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aanlaiias-s · 5 years ago

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Our strictly human heavens and hells have only recently been abstracted from the sensuous world that surrounds us, from this more-than-human realm that abounds in its own winged intelligences and cloven-hoofed powers. For almost all oral cultures, the enveloping and sensuous earth remains the dwelling place of both the living and the dead. The “body” — whether human or otherwise — is not yet a mechanical object in such cultures, but is a magical entity, the mind’s own sensuous aspect, and at death the body’s decomposition into soil, worms, and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all, too, are born.

Each indigenous culture elaborates this recognition of metamorphosis in its own fashion, taking its clues from the particular terrain in which it is situated. Often the invisible atmosphere that animates the visible world — the subtle presence that circulates both within us and between all things — retains within itself the spirit or breath of the dead person until the time when that breath will enter and animate another visible body — a bird, or a deer, or a field of wild grain. Some cultures may burn, or “cremate,” the body in order to more completely return the person, as smoke, to the swirling air, while that which departs as flame is offered to the sun and stars, and that which lingers as ash is fed to the dense earth. Still other cultures may dismember the body, leaving certain parts in precise locations where they will likely be found by condors, or where they will be consumed by mountain lions or by wolves, thus hastening the re-incarnation of that person into a particular animal realm within the landscape. Such examples illustrate simply that death, in tribal cultures, initiates a metamorphosis wherein the person’s presence does not “vanish” from the sensible world (where would it go?) but rather remains as an animating force within the vastness of the landscape, whether subtly, in the wind, or more visibly, in animal form, or even as the eruptive, ever to be appeased, wrath of the volcano.

excerpted here from David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (1996)

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An obvious risk of this sort of lyricism is its tendency to absorb indigenous death rituals into a romanticized image of archaic / premodern enchantment. Merely affirming the beauty of a form of mortality in which the animacy of the dead never really vanishes may serve to deanimate the people/s for whom that form still lives, freezing their historical presence into a vanishingly remote past.

Not to say that’s the point of this excerpt -- just that the poetic impulse driving its cultural relativism not only borrows its comparative breadth from but also owes its generic legibility to the schizochronism of colonial anthropology. And by schizochronism (a term borrowed from Johannes Fabian) I mean ideological / affective / structural efforts to split indigenous histories and temporalities off from the integrative developmental timeline of Euro-American cultures.

Also, somewhat tangentially, it’s interesting to read Abram’s lyricism against the grain of a movie like Midsommar, which exploits the same topos -- the nature cosmologies of indigenous ritual -- for different effects. Midsommar turns the romantic aesthetics of cultural relativism inside out until it produces horror.* Lyrical enchantment here draws its energies from an affective continuum that quickly slides into shock, estrangement, and distressed fascination. Nervous-irreverent / dry-ironic / weirded-out laughter edges onto this continuum, too, partly because the existential dread it calls on is labile enough to become silly. By the end of the movie these effects build to a kind of cathartic vengeance on the anomic individualism of the nuclear family / monogamous codependence that organizes the social reproduction of Euro-American culture. Notably, though, Midsommar also knowingly severs the anthropological gaze from its colonialist history by generating these effects from an encounter with a white (”white”?) version of indigenous culture -- a more or less autonomous (if also nominally law-abiding, state-integrated, and in some cases university-educated) Swedish commune.

At the beginning and end of Midsommar we see the comparative operation at its most graphic: meaningless, biochemical death vs. symbolically dense, enfleshed death; an atomized trio of corpses -- the married couple asleep in their bed and their daughter alone in her bedroom -- found asphyxiated, duct-taped to personal tubes of car exhaust vs. an allegorized tableau of living and ritually mortified bodies consumed together in the flames of a specially built temple, sedated or paralyzed but nonetheless present throughout; murder-suicide by suburban “bipolar” despair unresponsive to attempted communication vs. involuntary / elective sacrifice to the joyous apex of the solstice’s cosmic bipolarity. What differentiates these death scenes is the ritual framework by which the latter converts the impulsive and analgesic destruction of the former into an intentional and hedonic process of regeneration.

Neither form of death really transcends existential dread, of course: the cosmic good death is as coercive as the suburban bad death is anomic. Midsommar’s generic lability -- its resistance to lyricism -- makes a difference here, however. At the moment the regenerative death ritual brings its coercive design to completion, assembling all the bodies to be burned, its allegorical majesty (to borrow a concept from Wittgenstein) can seem more absurd than cryptic. The impotent confusion of the shitty boyfriend when he finds himself burning to death in a bear-suit moves the moment of cathartic vengeance toward the comic. Dread lapses into silliness insofar as the ritual frame cannot ever fully exclude confrontation from a relativistic outside. And yet the reverse of that confrontation never happens. If the opening murder-suicide evokes dread, it does not even come close to inviting laughter. It is only relativized as pathology -- part of the same cultural logic that leaves old people to die in nursing homes, (one of the movie’s clearest ideologemes of cultural relativism), an isolating / sickening abandonment of the communal forms that used to consecrate death. Maybe it’s just that the inorganic encrusted on the dead -- the exhaust tube taped over the face -- offers none of the density or distance needed to make the meaninglessness (incommunicativeness, inexplicability) of trauma funny.

* And for this reason it may be more accurately referred to the pre-ethnographic comparative anthropology of smth like J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890-1915); see Wittgenstein on the blank or inexplicable horrific in the rituals Frazer describes.

#Midsommar #animism #anthropology #cultural relativism #affect #writing #metamorphosis

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