Academic Autobiography (2c)—Tristes Tropiques

One year ago on Round and Square (29 September 2011)—Fieldnotes From History: Cuisine
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Academic Autobiography"

[a] Perspective RF

Click here for the other posts in this Round and Square series on Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques:

Tristes 1          Tristes 2          Tristes 3          Tristes 4          Tristes 5          Tristes 6

III—Anecdotal Origins

          In exploring all this, I was being true to myself as an archaeologist of space, 
          seeking in vain to recreate a lost local colour with the help of fragments and 
          debris. Then, insidiously, illusion began to lay its snares. I wished I had lived 
          in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full 
          splendour of a spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted, and spoilt; 
          I wished I had not troddent that ground as myself, but as Bernier, Tavernier 
          or Manucci did...[1]

[b] Origins RF

The search for origins is a key to Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology. The discipline is, he argues (at least when practiced correctly), a fundamentally receptive one. This goes far toward explaining for anthropologists (others have been less puzzled) why Tristes tropiques is such difficult reading, why it is, in the words of an American anthropologist, “though very far from being a great anthropology book, or even an especially good one…surely one of the finest books written by an anthropologist. Reading Tristes tropiques as one does a standard ethnography has led countless anthropologists to throw up (their hands) in despair. What, even a careful reader might ask, is Lévi-Strauss doing with the details he relates—a play in Calcutta, the description of a sunset, a snatch from the draft of a play written twenty years earlier (forgetting how it ended)? Let's continue with the quotation (one of the most famous in the book) that began this post.

          Once embarked upon, this guessing game can continue indefinitely. When 
          was the best time to see India? At what period would the study of Brazilian 
          savages have afforded the purest satisfaction, and revealed them in their 
          least adulterated state? Would it have been better to arrive in Rio in the 
          eighteenth century with Bougainville, or in the sixteenth with Léry and 
          Thevet? For every five years I move back in time, I am able to save a 
          custom, gain a ceremony or share in another belief. But I know that exts too 
          well not to realize that, by going back a century, I am at the same time 
          forgoing data and lines of inquiry which would offer intellectual  enrichment. 
          And so I am caught within a circle from which there is no escape: the less 
          human societies were able to communicate with each other and therefore 
          to corrupt each other through contact, the less their respective emissaries 
          were able to perceive the wealth and significance of their diversity.[2]

[c] Tract RF

Anthropologists reading Lévi-Strauss’s accounts of, say, village arrangement among the Bororo or family life among the Nambikwara as they might a chapter from Argonauts of the Western Pacific or, to use a puzzling example by which the author claims to have been inspired, Robert Lowie’s Primitive Society, come away from a reading with a profound sense of dissatisfaction. It is hard to know, at times, why Lévi-Strauss describes in minute detail items that seem to be founded on precisely the sensory and experiential data that he has condemned in earlier chapters.

The answer, which may not be of much interest, perhaps, to professional anthropologists, lies in balancing the various themes of the book—memoir, ethnography, philosophical text, and reformist tract. Even in the book’s later chapters, in which the world becomes his subject and the reform of Western society his goal, Lévi-Strauss quite consciously moves from a snippet of his travel experience, a page from his fieldnotes, to an ever-widening treatment of broad historical and philosophical themes. The role of the anecdote has been too little treated in interpretations of Tristes tropiques; I believe that it provides a key to understanding what Lévi-Strauss argues in the final passages of the work.

The “method” whereby the author moves out in concentric circles, as it were, from a primary datum toward its ever-widening implications, is what links the “co-occurring texts” in Tristes tropiques. What I shall call Lévi-Strauss’s anthropologie anecdotique is the engine behind his receptive anthropology. It is the method that allows him to move from a single experience, contextualize it, and make use of it for a broader and deeper understanding not only of the society at hand, but his own as well.

[d] Picture RF

Such analysis, as with his “study” of cannibalism in chapter thirty-eight, “if carried out sincerely and methodically, leads to two results: it introduces and element of moderation and honesty into our evaluations of customs and ways of life very different from our own…and it removes form our own customs that air of inherent rightness that they so easily have for anyone unacquainted with other customs, or whose knowledge is partial or biased.” It provides, in short, a method whereby the West can restore contact with that receptivity, that femininity, that needs to be rediscovered if it is to avoid the fate—to use Lévi-Strauss’s rhetoric—of Islamic civilization, as well as the last several hundred years of our own.

Anthropologists become frustrated, at times, reading Tristes tropiques because the details Lévi-Strauss relates are not merely building blocks for an “objective” picture of the society under study. They are, rather, carefully chosen and highly polished fragments of experiential data that constitute, like a fog-drenched Chinese landscape painting, only a shred of a larger meaning. The role of the anthropologist is to draw the lines, so to speak, between the ethnographic fragments and the larger meaning.

Let's conclude today's post with the dénouement of Lévi-Strauss's memorable quotation.

          In short, I have only two possibilities: either I can be like some traveller of 
          the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost 
          all, of which eluded him, or worse still, filled him with scorn and disgust; or 
          a modern traveller, chasing after the vestiges of vanished reality. I lose on
          both counts, and more seriously than may at first appear, for, while I 
          complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I 
          may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since 
          I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable 
          of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another 
          traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I 
          might have seen, but failed to see. I am subject to a double infirmity: all that 
          I perceive offends me, and I constantly reproach myself for not seeing as 
          much as I should.[3]

Click here for the other posts in this Round and Square series on Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques:

Tristes 1          Tristes 2          Tristes 3          Tristes 4          Tristes 5          Tristes 6

[e] Vestiges RF

Notes 
[1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropique [Translated by John and Doreen Weightman] (New York: Penguin Classics, 2012), 43.
[2] Tristes Tropiques, 43.
[3] Tristes Tropiques, 43.

Bibliography

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques [Translated by John and Doreen Weightman]. New York: Penguin Classics, 2012.

 

Academic Autobiography (2b)—Tristes Tropiques

One year ago on Round and Square (28 September 2011)—Seinfeld Ethnography: The Alliance.
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Academic Autobiography"

[a] Tropiques RF

Click here for the other posts in this Round and Square series on Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques:

Tristes 1          Tristes 2          Tristes 3          Tristes 4          Tristes 5          Tristes 6

II—Origins 
          Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; 

          everything degenerates in the hands of man. —Rousseau[1] 

Each stage in mankind’s religious development, writes Lévi-Strauss, represents a regression from that which preceded it. For Lévi-Strauss this regression can be seen everywhere—from the cities of the New World to modern painting. “Man never creates anything truly great except at the beginning:

          In whatever field it may be, only the first initiative is wholly valid. The 
          succeeding ones are characterized by hesitation and regret, and try to 
          recover, fragment by fragment, ground that has already been left behind…  
          The grandeur inseparable from beginnings is so undeniable that even 
          mistakes, provided they are new creations, can still overwhelm us with 
          their beauty.[2]

Lévi-Strauss’s attitude toward “nature” and “origins” often quite closely resemble those of his distant mentor, Jean Jacques Rousseau—“Rousseau, the most anthropological of the philosophes…Rousseau our master, our brother, to whom we have behaved with such ingratitude but to whom every page of this book could have been dedicated, had the homage been worthy of his memory:

          We shall emerge from the contradiction inherent in the anthropologist’s 
          position only by repeating, on our own account, the procedure that allowed 
          Rousseau to move on from the ruins left by the Discours sur l’origine de 
          l’inégalité to the ample structure of Le contrat social, the secret of which is 
          revealed in the Emile.[3]

[b] Gymnastics RF

Lévi-Strauss’s boredom with the tired “mental gymnastics” of Sorbonne philosophy—“not so much a system of discovering what was true and what false as of understanding how mankind gradually overcame certain contradictions”—and his predilection for geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, culminating in his choice of anthropology as a vocation, are a part of this desire to get to the solid foundation of matters.

For Lévi-Strauss, geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism can be reduced to a common thread. Knowing a thing requires going beyond the sensory data that lie before us (and that includes, for academics, books and records) to achieve a deeper level of understanding. One cannot perceive, unless one is taught to see in a different way, the series of upheavals that have created a particular landscape; the clues are buried in an out layer that may not only mask, but positively deform the deeper structures.

          Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos, which leaves one 
          free to choose the meaning one wants to give it. But, over and above the 
          various agricultural considerations, geographical irregularities, and the 
          various accidents of history and prehistory, the most majestic meaning of 
          all is surely that which precedes, commands, and, to a large extent, 
          explains the others…  The sole aim of this contrariness is to recapture the 
          master-meaning, which may be obscure but of which each of the others is 
          a partial or distorted transposition.[4]

[c] Structure RF

With the case of the landscape, as with Rousseau’s desire to see a life free from the encumbrances of social institutions, it is necessary, if one is to gain real insight, to go beyond the surface to the origin of a thing, to see it in its unadulterated state. Only then is it possible, echoing the quotations above, to move to the “ample structure” of deep understanding. One cannot know the Christian West without retracing the development of its thought. But even then one hasn’t grasped the origin. One must, just as Rousseau did two hundred years earlier, “set facts aside” at times to gain a better knowledge of a thing’s true nature.

          Following Rousseau, and in what I consider to be a definitive manner, 
          Marx established that social science is no more founded on the basis of 
          events than physics is founded on sense data: the object is to construct a 
          model and to study its property and its different reactions in laboratory 
          conditions…  At a different level of reality, Marxism seemed to me to 
          proceed in the same manner as geology and psychoanalysis…  All three 
          demonstrate that understanding consists of reducing one type of reality to 
          another; that the true reality is never the most obvious; and that the nature 
          of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive.[5]

For cultural anthropologists, the search for origins is problematic; they operate, to some extent, at the intersection of their own and other societies. It is difficult enough to retrace the steps of development in each, but to reintegrate that knowledge into a new set of principles, a new way of knowing, is forbiddingly complex. It is necessary for them to gain release from the constraints of their own societies.

          Anthropology affords me intellectual satisfaction: as a form of history, 
          linking up opposite ends with world history and my own history, it thus 
          reveals the rationale common to both. In proposing to study mankind, 
          anthropology frees me from doubt, since it examines those differences 
          and changes in mankind that have a meaning for all men, and excludes 
          those peculiar to a particular civilization, which dissolve into nothingness 
          under the gaze of the outside observer.[6]

The predicament of the anthropologist between his own society and those he studies is analogous, for Lévi-Strauss, to that of Western society itself in relation to its neighbors. Gaining receptivity, for Lévi-Strauss is not merely a matter of attuning our minds; it is necessary to free ourselves—physically and intellectually—from our environment. We are, writes Lévi-Strauss, free in relation to others.

          We thus put ourselves in a position to embark on the second stage, 
          which consists in using all societies—without adopting features of any 
          one of them—to elucidate principles of social life that we can apply in 
          reforming our own customs and not those of foreign societies: through 
          the operation of a prerogative that is the reverse of the one just mentioned, 
          the society we belong to is the only society we are in a position to transform 
          without any risk of destroying it, since the changes being introduced by us, 
          are coming from within the society itself.[7]

[d] Comparison RF

It was Rousseau, writes Lévi-Strauss, “who taught us that, after demolishing all forms of social organization, we can still discover the principles that will allow us to construct.”  We need, however, if this is to be successful, to find the “unshakable basis of human society.”

To this quest, anthropological comparison can contribute in two ways. It shows that the basis is not to be discovered in our civilization: of all known societies ours is no doubt the one most remote from it. At the same time, by bringing out the characteristics common to the majority of human societies, it helps us to postulate a type, of which no society is the faithful realization, but which indicates the direction the investigation ought to follow…

Lévi-Strauss continues: 

          Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it. Our task is to 
          rediscover his form as it is immanent in the social state, mankind being 
          inconceivable outside society; this means working out a program of the 
          experiments that “would be necessary in order to arrive at a knowledge 
          of natural man” and determine the “means whereby these experiments 
          can be made within society.”  But the model—this is Rousseau’s solution—
          is eternal and universal.[8]

The oft-noted “quest structure” of Tristes tropiques—leaving the stale intellectuality of the French academy for the lush vegetation of the Brazilian interior, journeying ever more deeply through the layers of human (d)evolution, and returning, finally to that same France with a deeper understanding of the West’s relationship to the rest of humanity—becomes clearer when we read with knowledge of Lévi-Strauss as social critic and reformer. The anthropologist is, indeed, caught between two civilizations. Like travelers before him, he has an effect on both, whether he wants it or not. For the anthropologist, “less able to ignore his own civilization and dissociate himself from its faults in that his very existence is incomprehensible except as an attempt at redemption,” the need to study other societies takes on added urgency and much greater importance: he is the symbol (and perhaps the vehicle), writes Lévi-Strauss, of atonement.

More on precisely this (how does anthropology provide a vehicle for redemption?) tomorrow.

See you then.   

Click here for the other posts in this Round and Square series on Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques:

Tristes 1          Tristes 2          Tristes 3          Tristes 4          Tristes 5          Tristes 6

[e] River RF

Notes 
[1] Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile [Translated by Allan Bloom] (New York: The Free Press, 1973), 1.
[2] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropique [Translated by John and Doreen Weightman] (New York: Penguin Classics, 2012), 57.
[3] Tristes Tropiques, 57.
[4] Tristes Tropiques,58.
[5] Tristes Tropiques,392.
[6] Tristes Tropiques,390-391.
[7] Tristes Tropiques, 392. 
[8] Tristes Tropiques, 389.

Bibliography

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques [Translated by John and Doreen Weightman]. New York: Penguin Classics, 2012.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Emile [Translated by Allan Bloom]. New York: The Free Press, 1973.

Academic Autobiography (2a)—Tristes Tropiques

One year ago on Round and Square (27 September 2011)—Styling Culture: Foreign Terms, Titles, and Emphasis
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Academic Autobiography"

[a] Amazon headwaters RF

Click here for the other posts in this Round and Square series on Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques:

Tristes 1          Tristes 2          Tristes 3          Tristes 4          Tristes 5          Tristes 6

Note: The world after 2001 makes all of this somewhat jarring for American readers. Let me just say that the opinions expressed here are my best representation of Claude Lévi-Strauss's text. This post began many years ago as an essay response for the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought's "Fundamentals Examination." The classicist James Redfield asked a brilliant question, and this post is a less-brilliant but no less fascinated response to the literary legacy of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

 
I—Receptivity

                    He who knows the masculine but holds to the feminine

                    Becomes the ravine of the world

                    Being the ravine of the world,

                    He dwells in constant virtue,

                    He returns to the state of the babe.
                                                            —Daodejing 28
In the closing pages of his multi-layered anthropological narrative, Tristes tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss provocatively states that “the West lost the opportunity of remaining female" through its militaristic contact with Islam. He notes:
          In Taxila, in Buddhist monasteries bristling with statues because of the 

          influence of Greece, I was aware of the slim opportunity of remaining united 

          which is open to our Old World; the schism is not yet complete. A different 

          future is possible, the very future that Islam opposes by erecting its barrier 

          between the West and the East, which, without it, would perhaps not have 

          lost their attachment to the common ground in which their roots are set.[1] 

[b] Resonant RF

For Lévi-Strauss, the femininity that the West has forsaken is closely attached to the Daoist conception of receptivity. Lévi-Strauss portrays Buddhism and nascent Christianity as quintessentially responsive doctrines, capable of growing through contact with an other. Lévi-Strauss’s Islam, on the other hand, is the very embodiment of Daoism’s extreme male principle—hard, unyielding, certain of itself, and wary of contact with outsiders. As Lévi-Strauss puts it, the Arab soul has always been associated with the qualities of jealousy, pride, and heroism.

Far from presenting a “survey” of world religion in the resonant closing chapters of Tristes tropiques, Lévi-Strauss pares each complex doctrine down to its essentials, looking not so much at the historical development of their teachings as at the “inner core” that gives them their power. He sees in the compassion of Buddhism and the openness of Christianity the fundamentally receptive quality of femininity; in Islam, he perceives only self-doubt and xenophobia:

          This great religion is based not so much on revealed truth as on an inability 

          to establish links with the outside world. In contrast to the universal kindliness 

          of Buddhism, or the Christian desire for dialogue, Muslim intolerance takes 

          an unconscious form among those who are guilty of it; although they do not 

          always seek to make others share their truth by brutal coercion, they are 

          nevertheless (and this is more serious) incapable of tolerating the existence of 

          others as others. The only means they have of protecting themselves against 

          doubt and humiliation is the “negativization” of others, considered as witnesses 

          to a different faith and a different way of life.[2] 

Islam is the West of the East, writes Lévi-Strauss; he sees in the intolerance of Islam the most serious danger confronting twentieth century Europe, particularly France. Although he never adequately explains what be means by such phrases as “Christian desire for dialogue,”[3] or the precise manner in which contact with Buddhism would have “Christianized us still further and…made us all the more Christian in that we would have gone back beyond Christianity itself,[4] he perceives an essential unity in the two that lies outside of history, outside of time.

[c] Striking RF

There is an elemental similarity in both doctrines, and the civilizations they represent. Lévi-Strauss, like Rousseau before him, characterizes this ahistorical similarity in strikingly temporal terms. Beyond that, he encases his description in Christian imagery of the fall:

Mankind has made three major religious attempts to free itself from the persecution of the dead, the malevolence of the Beyond, and the anguish of magic. Over intervals of approximately five hundred years, it originated in turn in Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam; it is a striking fact that each stage, far from constituting an advance on the previous one, should be seen rather as a regression…

          Now I can see, beyond Islam, to India, but it is the India of the Buddha, 

          before Mohammed. For me as a European, and because I am a European,

          Mohammed intervenes with uncouth clumsiness, between our thought and 

          Indian doctrines which are very close to it, in such a way as to prevent East 

          and West joining hands, as they might well have done, in harmonious 

          collaboration.[5] 

Lévi-Strauss continues:

          The two worlds are closer to each other than either is to the Muslim 
          anachronism. Rational evolution would have been the converse of what 
          actually occurred historically: Islam cut a more civilized world in two, he 
          states. What appears modern to it belongs to a bygone age; it is living with 
          a time lag of a thousand years…Islam fertilized actuality and sterilized 
          potentiality: it brought about a form of progress that is the reverse of 
          a project.

          If the West traces its internal tensions back to their source, it will see that 

          Islam, by coming between Buddhism and Christianity, Islamized us at the 

          time when the West, by taking part in the crusades, was involved in 

          opposing it and therefore came to resemble it, instead of undergoing—had 

          Islam never come into being—a slow process of osmosis with Buddhism…   

          It was then that the West lost the opportunity of remaining female.[6]

[d] Space RF

Lévi-Strauss, in the space of only a few pages, divides the world into three major religious systems, refines their doctrines to a limited number of key oppositions (such as masculinity-femininity, intransigence-receptivity), denies the importance of historical change in the doctrines, and finally—in richly historical terms—describes the relationship between all three.

          The West lost the opportunity of remaining female by opposing a doctrine 

          that is, as characterized by Lévi-Strauss, by its very nature insecure and 

          pugilistic. Opposition is a masculine and confrontational term, used quite 

          consciously by the author in this manner; osmosis is fundamentally feminine 

          and receptive. Lévi-Strauss speaks of two very different kinds of change here, 

          and the historical necessity of choosing one over the other has, he argues, 

          profoundly altered not only the history of the West, but its religious and 

          (hence) cultural orientation as well.[5]

Lévi-Strauss quite forcefully states the problem. Moreover, he alludes to the possibility of resolution—“the schism is not yet complete; a different future is possible. Nowhere, however, does he state explicitly what is to be done. Lévi-Strauss’s resolution lies in the narrative of Tristes tropiques, not at any single, definable point in the text. For a resolution to the problem, for a return to the “natural” receptivity of the Christian West, we must return to origins; for this return the discipline of anthropology is an ideal vehicle.

Click here for the other posts in this Round and Square series on Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques:

Tristes 1          Tristes 2          Tristes 3          Tristes 4          Tristes 5          Tristes 6

[e] Return RF

Notes 
[1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques [Translated by John and Doreen Weightman] (New York: Penguin Classics, 2012), 406.
[2] Tristes Tropiques 403-404.
[3] Tristes Tropiques, 403-404.
[4] Tristes Tropiques, 403-404.
[5] Tristes Tropiques, 409.
[6] Tristes Tropiques, 408-409.

Bibliography

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques [Translated by John and Doreen Weightman]. New York: Penguin Classics, 2012.

Seinfeld Ethnography (33)—Face Paint

Click here for an introduction to the Round and Square series Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific.

[a] Paint/face RF

Click below for all "Seinfeld Ethnography" posts: 

George Eats Trash     No Soup for You     Elaine Exclaims    The Puffy Shirt    Poppie's Pizza     Mr. Bookman

Marine Biologist         The Doorman          Opposite George   Newman's Mail   The Bootleg         Marriage
Just Dessert               Sleep Desk             Late Coffee            High Stakes        Motor Oil              Downtown 
Code Cracking           Nonfat Yogurt          Bad Boy                 It's Not You         I Can't Be...          Exploding Wallet
Elaine Flies Coach    The Close Talker     The Alliance           Broccoli               Coated Culture    Dinner Party
George's Friend        Jerry's Haircut          Face Paint             Mustachioed       Smoking              East River
Pool Man                   Dunkin' Joe              Life Lessons          Reckoning          Dog Medicine      Shower Heads
Looking Busy            George Tips             Kramer's Job          Empty Tank
Click here for the reference to the "Argonauts" title, below.
Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific

I study anthropology, among other things, and one constant in my reading has been the value of, let us say, facial embellishments in a wide array of societies. We have whole battalions—even regimen(t)s—of salespeople ready to go with cosmetics, and the gendering of those products is only a little less obvious now than it was, say, fifty years ago. Some men might be man enough to moisturize and use a few creams here or there, but the industry is geared powerfully toward women.

[b] Yin-yang RF

So do men express their complex personhood without cosmetic masking? Well, yes and no. Certainly, the cosmetic makers would love to take even an infinitesimal share of those 100 out of every 207 babies who grow into aging facial consumers. They don't get much. But there are other ways for men to set their jaws, so to speak, against the winds of mundan(e)ity, not to mention aging.

To begin, there are beards. It is only relatively recently in many societies that a clean shaven face has come to be de rigueur. Speaking only of the nineteenth century French society that continues to fascinate me with its twisting turns of literary excellence, social theorizing, and madcap politics, it was the rare man who walked about without a full beard. The same goes for another area I study. In, say, Tang dynasty China (CE 618-906), a beard and somewhat lower voice register was one of the markers (other than attire and hair style) that separated government officials from, well, government eunuchs.

So, let's remember that facial distinctions play a powerful role in society, and for both men and women. In the lines above, we have only touched lightly upon the interpretive possibilities. In today's post, however, I would like to turn our attention to what we might call combative faces. Take a look at the Seinfeld clip, and pay special attention to everyone's reaction to the wavy lines of tribal identification and pugilism.

The Face Painter 1:12

[c] Peinture RF

O.k., that episode might just trigger thoughts of other kinds of facial distinctions. It is not just moisturizers and beards (and the occasional mustache). Men (and women) paint their faces for many reasons. They also occasionally paint them in order to fight. What is it with...culture...that leads grown people to paint their faces, jump up and down, and clutch various implements? I am not making fun here (well, except of some sports fans).

Today's readings will consider face painting from several angles, and will look at the ways in which painting, identity, and (often) testosterone mingle together in the arenas of violence. We have three readings from different eras and analytical backgrounds. We begin with Sir James George Frazer and The Golden Bough, the odd classic that both inspired and repelled would-be anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (this excerpt is from the abridged 1922 edition). From there, we will look at Caduveo face painting in Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, and conclude with Victor Turner's account of Ndembu circumcision rituals. It's all about the face paint...and a whole lot of other stuff.

Sir James George Frazer

[d] Unbowed PD

The Golden Bough (1922)
In Windessi, Dutch New Guinea, when a party of head-hunters has been successful, and they are nearing home, they announce their approach and success by blowing on triton shells. Their canoes are also decked with branches. The faces of the men who have taken a head are blackened with charcoal. If several have taken part in killing the same victim, his head is divided among them. They always time their arrival so as to reach home in the early morning. They come rowing to the village with a great noise, and the women stand ready to dance in the verandahs of the houses. The canoes row past the room sram or house where the young men live; and as they pass, the murderers throw as many pointed sticks or bamboos at the wall or the roof as there were enemies killed.[1]

Claude Lévi-Strauss

[e] Face à PD

Tristes Tropiques (1955)
In the tribe we visited, the men were sculptors and the women painters. The men fashioned the statuettes I mentioned earlier from the hard, bluish wood of the gum tree. They also embossed figures of men, ostriches and horses on the zebu horns they used as cups. Occasionally they made drawings, but only of foliage, human beings or animals. The women’s specialty was decorating pottery and leather, and doing the body paintings, at which some were undeniably expert.

Their faces, and sometimes even their bodies, were covered with a network of asymmetrical arabesques, alternating with delicate geometrical patterns. The first person to describe this feature was the Jesuit missionary, Sanchez Labrador, who lived among them from 1760 to 1770, but exact reproductions were only made a century later by Boggiani. In 1935, I myself collected several hundred designs in the following manner. My first intention was to photograph the faces, but the financial demands of the ladies in the tribe would soon have exhausted my resources. I next tried to draw faces on sheets of paper and suggested to the women that they should paint them, as they would their own countenances; the result was so successful that I abandoned my clumsy sketches. The women were not put off by the blank sheets, and this showed that their art in no way depended on the natural contours of the human face.

Only a few very old women seemed to have preserved the ancient skills; and for a long time I remained convinced that I had mad my collection at the last possible moment. I was, therefore, greatly surprised two years ago to receive an illustrated account of a collection made fifteen years later by a Brazilian colleague. Not only did his documents seem as expertly executed as min, but very often the designs were identical. During all that time, style, technique and inspiration had remained unchanged, just as they had remained unaltered during the forty years which had elapsed between Boggiani’s visit and mine. Such conservatism is all the more remarkable in that it does not extend to their pottery, which, if we are to judge by the latest illustrated accounts, is not in a state of complete decline. This fact would seem to prove the exceptional importance attributed to body paintings, and still more so to facial paintings, in native culture.[2]

Victor Turner

[f] Liminal lamination PD

The Forest of Symbols (1967)
Just after sunrise, I was Sampasa wash the senior Lodge Instructor, Kutona, from Wadyang’amafu Village, with ku-kolisha medicine from the mortar beside the chikoli tree in the middle of the campsite. After that, he washed himself and the other circumcisers, yifukaminu assistant circumcisers, and guardians with the medicine, then all the novice’s mothers and fathers.

Next a really big meal of fish and cassava meal was given to the novices by their mothers, each mother feeding her son by hand as though he were an infant. After eating, the novices sat trying to look impassive (as Ndembu say “not showing their liver”), while a number of lads who had already been to Mukanda stood by them offering encouragement, much as White had described it. The mothers looked grave and subdued. There was a feeling of tense expectation. Wukengi was nowhere to be seen. Someone told me that before dawn he had gone into the bush with the important circumcisers and Lodge Instructor to select the site of the lodge and of the ifwilu where the boys would be circumcised. There were various ritual “properties” to get ready—a muyombu pole and a mukula log, for example. Perhaps Wukengi was helping with these things.

Shortly after the novices meal, all the circumcisers, looking thoroughly menacing with red clay daubed on brow and temples and each with a red lourie feather in his hair, marched in and proceeded to dance around the chikoli tree, holding up their equipment…What should have been done next, but was in fact omitted until circumcision was over, was to erect a frame of mukula poles, in the shape of a soccer goal post, over the entrance of the new path…Through it the novices had to pass on the way to circumcision, and over it were hung the clothes they wore as children and would wear no more as circumcised tribesmen.[3]

Notes
[1] Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996), 248.
[2] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques Translated by John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Penguin Books, 1973, 185-187.
[3] Victor Turner, Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 212-213.

Bibliography
Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. New York: Touchstone Books, 1996.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Penguin Books, 1973.
Turner, Victor. Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1967.

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Facial Artifice

George and Jerry wear mustaches and discuss the Netherlands. Really.