatal tensions.7 This sacrificial mechanism of stabilizing social order at the expense of arbitrary victims, he argues, is at work in all social constructs and the victims’ innocence is being veiled in mythic tales. Yet if Girard may have convincingly shown that the Gospel unravels this inculpating route by stressing the innocence of the victimized Christ, who was murdered for consistently taking the side of the marginalized and thus saved the entire nation from perishing (Jo. 18:14), now I was asked whether the evangelic Savior might be plausibly aligned with a narrative hero, whose exploits openly target the dominant structures and their victimizing effects. Which similarity between these two might my host have possibly perceived? For this, we need to investigate the Banda social order and the topos of their storytelling.Before studying the particular rules of Banda society, we note that joviality and laughter are widely viewed as typical human traits that might be defined even as humanity's particularity. Although among animals, notably primates, signs of pleasure resembling joviality and even some gestures of relief from social stress are well known, any purposeful actions to cause hilarity seem absent. Philosophers like Bergson have aptly analyzed the phenomenology of laughter, and many anthropologists have studied in detail the various forms of joking relations. In today's English idiom the term “avuncular” is still associated with these facts, meaning “genial, benign, and kindly.” While the terms “hilarity” and “avuncular” are of Greek and Latin origin, they seem appropriate to capture the mood of the Banda trickster story. But they seem far removed from any religious meaning, let alone from sacrificial rituals. The jovial-sounding avuncular derives from the Latin for “little maternal grandpa,” avus, but is rarely linked to the essence of religion, often etymologically explained as a relation (religare) with transcendental matters. Although “hilarity” appears even more remote, there is the curious etymological link with hilasterion, which the Septuagint commonly uses as the Greek equivalent of sacrificial reconciliation in the Hebrew Bible, and which Romans 3:25 applies to Christ, identifying him as sacrificial hilasterion.While Girard stresses the etymology of sacrifice as sacrum facere and emphasizes the violent killing of an (arbitrary) victim as the sacrificial means to halt a greater violence that threatens the community due to a mimetic crisis, many a critic of this theory has slated its one-sided stress on its destructive side. But even if they spell out the rite's peaceable aspect of offering gifts to a divinity, they never come close to describing the sacrificial hilasterion and its Paulinian application to Christ in terms of a social hilarity. So, what is one to make of Christ's identification with the Banda trickster Tere, who causes boisterous laughter for attempting to outclass, humiliate, or even crush others, and who, after meeting his own defeat, climbs back into the sky as the Orion constellation, brewing up a new adventure? Surely, my host could not be acquainted with Christ's ancient affiliation to the Egyptian mythic king Osiris, represented by the constellation of Orion, as a symbol of the eternal cycle of (ritual) death and resurrection? The Banda identification of Tere with the Orion constellation is not part of a mythological complex dealing with murder and rehabilitation, death, and rebirth. Even the imagery of the hunter Orion with his dog Sirius hardly rings a bell to them. Orion's belt is not viewed as a sword or weapon, except in a hilariously metaphorical sense, for it counts as the erected phallus figuring prominently in many of Tere's erotic exploits. This contributed much to their amusement and thereby to my bemusement as well. Awareness of some new studies on the historical-Jesus, in which sexual associations are given a psychological twist that could relate to the trickster imagery, could not lead closer to my host's mindset either, as the psychoanalytic framework of that hermeneutics could hardly have been behind his enigmatic question.By early morning, when I was to offer some reply, I realized that two points had to be taken into account. Firstly, the makonji valued highly the religion of the priest and nun, who visited the village regularly with medical and other services, and on whose behest he had bidden me welcome. Second, he knew of their preaching about the holy man Jesus, who ascended into heaven but was believed to be involved in people's life. So if the white man's belief in that Jesus had a parallel in the hilarious Tere tales, there was no reason to treat his enigmatic question as phony or seeking a scandal. Thus, I had come to the conclusion that the suggested identity of Jesus and Tere was to be viewed in terms of the mediation that religion means to offer. But provisionally I wagered on the fact that my host valued the schooling of his son with its stress on written records. While aware of the risky argument, I stressed the historical records showing that Jesus actually lived on earth, whereas nothing of the sort could be said of Tere.While my host considered this point convincing and left the issue to rest, the reply obviously failed to answer the question. In fact, it rather exposed the true quandary of the mediation. Not only did the written reports on the historical Jesus—whatever their reliability—ignore any point of identity with Tere, but numerous questions about Christianity's scriptural base made Girard expose far-reaching questions we must briefly consider. The issue of writing has been a philosophical topic ever since Plato's Socratic dialogue The Phaedros quoted the Egyptian myth on Teuth, implying that written texts as mnemonic aids carried a threat to people's mental abilities by making them lazy. More importantly, Western philosophy has repeatedly stressed the dangerous abuse of (religious) texts by those in power to establish authority and enforce submission, turning writing into a pharmakon, a poisonous medicine that deceptively promises delivery and salvation. While Plato's argument was about the ambiguous effects of writing on man's mnemonic capacity, Derrida has more recently related it to the double quandary of a metaphysical rationality linked to legal authority and to the enslaving effects, rightly lambasted not only by such recent critics as Nietzsche and Freud, but already by St. Paul's letters, in line with old prophetic critique. The writing in biblical tradition, which had developed from the divinely sanctioned law, Paul controversially viewed as a cause of sin and death, as he contrasted it with the faith that was in Jesus bringing freedom and reconciliation (hilasterion). Reflecting on this, Girard has pointed out that the Nietzschean and Freudian critique of the enslaving effect of Christian scriptures is beside the point and fails to grasp the true portent of the Gospel.8 But even this leaves us with a question.By making historic documents the differentiating factor between Jesus and Tere, I slid into the very quandary of the (post-)colonial setting. Not only was documentary writing the hallmark of the sacrificial order that Girard discerned as being targeted by the Bible's prophetic critique culminating in Christ's Gospel, but the (post-)colonial conditions had deepened this quandary. Indeed, ever-returning mimetic crises and social tensions are counteracted by sacrificial acts that victimize scapegoats on the basis of fixed criteria believed to be absolutes. While the Banda, no doubt, also use this universal means of settling disputes, by blaming individuals who are unable to defend themselves, their tools of doing so have been greatly boosted by the use of fixed documentation. So, with regard to the oral tradition of trickster stories, I wondered whether they might contain the prophetic kind of critique and awareness of what the biblical exegesis had discovered to be the linguistic link between the reconciliatory sacrifice named hilasterion and the social hilarity, due to their common etymological link with hileoos (meaning: joyous, satisfied).9 Their common play on the “as-if” deserves investigating. But for now, we must accept that my option of opposing Jesus’ historically documented life to Tere's imaginary status was a spurious trail, as it postulated an imaginary absolute founded on a historical contingency.10Urged to analyze the place of Tere in Banda social–religious life, we remain intrigued by the idea that Christ‘s historical role was associated with the hilasterion, being the sacrifice that cheers up (hileoos). How is any enjoyable effect of the sacrifice to be related to hilarity at the storytelling about joker Tere? While examining this mythic figure, we note that sacrificial ceremonies are few and quite sober in Banda society. The killing of a fowl at whatever ritual site may be preceded by palpable tension and be followed by a relief and joviality at the meal that usually follows, but I have never observed such a sacrifice being directly followed by a hilarious storytelling. Let us, therefore, briefly analyze the Banda society with the pivotal role of its kinship rules and religious traditions, to place trickster Tere within that scheme.The Banda ethnic group forms a very loose agglomeration of patrilineal clans living in small units spread over thousands of square miles of sparsely populated wooded savannah, between North Cameroon and West Sudan, mainly north of the Ubangi confluent of the Congo river. The language is their main connecting factor, but the dialects differ greatly, often reducing the intercomprehension to less than 40%. Tonal registers are linguistically more important than articulation, making drum communication in the savannah quite effective, even between the dialects. Their well-articulated kinship rules, reflected in their storytelling, songs, and dances, form another binding factor, together with a common economic base of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle joined to small slash-and-burn horticulture. Communication by slit drums marks both the desire for independence and a profound sense of togetherness. Since these drums transmit important events such as deaths, ritual inaugurations of newly carved ones are big events that are placed under the auspices of the ancestors, represented by a young, not yet initiated child.Subsequent to the welcoming session, these drums made me discover a basic paradox of the Banda social order. The dominant, large and low-pitched drum was indicated as the female one (èyí), whereas the high-pitched ones were called male. The female or mother, èyí, is the word used for anything big, useful, or superior, designating even ownership and mastership. Given their patrilineal order, this obviously puzzled me. But my informer was surprised to see me bemused, and asked, “Didn't I feel the life vibrating in my belly at the big drum's low pitch?” The term èyí expresses what makes a thing function and be productive, its maternal fertility. The owner of a hunting net is its èyí, and a smith is the èyí of the smithy (ndawo, house of fire). I was the èyí of my bike, and if I had two bikes, the bigger one was èyíne, the female, the superior one. I felt mystified by this curious deviation from what is a rather universal way of males marking superiority over women, certainly in patrilineal conditions like the Banda?11This peculiar role of the term èyí (mother, female, master) marks a perspective on reality, rooted in a kinship structure, which holds other surprising aspects, while creating a strikingly transparent order in a society without overarching power structures. The Banda system of kinship terms is simple and quite distinct. Where other peoples typically have between twenty and sixty or more of such terms, the Banda use just three sets of five terms. Only one of these sets consists of nonreciprocal terms and appears to apply to a nuclear family (father, mother, husband, wife, child). However, we must note that any Banda kinship term is classificatory in the sense of designating a whole class of people. Thus, “father” also refers to all men whom the actual father calls a “brother” (aye). Similarly, even “wife” and “husband” are classificatory and this applies in a special sense to the two sets of the reciprocal terms. One of these sets indicates consanguinity and the other affinity. The term àtà for grandparents is reciprocal and thus also applies to the grandchildren. The same applies for brothers and sisters, addressing each other by the same term kòbá, while siblings of the same sex address each other by the reciprocal term aye. In these pages we focus on a particular one of these reciprocal terms, è’ú, which designates the bond between a man and his sister's children (m/f). This term figures prominently in the trickster stories, since Tere is the proverbial uncle/nephew, who invariantly uses and abuses the rules and privileges pertaining to this special è’ú bond. The term is indeed the epitome of all nonhierarchical relations, be they of age or other grading.12To locate the two pivotal terms of èyí and è’ú, and their religious connotations, in the Banda mental landscape, we must first consider the dominant patrilineal order and its economic and political base. Before French colonial occupation, the Banda subsistence economy of hunting and fishing mixed with slash-and-burn cultivation of sorghum and vegetables knew only a rudimentary monetary system of cowry shells for the exchange at weddings or to settle feuds. Additionally, there were some fowl in most homesteads, which also served for the settling of such deals, mostly by way of a sacrifice. A valuable source of protein was the yearly flight of edible termites. This type of economy urged regular shifts of hamlets moving through the savannah. Centered around the altar of the paternal ancestors, each hamlet had a patrilineal claim to the surrounding fields. Theft of produce or equipment was a serious offense, on a par with witchcraft and even murder. Real estate rules were rather fluid. So were political structures of authority. The elders of the clan's patrilineal homesteads formed a council and, if need be, a court. But conflicts usually translated into witchcraft litigations that were settled by oracles, comparable to what Evans-Pritchard famously described for Azande-society.13Two external forces have caused the segmentary patrilineal order to become more centralized. The relentless slaving raids by Arab bands from the Sudan, active even up to the present, occasioned the emergence of a temporary military leadership, which sometimes confronted the colonial armies as well. Next, the colonial authorities constructed roads and forced hamlets to move and settle along them, to start cultivating cotton, pay taxes, and submit to chiefs, created to oversee this innovation. Although this rigidified the ancient patrilineal order, it did not wipe out the basic ambiguity. Each person belongs to the father's clan, but children born out of wedlock belong to the woman's paternal group. At her wedding a woman typically joins her man's homestead, which consists of mud-and-thatch houses built for each of the incoming wives. But the woman remains a member of her clan. A house is the woman's domain, as is also the area just behind it, where even the husband is not supposed to tread. Until their initiation, both girls and boys are deemed part of the patrilineal ancestors’ world and may represent them to bless events such as the carving of new drums or the inauguration of an oven for melting iron ore.The initiation (gànzà) intends to change the children's androgynous state and prepare them for a procreating clan membership. It is done by a surgical operation on what is alleged to block it by removing the other sex's remainder (prepuce and clitoris). Separate for boys and girls, the ceremonies carry also an ambiguous message. While they make the youngsters full-fledged members of their patriclan, they also impose a strict duty to view their co-initiates along the informal è’ú line that marks the link to a maternal uncle. Both boys and girls will soon receive their patriclan's protective emblem (yéwò), but will also at some other time get a protective ring (lìngú) from their mother, which only girls will pass on to their offspring. Several such rituals make it clear that the dominant paternal domain has to accommodate a parallel world of the mother (èyí), so much so that the deity protecting the female emblem, the èyílìngú, is often identified with the Christian God, even though the latter is known as God the Father.Despite the constant references to the maternal world by the use of the term èyí to designate ownership, the feminine notion of the house àndà, and transcendence of èyílìngú, the Banda mental scenery and sense of solidarity are strictly patrilineal. The symbols and rituals that stress the patrilineal grip on daily life are manifold. This is not the place to attempt an inventory of the means by which the patriclan ensures its grip on all members, running from offerings at the ancestral altar in the center of the hamlet to the food taboos and scarifications. Solidarity is segmentary, meaning that helping in house building, in harvesting and storing the crop, and in facing conflicts or attacks is expected from those nearest to one's paternal descent line. Yet this patriclan's grip on the members is also limited by the savannah's special conditions that facilitate parting in search of a new location, whenever internal pressures become unbearable.Patrilineal solidarity is felt especially at events like the outdooring of a baby, the initiation, the wedding, and in the case of mishaps, disease, or death. A few days after birth a baby is brought out into the central space of the hamlet, thereby passing from the maternal to the paternal domain. This passage will be completed years later by the most spectacular of all rites, the gànzà initiation, when the child will leave not only the ancestral domain, but dramatically also the maternal realm of influence, to enter totally into the responsibility of the clan. This is cut into the flesh by a surgical removal of the remnants of the rival sex. Completing what may count as the universal psychosocial drama of any child's departure from the womb and the weaning from maternal care, the gànzà ceremony of ritual transition to the paternal realm is quite dramatic. Less spectacular than for the boys, the gànzà ceremony for girls, while festive too, is very ambiguous and painful, as it marks them to become the group's link to another clan, for whom they will bear offspring, in a servile position that is basically contradicted.Boys go to a gànzá seclusion to undergo not just a painful and potentially fatal operation, but also a symbolic death so as to emerge from the ancestral home as an adult clan member. This will be completed only by their first killing of a hunting prey. Gànzà songs speak of a second birth amid the flow of blood, as if the maternal primacy is annulled and replaced by the circumciser. At this rite the boys’ mothers and sisters are to stay aloof and sing dirges, as if at a funeral. The separation gets another ritual twist at marriage, when the young man is to fetch a wife from a distant exogamous clan across the dangerous savannah, and finally at the birth of his own child. The rituals of these events suggest a radical option for the patrilineal order and a brutal sidelining of the maternal. Yet this emotional drama leaves a perplexing imagery of a male attempt to compensate “natural inferiority,” an “as-if,” rooted in a méconnaissance of the subdued truth, as if it were a structural recompense in ritual and mythical mode.14The patrilineal identity and solidarity capture people patently during the frequent consultation of oracles. When mishaps raise fears of witchcraft, the prime suspects invariably are expected to be the in-laws of the patriclan. Since women remain members of their own patriclan, their brothers will monitor closely how they are treated, leading to suspicions of witchcraft more often than not. Like the Azande, the Banda think of witchcraft as a largely unconscious action of an internal organ near the bile. This allows one's mind to go out and wreak havoc, if one is provoked by an adverse and unkind behavior. Whatever the techniques used to examine this crime, in Girardian perception, the oracles are outspoken cases of scapegoating, shaded by the veiled conviction that the culprit is condemned for a crime that basically is unconscious and also provoked. While this witchcraft belief causes tensions between the patrilineal groups, it is thus known to rest on an “as-if” that may easily backfire in various ways. The suspicion of witchcraft is typically about daily worries and conflicts. Because the capacity to act as a witch is inborn from birth and may lay dormant unless provoked, the first one to be blamed should, in fact, be the person stricken, or some kinsmen. But since this would sow discord within the clan, the blame is projected outside. The oracles focus on the in-laws, thereby placing women in an awkward position. But they put the patrilineal relations under strain as well, making the scenes of witch-hunting a most divisive feature in Banda society.This divisive role of oracles in the kinship order takes us indirectly back to the question about Tere, the hilarious and avuncular figure. The ambiguity surrounding witchcraft accusations, subconsciously known to be the outcome of previous provocations, often creates animosity between paternal and maternal links. To find your father's kin accusing a maternal relative is a rather traumatic experience, which not only occurs frequently but is also structurally built into Banda social order, where the in-laws are the first suspects. The violent rivalry Girard describes notably in the ninth chapter of his La Violence et le sacré15 is typical of the painful clashes between patrilineal relations and the è’ú bond of uncles with their sister's children. Yet the maternal group that is always suspected by your paternal kinsmen actually offers you a haven of kindness free from whatever restrictions. It is this jovial è’ú subterfuge that indeed features in numerous Tere adventures.Girard has famously commented on Levi-Strauss's study of elementary kinship structures that highlights the so-called atom of kinship, opposing the brother–sister relationship to the marital bond, and comparing paternity to the avuncular bond. Although this structuralist approach has often been accused of being too exclusively male-focused and failing to account for the primacy of the mother–child relation, Girard rather targeted a more basic flaw. He praises the choice of viewing the marital exchange mechanism as the motor of the kinship systems, but points out that this is not a matter of irenic social contracts, but rather part of the dramatic response to an original mimetic crisis. Among Girardians, Lucien Scubla and Martha Reinecke have fittingly called for a more explicit application of his views to the gender issues. Their shared critique of the structuralist approach seems well focused within Banda context, where the