timjmason

[timjmason]

Bye-bye books

Moving house, so this is where I have to go through my books and decide what to take with me and what to throw out. First to go are all those out-of-date EFL texts and how-tos. Then the social science and history books to sift through. These have been accumulating since the 60s, and a lot of them can go because they are out of date, either empirically, theoretically, or both.

Some of this stuff just doesn't interest me any more; much of the anthropology is so riddled with colonialist/racist ways of seeing that it almost hurts to find it on the shelves. And so much blokishness.

By and large, I'm hanging on to the fiction, although Mailer's iffy (maybe I'll reread Why we are in vietnam one of these days, but the rest tugs no strings) and Henry James would be junked except that M might want them. Anyway, so far I’ve got as many boxes full of books to junk as I have of books to take with me.

[timjmason]

East of the Moon and West of the Sun

Once upon a time there was a miller. He had six sons and seven daughters. He worked hard every day, but however hard he worked, there never seemed to be enough money for all his children to be fed and clothed

His eldest son had a hole in his shoe, and his toes poked through.

The next one had holes in his socks and his ankles poked through.

The next one had holes in his trousers, and his knees poked through.

Another had a jersey that was more hole than wool and his elbows poked through.

Another had a shirt that was far too small, and his belly was naked to the wind.

And the youngest could only ever wear the clothes that his older brothers were not using that day -

and sometimes you saw his toes,

and sometimes you saw his ankles

and sometimes you saw his knees

and sometimes you saw his elbows

and sometimes you saw his belly

but most of the time you saw nothing at all but his head and shoulders, because he had to stay in bed, covered up in the one thin blanket.

The eldest daughter was so thin that you could play piano on her ribs.

The next sister was so thin that her eyes almost popped out of her head.

The next sister was so thin that if she turned sideways, you couldn't see her.

Another sister was so light that a gentle wind could blow her over.

Another sister was so light that she could ride on the back of a mouse.

The sixth sister was so light that a bird would think she was a feather

But the youngest sister, beloved of all, was the most beautiful girl in the village, and the young men would dream of her when the wind was high, and sigh for her when the wind was low, and they all loved her until their hearts ached. But she didn't notice She didn't care She didn't give a fig and passed them by with a toss of her long black hair and a flash of her dark black eye, which only made the young men fall even more deeply in love with her, so they pined away and became nearly as thin as the six sisters, taking so little care of themselves that their clothes were almost as ragged and tattered as the clothes of the six brothers. Then the mothers and the fathers of the village said that they must do something about the miller's daughter if they didn't want all their sons to fade away, and all their daughters to have to leave home to look for their husbands and never come back.

Then, one day, the big white bear who lived to the north, and who would sometimes exchange a tasty salmon for a pint of beer, came to the miller, and said to him, "Miller, if you will give me your youngest daughter, I will make you rich."

Well, the Miller loved his youngest daughter, and indeed, she was his favourite, but he loved his other children too, so when he thought about how thin his daughters were, and about how ragged were the clothes of his sons, he came to a decision. He went to talk to his daughter, and he said to her, "Listen, my love, the great white bear has asked for your hand. If you accept, we will be rich, and your brothers and your sisters will be able to buy some new clothes, and will eat enough to stop the wind from knocking them down. The bear is a handsome enough beast, and he is always very courteous when he comes here to barter his salmon. I've no doubt he will make a fine husband for you, even though he is a bit furry."

The daughter listened to her father, and she thought about it. It didn't seem right for a girl to be marrying a bear, even though he might be rich, and even though he might be well-behaved. So she told her father she would not give her hand to her strange suitor. The miller shrugged and turned away.

That night, it was as cold as cold could be, so cold that a man could not cry, for his eyes would freeze up, and the icicles shone in the trees like a million stars. The youngest son of all had to creep out of the house in the middle of the night to go to the loo; he had nothing to wear because his brothers had all the clothes, and in the morning, the miller found him shining like a block of ice and looking at him with a cold, cold, smile. So he went to his daughter and he said to her; "Listen, my love, you can see how hard it is for us all. We have not enough clothes to put on our backs, and your dear brother has been frozen to a block. If you will give your hand to the great white bear, we'll be able to buy fur coats for all the family, and we'll never freeze again."

The daughter listened to her father, and she thought about it. It still didn't seem right for a girl to be marrying a bear, however rich and courteous he may be, and so, although she was very sorry for her brother, she told her father that she could not give her hand to her strange suitor. The miller shrugged and turned away.

That night, the wind blew as hard as ever the wind had blown, and perhaps even harder than that; it rattled the windows, it knocked at the doors and it almost blew the heavy slate roof off the mill. Now, the eldest sister, who was out in the woods gathering fire-wood so that they would be warm that night, was so light and thin that she was picked up and swept into the air ; the last the miller saw of her, with her skirt spread out against the sky, she had joined the storm-birds up amongst the blackest clouds. So when he saw that, he went to his youngest daughter, and he said to her; "Listen, my love, it is not that much that I am asking of you. We have not enough food to put in our bellies, and your dear sister has been blown away with the storm birds. If you were to give your hand to the great white bear, we would be able to buy meat and bread for the family, and walk upon the ground even when the wind is blowing at its strongest."

The daughter listened to her father, and she thought about it. It still didn't seem right for a girl to be marrying a bear, however rich and courteous he might be, but she was very sorry for her brother, and she was very sorry for her sister, and to see her poor father so pained by what had happened to his children pulled at her heart. So she told him to let the bear know that she would marry him as soon as he wanted.

The wedding was quite an affair, and the mayor gave a long speech that no one listened to, and the young men felt that their hearts were gong to break forever; the young women (although they were extremely polite about it) were very pleased at the thought that the miller's daughter was leaving, as were the fathers and the mothers of the village. The bear danced with each of the sisters, and as he danced, the sisters seemed to fill out and get a little plumper. Then he danced with the brothers, and as he danced, it seemed that their clothes became as good as new. And when all had danced and eaten and drunk until they could dance, eat and drink no more, the bear summoned his carriage, and handed the youngest daughter into it, climbed up beside her and told his coachman to take them home.

The bear's home was a great castle, surrounded by a beautiful garden full of the most colourful of flowers. There were tulips, and daffodils, roses and hollyhocks as well as chrysanthemums, lupins and tiger-lilies. Inside the castle, there were long corridors, and large rooms with high ceilings and broad windows letting in the light. The bear showed her to her room, and then disappeared. The young woman sat at her dressing table and looked into her mirror; she saw the same face that she had always seen, and the same black hair and the same black eyes, but she felt that she would never be the same again.

Night came in upon the castle, and finally, she dressed herself in her bridal gown, blew out the candles and went to bed. She waited, a little frightened, for she believed that the bear, as any husband would, was coming to join her. Indeed, after a while, when the night was as black as night could be, someone slipped into the bed beside her. She reached out, expecting to feel the furry hide of her new husband, but instead, she found a man, with skin as smooth as silk. And so it happened that every day she spent alone in the castle, walking through the rooms, or leafing through the books in the library, and every night, she went to bed and she would be joined by her husband, the man with skin as smooth as silk. For somehow she knew that her husband was a bear by day and a man by night.

Now, although the nights, in the arms of her husband, were all she could wish for, the days, when she saw no-one, and spoke to no-one, were long and deadly, so one night she said to her husband, "Listen, my love, you must let me return to see my father, and my brothers and sisters, and to find out how they are getting along, for I have a great need of company. Remember, I have always had so many brothers and sisters that I am not used to being alone."

Her husband sighed, and he said to his wife, "My love, I expected you to ask for this, but it does not make my heart any the less heavy. I cannot refuse you, for I love you, but I must tell you that by going to visit your family you put me in great danger. So you must listen to me carefully. You may go and visit your father and your brothers and your sisters for three days and for two nights, but you must promise me not spend any time alone with your sister Elena, even though I know she is your greatest friend. For if you do, only harm may come of it."

Well, she had become quite fond of her husband, and so she made the promise that he asked of her, and set off to see her family in their new mansion. She found them as happy as they could be, for they had lost two sisters, and one brother was still standing, a block of ice, outside the old mill. All of them were thrilled to see her, and they came running out to greet her. Her brothers were all dressed in the finest and the warmest clothing that money could buy, and her sisters had all filled out, and were almost as beautiful as she. She spent the first day and the first night with them, playing the old games together, and chattering and dancing as if it were Christmas or somebody's birthday. However, she remembered not to allow Elena to take her aside and have one of those long sisterly chats that had been their delight before her marriage, and this although she saw that it pained her sister.

The second day and the second night, the fun and the happiness seemed to go on just as before, but it became harder and harder to avoid her sister, and harder and harder to avoid the pain in her sister's eyes. Just before they went to bed, Elena approached her, and said; "Listen, my beloved sister, it seems that your new estate has made you forget what once we were the one to the other, and you have forgotten the hours that we would spend, pouring out the depths of our hearts to one another. And you have forgotten the promise that we made so long ago, that we would always tell each other of our troubles and of our fortunes. But, oh my sister, I have not forgotten, and never would I do such a thing!'

The young wife went to her bed that night with a clouded mind. She thought of what her sister had said to her, and she thought of what her husband had said to her, and she thought of the promise that she had made to her husband, and she thought of the promise that she had made to her sister, and she said to herself; "It is true that I made a promise to my husband, but it is also true that I made a promise to my sister, even though it was a long time ago, and I had forgotten it. Is a promise to a husband stronger than a promise to a sister? Is a promise made long ago when I was a child more binding than a promise that I made but yesterday? Is it right that my husband should ask me to break my word to my sister? And is it right that my sister should ask me to break my word to my husband?" And she thought on these things all through the night.

When she awoke, all her brothers and her sisters were waiting for her, for all knew that it was their last day together. But Elena remained apart, her eyes to the ground, her hands falling from her lap, and she would not look at her sister, and she would not smile. Thus the morning went. In the afternoon, the eldest brother took out his fiddle, and the second eldest sister sat at the piano, and they played while the others danced and sang, yet Elena sat apart, and her eyes were on the ground, her hands were falling from her lap, and she would not look at her sister.

And as the shadows drew in to announce the end of the day and the beginning of the evening, the young wife's heart felt that it would break, so she drew her sister to one side, taking her back to the old mill, into the bedroom that they had shared for so long, and she said; "Listen, my beloved sister, do not look down upon the ground, but look into my eyes. For even though I made a promise to my husband that I would not speak alone with you, you see that my promise to you is the stronger." Then she told her sister all that there was to tell her about her new life, and about the man that would come to her bed when the night was as black as night could be, and whom she had never seen. Her sister listened, then she pondered, and then she said; "Listen, my beloved sister, it is not right that a wife should never see her husband. You must take with you this candle, and these matches, and this night, when your man is sleeping, light the candle to look upon the face of the man you have married, for a man he must be, even though you only ever see the white bear by light of day."

The young wife took the candles and she took the matches, putting them in her pocket and promising her sister that she would think of what she had said. Barely ten minutes later, the white bear's carriage came to collect the bride, and the white bear was in it, waiting for his young wife. When she mounted and sat beside him, he looked into her eyes, and then he glanced at her pocket, and he said; "Listen, my beloved, you must take care. For I do believe that you have spoken to your sister alone, and I do believe that she has said things to you that were better not to have been said." The young woman saw that her husband had read her like an open book, and so she did not try to conceal her fault, if fault there had been.

Then the bear said to her; "Listen, my beloved, if you truly love me, you will not follow the advice that your sister has given you, for if you do, only harm shall come of it." The girl promised to obey her husband, but that night, after the man beside her had fallen asleep, she heard her sister's voice inside her head, insisting that it was not right that a woman should never see her husband's face. The more she heard the voice, the more it seemed that what the voice said was true, until she could bear it no more. She rose, and pulled the candle and the matches from her pocket. With trembling fingers, she lit the candle, and held it over the form of the man who shared her bed.

There, revealed to her gaze was a young man of such beauty that her breath left her body. He had hair as black as her own, thick and lustrous. He had the stern and noble nose of an eagle, the firm, wide brow of the owl, the firm chin of a prince and the soft, red mouth of a young girl. Her heart turned over within her, and, unable to prevent herself, she bent to set one kiss upon his lips. But as she did so, her hand wavered, and three drops of wax spilled from the candle, to fall upon the young man's nightgown. Before her lips could press to his, his eyes opened, and he awoke. He drew back from her, and then his eyes locked upon hers.

If her eyes were black as the night, then his were the blue of a winter sky, and as she looked into them, she felt that she could feel the cold, cold wind upon her face. Then she felt his hands upon her shoulders, though whether they were the hands of the young man, or the heavy paws of her daytime husband, she could not be certain. His mouth opened, and whether she saw the white, even teeth of the young man, or the yellow fangs of her daytime husband, she could not be sure. He spoke, and whether it was the sweet voice of her nighttime companion, or the low, patient growl of her daytime husband she could not be positive. There was love in his voice that made her tremble for joy, and there was anger in his voice that made her tremble for fear. There was sorrow in his voice that made her tremble in sympathy, and there was hope in his voice that made her tremble in expectation.

He said; "Listen, my love, my wife. In another three days, if you had not seen my human face, the enchantment would have been broken, and I would have been yours for ever. But now, I must leave you, and go far, far from here, to be married to the witch's daughter. If you love me, you can still save me, but I may tell you no more than that you will find me in the castle that lies to the east of the moon and to the west of the sun. And, oh, my beloved, it is so very far from here, and it is so very difficult to find, that I fear for you, and I fear for me, for if you do not save me, then what life will I live for the rest of my days? Now, kiss me one last time, before I go, and then I shall leave you."

The young woman looked, and she saw that where the young man had been, there was only the white bear, with his heavy paws upon her shoulders, and his yellow fangs glinting at her in the light of the candle. She knew that it was her husband, and she leaned forward, and kissed him upon the muzzle, upon which he dropped his paws from her shoulders and shuffled slowly out of the room. She blew out the candle, and lay back upon the bed. A heavy cloud seemed to descend upon her, and she drifted into sleep.

The next morning, she awoke, cold and shivering. The castle was gone; she found that she had been sleeping upon a pile of damp leaves, beneath a tall tree. In the branches of the tree, sat a small, gaily coloured bird, looking at her with its head on one side. When the bird saw that she was awake, it gave a loud shriek and flew off, alighting upon another tree some distance away. Then it looked back at her, as if waiting for her to follow. She rose to her feet, and, not knowing what else she could do to find the castle east of the moon and west of the sun, she walked towards the bird. As she approached the second, tree, the bird gave another shriek, and flew off a little further, stopping once again to look back at the white bear's bride.

Proceeding in this way, she followed the bird through the forest, until they came to a small wood cabin, beneath a walnut tree. Sitting at the door of the cabin, was an old old woman, with three teeth in her head and an old pipe jammed between them. The bird alighted upon her shoulder, and watched as the young woman approached. The old woman looked up at her, took the pipe from between her teeth and blew out a rank smelling ring of smoke. Then she cackled, then she winked, and then she stood up and curtsied. "Ah," she cried, "so here's the silly princess who couldn't hold on to her prince! But tell me now, are you sure you want him back again? For to be sure, if you're silly, then he's a fool or else he never would have got you both into this pickle.'

The white bear's wife thought for a moment, considering the truth and the consequences of what the old woman had said. Then she answered; 'It is true that, if I had known then what I know now, I might not have done what I have done. And it is true that if my husband had not done as he has done, then he might not be where he is now. But ifs are made of candy-floss and might bes are made of moonshine; all I want now is to know the road to the castle that lies east of the moon and west of the sun, so that I can go and get him back again, for if he is a fool, he is my fool, and if I am silly, then it is with him that my silliness is most at ease. Please, can you tell me the way?"

Well, the old woman cackled again, but in a more friendly tone, this time. 'Ah, my dear," she said; "you may have a little more sense than I gave you credit for. Now, I do not know where this castle is, but if you go and ask my elder sister, she may be able to help you. All you have to do is to follow the bird, for he knows the way." With that, the old woman turned into her cabin, and cooked up a bowl of porridge, to help the young wife on her way. After they both had eaten, the young wife rose to her feet, and thanked her hostess, making ready to be on her way. However, the old woman laid one hand upon her sleeve, and with the other, reached up into the walnut tree and plucked a single nut. Then she said; "Here, my love. You must take this as a gift from me. Keep it by you, and do not open it until you come to the castle east of the moon and west of the sun, for there you may find that you need it." The young wife thanked her, took the nut, and put it in her pocket. Then she heard the little bird screech, and turned to follow him out into the forest.

She wandered for many days through the forest, eating nuts and berries, and sleeping under the trees. Ever she would follow the bird, as it flitted from tree to tree, until at last they came to a second cabin, that looked very much like the first, except that it was even older and more decrepit. Sitting on a stool outside the door was a woman who looked to be even older than the first, with two teeth in her head, and a pipe jammed between them. Once again, the bird alighted on her shoulders, and once again, the old woman took the pipe from between her teeth, and blew out a great stinking ring of smoke. Then she cackled, then she winked, then she stood up and curtsied. "Ah," she cried, "so here's the silly princess who couldn't hold on to her prince! But tell me now, are you sure you want him back again? For to be sure, if you're silly, then he's a fool or else he never would have got you both into this pickle.'

The white bear's bride had been thinking things over as she walked through the forest, but for the life of her, she could come up with no other answer than the one she had given to the crone's younger sister. So she repeated; 'It is true that, if I had known then what I know now, I might not have done what I have done. And it is true that if my husband had not done as he has done, then he might not be where he is now. But ifs are made of candy-floss and might bes are made of moonshine; all I want now is to know the road to the castle that lies east of the moon and west of the sun, so that I can go and get him back again, for if he is a fool, he is my fool, and if I am silly, then it is with him that my silliness is most at ease. Please, can you tell me the way?"

Once again, the old woman seemed to be satisfied with this reply, and like her sister, she offered the white bear's bride a meal. Then she told her that although she did not know the whereabouts of the castle that was east of the moon and west of the sun herself, her elder sister might, and that if the young woman would follow the little bird once again, he would take her to her sister's abode. "And now, ' she said, "before you go, there is a gift I would be giving you." And like her sister, she reached up into the walnut tree that grew beside her cabin, and took down one single walnut. "Here," she said, "keep this about your person, and do not open it until you come to the castle that is east of the moon and west of the sun, for then you may find that you have need of it." The white bear's wife thanked her, and set out once again to follow the bird through the forest.

As before, she wandered for days, eating nuts and berries, and sleeping under the trees, until she came to yet another ramshackle cabin, beneath a walnut tree. Sitting in the doorway was a woman who looked even older than her two sisters, and in her mouth there was nothing but the blackened stump of one tooth, and although she had no pipe, when the bird alighted on her shoulder, and she looked up to see who was approaching, she blew out a large stinking ring of smoke. Then she cackled, then she winked, then she stood up and curtsied. "Ah," she cried, "so here's the silly princess who couldn't hold on to her prince! But tell me now, are you certain that you want him back again? For to be sure, if you're silly, then he's a fool or else he never would have got you both into this pickle.'

Now the white bear's bride had been thinking this over as she wandered through the forest, but still she could find no other answer than the one that she had given to the first and to the second old crones, and so she replied; 'It is true that, if I had known then what I know now, I might not have done what I have done. And it is true that if my husband had not done as he has done, then he might not be where he is now. But ifs are made of candy-floss and might bes are made of moonshine; all I want now is to know the road to the castle that lies east of the moon and west of the sun, so that I can go and get him back again, for if he is a fool, he is my fool, and if I am silly, then it is with him that my silliness is most at ease. Please, can you tell me the way?"

The old woman looked at her, her head on one side, as if she were herself the bird that was perched upon her shoulder, and she said; "Is that the best you can come up with then? Well, you are young and you do not know the world as I know it, and there's no use in my telling you about it, because you would not believe me if I did. But tell me now, is it the bear that you love or the prince?" The white bear's bride had also been wondering about this as she made her way through the forest, so she did not take long to make up her mind to her reply; "Old lady, I love the man that is in the bear, and I love the bear that the man is in. I married them both, and I want them both, but if I can't have the one, then I shall take the other, for either would be better than the empty space that is in my heart while I am so far from him."

The old woman nodded, as if this was the answer that she had expected, and then she said "I cannot tell you where the castle itself is, but I can tell you that to find it, you must first go and ask the east wind. Now the bird will take you to the wind, but when you have found it, you must send the bird back to me, for otherwise, your quest will end in grief. Now sit down, while a cook you a meal, for you will be needing something inside your belly." So the young woman sat down, and the old woman cooked a meal, and when they had eaten, she reached up into the tree above the cabin and picked just one walnut, giving it to the white bear's bride and warning her not to lose it, or to open it until she should come to the castle that lay east of the moon and west of the sun.

So the white bear's bride set out once again, following the little bird as it flew from tree to tree, eating nuts and berries, and sleeping under the trees, until she came to the very end of the world. And there she spied the east wind, so she waved a last good-bye to the bird, and went and sat upon a rock and waited for the wind to notice her. At last, the wind, which had been busy blowing the leaves off tress and fluffing up the crests of the waves, turned to her and asked her what she was doing, waiting upon a rock in this wild and lonely place. So she told him all her story, from the very beginning, and then asked him if he knew where the castle was that was east of the moon and west of the sun.

The east wind thought about this for a while, and then he said; "It is lucky for you, young woman, that I know your sister, for it was I that carried her away that day, and she told me of the proud beauty that would not marry the white bear, even though her brothers were dying of cold, and her sisters were wasting to nothing in front of her eyes. She was glad to come with me, and to take the burden off your father's back a little, even though she regretted not having the time to say good-bye. But now, I suppose you are not so proud as you were then, and for your sister's sake I will take you, for I loved her well. So hop on my back, and I will take you to my brother, the west wind, for he may know where your castle is to be found."

The white bear's wife answered nothing, for she was a little ashamed of herself when she remembered the pride that had been hers before the bear took her to be his bride. She climbed upon the east wind's back, and away they soared, across the seas and across the lands, until they came to the end of the world. There the east wind let her climb off his back, and she thanked him for his kindness, and then perched herself upon a rock until the west wind should notice her, for he was busy rattling the eaves and the shutters of the houses, and blowing up waves upon the ocean. But finally, he looked down and saw her there, and asked her what her business was and why she was waiting upon a rock in this cold and lonely place.

So the young woman told her story, from the beginning to the end, and then she asked him if he knew where the castle was, that lay east of the moon and west of the sun. Well, the west wind pondered for a moment, and then he said; "It is lucky for you that I know your sister, for my brother, the east wind brought her to me, because, although he loved her well, he could not bring a smile to her poor sad face. She told me how it was that you were too proud to take the white bear to be your husband, even though your brothers were dying of cold and your sisters were wasting away to nothing in front of your eyes. I suppose that you are not so proud now as you were then, and for your sister's sake, because I loved her well, I will take you to my brother, the south wind, who may indeed know where the castle is that you seek. Climb onto my back, and we shall be off."

Now, once again, the white bear's wife answered nothing, for she was indeed ashamed when she thought of the sad life that her sister must be living. On the back of the west wind, she travelled over the oceans and over the continents, until she came to the end of the world, where the wind set her down. She thanked him, then sat upon a rock waiting for the south wind to notice her, for he was busy blowing sandstorms up in the desert and cracking the wild waves against the tumbling cliffs. But after a while, he looked down, and when he saw her, he asked her what she was doing, waiting in such a bleak and desolate place.

Once again, the white bear's wife told her story; the wind pondered for a moment, and then he said ; "It is lucky for you that I know your sister, for my brother, the west wind brought her to me, because, although he loved her well, he could not bring a smile to her poor sad face. She told me how it was that you were too proud to take the white bear to be your husband, even though your brothers were dying of cold and your sisters were wasting away to nothing in front of your eyes. I suppose that you are not so proud now as you were then, and for your sister's sake, because I loved her well, I will take you to my brother, the north wind, who may indeed know where the castle is that you seek. Climb onto my back, and we shall be off."

Well, what could the young woman say. she hung her head, thinking of the hard life that her sister must be leading, and wishing that she had done many things that she had not done, and that she had not done many things that she had done. Nevertheless, she climbed upon the back of the South wind, travelling over oceans and continents, until once again, she came to the end of the world. She looked around her, to see that she was surrounded by cold and icy mountains and that icicles hung from the very clouds. After thanking the South wind for his kindness, she stood upon the freezing rocks, and waited for the North wind to finish blowing the roofs off houses, and battering ships to their graves in the wild wild sea. Finally, he noticed her, and stopped what he was doing for a moment, giving some respite to the shivering householders and the terrified mariners. Once again, she explained her errand, telling her story from beginning to end. The North wind listened, and then he let out a short laugh, which emerged as an icy breeze which froze the air around her head and turned her ears first pink and then blue.

"Well," he said, "I have a surprise for you. Step upon my back and meet my wife, for I think you know her!" Well, of course, who should the wife of the North wind be but the long lost sister. She greeted the white bear's bride joyfully, and said that she should take no notice of what the east wind, the west wind and the south wind had said about her, for it was indeed a strange thing to ask of a young girl to marry a bear. Moreover, if the bear's bride had married the bear straight away, then she, the wife of the North wind, would never have met her husband, so really all was well that ended well. Then she told her that her husband did know where the castle was that was east of the moon and west of the moon, for, she said proudly, he was the strongest of the four winds, and he had been over the whole world, from one corner to the other.

So the North wind flexed his mighty muscles, and carried the two sisters across the oceans and across the continents, and as they flew, his wife told her sister that they had been to the very castle to which he was taking her not long ago. There was a beautiful young prince there, with hair as black as the night, the nose of an eagle and eyes so blue that they looked like the winter sky. He lived in the castle with an old lady, who some believed to be an ogress, and her daughter; very soon, he was to marry the daughter. When the white bear's wife heard this, she knew that she would need all her courage and all her wits if she was to win her husband back again. She felt in her pocket, and she found the three walnuts and she gripped them tight in her hands.

At last, they arrived at a long, golden beach, and above the beach there was a tall, golden castle, with spires that seemed to reach to the very sky. The wind set his wife and his sister down upon the sand, and then said that he would return for them whenever his wife should call, but that now he was very busy, for there were houses to destroy, ships to sink and cliffs to crumble into the sea. With that, he was off, howling across the oceans and the continents, and his wife watched him on his way with a fond smile and the trace of a tear about her eye.

"Now," she said, "I will give you all the help that I can, for I have been given certain powers by my husband. I can float upon the air, and waft wherever I will, and I am so thin, that if I do not wish to be seen, then I will not. But in the main, this is your task, and you must do it as you see fit."

It was evening time, and the sky was full of stars. The white bear's wife sat beneath the castle walls, and she thought and she listened. After a while, she heard a voice, and she looked up. A young woman was sitting at a window, looking out over the sea, and as she gazed at the waves, she sang a song.

In three short days, 'tis my wedding day By the stars that shine on the sea. If I had a gown made of those stars Then I know my love would love me

The white bear's wife picked one of the walnuts from her pocket and looked at it thoughtfully. Then she closed her eyes tight, and sent her thoughts and her mind winging back the way she had come, upon the backs of the winds and following the bird through the forest, back to the third cabin, with the oldest woman with only one tooth, and then back to the second cabin, where the old woman had two teeth, and then back again to the first cabin in which lived the old woman with the three teeth, and she looked down upon the woman, who looked back up at her, and winked one eye, and cackled and curtsied, just as she had done on the day that first she saw her. Then the young woman opened the first walnut, reached into it and slowly teased out a gown of finest cotton, the colours of which shimmered like the stars in the sky, and it was full of the light of the stars. She put the dress on, and it fit her as if it had been made for her, which, of course, it had, and then she walked upon the sand, and she walked in the full view of the young woman who was sitting in the window.

"Who are you, that walk thus upon the sands in the light of the stars?" called down the young woman. The bear's wife looked up and saw a face the beauty of which mirrored her own, but while she was dark, the other was fair, and while her face was an open book, the face of the other was a closed mystery. She called up to the face at the window, "I heard your song, and thought that you would wish to see the dress."

"Give it to me," said the girl at the window, "for I am to be married to the most beautiful man in the world, and I would wear that gown for my wedding day."

"I will give it to you, if you will let me pass the night with your husband to be."

The fair woman in the window laughed, and said to her, "Come on up. I will go to him and tell him to expect you." But while the bear's wife was hurrying up towards the castle, and waiting for the gate to open, the bride-to-be went to her fiancé with a cup full of wine, and told him that it was a nightcap, to help him sleep through the night before the night before the night before the night they would be wed. The prince took, the cup, and drank the wine, and soon it was clear that the fair girl had said nothing but the truth, for he fell into a deep sleep. So when the bear's wife had given the gown that was the colour of the stars to her rival, and entered the room, she found that she could not wake her husband, or speak to him to remind him of the things he had forgotten. So she kissed him once upon his red red lips, and lay down beside him, to spend a last night with the man who had been the white bear.

In the morning, she left the castle, and went to find her sister, who was blowing ripples upon the water as it washed up upon the sand. "Listen, my beloved sister," said the North wind's wife, "I suspect that the young woman and her mother are up to some tricks. I will see what I can see." Light as a leaf upon the autumn wind, the young woman rose up in the air, and wafted over the castle, turning herself this way and that, so that anyone who might have looked in her direction could never be sure of what he saw. She floated down into the castle, and crept through the many chambers, until she came to an inner bedroom, where the fair young woman was talking to her mother.

The mother was tall, and slender, and as beautiful as her daughter, but her hair was the colour of flame, and her eyes were as green as emeralds. There was danger for all but the boldest men in the tilt of her chin, and in her smile there was a threat and a promise. "Well, my daughter," she was saying, "I hope you know what you are doing, for you know as well as I do who this young woman is."

"Yes mother," the daughter answered, "but with the magic that we have woven around him, he has forgotten all about her."

"Ah," said her mother, "that is easy, for what man will not forget an old flame when he has two new ones, each as beautiful as we are. But if he sees her again, he will remember, and if he remembers, you will surely lose him, for she wants him far more than you do, and she will fight the harder."

"Mother, he did not see her, and he could not see her, for I gave him a drink that made him sleep the whole night through. Tonight I shall give him another, and the night after that, I shall give him yet another. Then it will be our wedding day, and he will be mine."

Then the North wind's wife slipped out of the castle, and went to tell her sister all that she had heard. The bear's wife sat by the shore, and she lost herself in thought. The night fell, and this night there were no stars, for the moon was as full as a moon can be, and shone upon the sea, the sand and upon the castle. After a while, the bear's wife heard a voice, coming from the castle, and she looked up, and she saw her rival, sitting at the window again, and singing a song

In two short days, 'tis my wedding day By the moon that shines on the sea If I had a gown made of the light of the moon Then I know my love would love me

Once again, the bear's wife reached into her pocket, and took out the second walnut. Then she closed her eyes tight, and sent her thoughts and her mind winging back the way she had come, upon the backs of the winds and following the bird through the forest, back to the third cabin, with the oldest woman with only one tooth, and then back to the second cabin, where the old woman had two teeth, and she looked down upon the woman, who looked back up at her, and winked one eye, and cackled and curtsied, just as she had done on the day that first she saw her. Then the young woman opened the second walnut, reached into it and slowly teased out a gown of finest satin, the colours of which shimmered like the moon in the sky, and it was full of the light of the moon. She put the dress on, and it fit her as if it had been made for her, which, of course, it had, and then she walked upon the sand, and she walked in the full view of the young woman who was sitting in the window.

"Who are you, that walk thus upon the sands in the light of the stars?" called down the young woman.

The bear's wife looked up and called to the face at the window, "I heard your song, and thought that you would wish to see the dress."

"Give it to me," said the girl at the window, "for I am to be married to the most beautiful man in the world, and I would wear that gown for my wedding day."

"I will give it to you, if you will let me pass a second night with your husband to be."

The fair woman in the window laughed, and said to her, "Come on up. I will go to him and tell him to expect you."

But as before, while the bear's wife was hurrying up towards the castle, and waiting for the gate to open, the bride-to-be went to fetch her fiancé a cup full of wine. The North wind's wife intending to forewarn the prince, floated up into the air, but just as she crossed the battlements, the fiancées mother saw her, and with a laugh blew her back over the sea, twisting and turning like a leaf in an autumn gale. The young woman brought the wine to the prince and told him that it was a nightcap, to help him sleep through the night before the night before the night they would be wed. The prince took, the cup, and drank the wine, and soon it was clear that the fair girl had said nothing but the truth, for he fell into a deep sleep. So when the bear's wife had given the gown that was the colour of the moon to her rival, and entered the room, she found that she could not wake her husband, or speak to him to remind him of the things he had forgotten. So she kissed him once upon his red red lips, and lay down beside him, to spend a last night with the man who had been the white bear. In the morning, she found her sister sitting by the sea, blowing the water into angry wavelets.

"Ah, said the North wind's wife, "I have not been with my dear husband long enough to learn how to command the breezes and the bluster, for if I had, that woman would never have had the better of me, and I would have warned your husband not to drink the wine. And now, through my foolishness and vanity, you have lost him forever."

"Sister, dear sister, listen to me," said the white bear's bride. "We should never give up until we are sure we have truly lost. I will not abandon hope before I have seen them in each others arms on their wedding night, and I know that he has truly, truly forgotten me. For remember what the red-headed witch said.? If ever he should see me, he is mine."

So the two sisters waited through the long long day. The sun was close to the horizon, blood red and golden, when the bear's wife heard her rival's voice again. Once more she was singing a song :

In two short days, 'tis my wedding day By the sun that shines on the sea If I had a gown made of the light of the sun Then I know my love would love me.

The white bear's wife smiled to herself, and this time she was sure of what she must do. She plunged her hand into her pocket, and pulled out the last walnut. Without pausing to think, or to send her mind and her thoughts back to the third old woman, she cracked open the nut, and drew out, inch by inch, the most beautiful gown that has ever been seen upon the face of the earth. It was of the finest Chinese silk, and it held the colours of the setting sun in every stitch. She put the gown on, and it fitted her as if it had been made for her, which it had, and she danced upon the sand, the light of the sun and the light of her dress reflecting back the one from the other, until the waves of the sea did not know from where they should be sending their sparkling iridescence. As she danced, the bear's wife heard a gasp from the window, and she looked up to see her rival looking down at her with envy in her eyes. Neither of them spoke, for each knew what the other wanted. Dancing slowly across the sand, the white bear's wife made towards the castle gate.

Her sister, seeing what was happening, opened up her heart, and silently called to her husband. Then she turned towards the castle, floating up into the air like a feather rising in the heat. As she drew over the battlements, she saw that the red-headed woman was waiting for her, but this time, as the witch puffed up her cheeks, the wild North-wind caught her by her heavy skirts and sent her billowing into the sky. She turned to grapple with him, and witch and wind were carried, struggling the one with the other, over the stormy sea. Turning her back upon the sight, the North wind's wife floated through the castle's corridors, until she came to the prince's room. There she did not make herself visible, but whispered her message in his ear, barely seconds before the fair young woman entered with her nightly potion.

"Take this," she said, ' and it will help you to sleep through the night before the night that we are wed."

He smiled, and thanked her, but he heard a small voice that seemed to come from inside his head, warning him not to take the offered drink. As soon as his betrothed's back was turned, he tipped the contents of the cup out of the window, and lay upon the bed to see what would be. Some ten minutes later, after giving the gown the colour of the sun to her rival, the white bear's wife slipped into his room, and then into his bed. You can imagine her joy when she discovered that her husband was awake. As for him, no sooner did he see her face above his own, as she leaned to kiss him once again upon his red red lips, than the spell of forgetfulness fell from his mind, and he recognized his proud and wilful wife.

The next day, the fair young woman woke to find her mother gone. This did not prevent her from going ahead with the wedding preparations, for she was determined that today she would be married. She chivvied the kitchen staff, she berated the waiters, she pestered the priest until the hour came when the great bell struck, and her prince walked from his chamber into the court-yard of the castle. At the very same moment, the North wind, somewhat out of breath, but looking very pleased with himself, deposited the bride's mother, looking a little flustered but with a merry eye, on the castle battlements. The prince looked at his bride-to-be, and looked at his mother-in-law to be, and they were so beautiful, that for a moment, he forgot his resolve, but as he glanced once more towards his wife, his spirits cleared, and he stepped forward, holding in his arms a folded nightgown.

"Listen, my dear ladies," he said, "if I am to be married, I wish to be sure that I will have a good wife. Therefore, I will give my hand to no woman who cannot wash the three drops of wax from off this nightgown." The bride-to-be looked at her mother, who flicked a contemptuous eye-brow. The young woman turned towards the prince, and looked him in the eye. "If you think," she said, "that I would marry a prince so as to do his washing, you had better think again." Then she shrugged her shoulders and turned away, biting her lip, because, after all, he was such a very pretty young man.

The prince turned towards the dark young woman, who stepped forward in her turn, looking up at the fair one's mother, who flicked her eye-brow yet again and pursed her lips. "If you think," said the dark one, "that I would marry a white bear so as to do his washing, you had better think again." The prince looked abashed, and stepped back. "However," she continued, "I do recognize those three drops of wax as my own doing, and so I will not refuse to wash them from your nightgown.' And she took it from his hands, and held it up to the light. "But you can damn well iron it yourself," she murmured, so that only he could hear.

With that, she walked from the castle, down to the sea and lay the nightgown in the waves. She took three walnut shells from her pocket, and scraped the wax away from the gown, shook it out and the North wind carried it up far into the air, where the heat of the sun dried it out. The wind returned it to his sister-in-law, who gave it to her husband, and so as not to waste the wedding feast, they got married all over again.

The next day, the north wind took his wife, and her sister, and her husband upon his back, and carried them back to the miller's house. The wind had given a rendezvous to his brothers there, and the south wind, which was warm and dry after a trip across the desert, thawed out the frozen brother, who was overjoyed to be returned to his brothers and his sisters. And three of the sisters married the South wind, the West wind and the East wind, while the sixth stayed home and looked after her father, and played havoc with the hearts of the young men of the village, until the mothers and fathers wished that another bear would come and take her away as well. As for the sons, they married the fair young woman in the castle east of the moon and west of the sun, and a hard but merry time of it she gave them.

As for the red-headed witch, well, I do believe that whenever the North wind had it in mind to take a change from his wise, but rather leafy wife, he would off and romp with her for a day or two, for they had come to something of an understanding during their tussle for the prince's heart. As to the bird and the three old women, I don't know what happened to them, for they were never seen or heard of again. But sometimes, the red-headed witch opens wide her emerald green eyes, pouts her lips and blows out a perfect ring of foul-smelling smoke. And then she winks. But no-one has ever heard her cackle and I do not think that she curtsies to anyone.

[timjmason]

Man the Hunter, Richard, Lee eds.

Although dated, this book is still worth the reading. There are multiple essays by a large number of anthropologists with insights from their field-work - particularly valuable are the discussions. It does need saying that this book over-emphasizes the hunter, at the expense of the gatherer, and that virtually all the participants are male. This would no longer pass without comment today. 

[timjmason]

Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

Mark Lawrence's second trilogy is kind of OK, but less gripping than his first. The hero is more purely literary device than was Jorg - one part Flashman, two parts Rincewind, with an occasional zest of Viking berserker. His musings on his own flawed character are, by the third volume, repetitive and tedious. The story itself is well plotted, and if the central character had been a little more complex and rooted, the novel might have worked. There are no female characters worthy of note; the women in this novel are all seen through the red haze of the hero's lust, and react either by bedding him or by breaking his nose. On the whole, this was a rather disappointing follow-up to an excellent debut. 

[timjmason]

Nicholas Eames - Kings of the Wyld

This was OK. It was both amusing and touching in parts, and there were some good jokes - mainly quipped by the grimmest of the characters, Ganelon, which was a neat joke in itself. The story zipped along nicely. Its characters are close to the models of the genre, and this is limiting, particularly for the women - I counted two bitches and one domestic goddess, with a sprinkling of younger women who were allowed to have initiative but not to exercise it anywhere it mattered. I found I skipped the fights: it's a bit like listening to football on the radio. And I'm not really interested in football anyway.

[timjmason]

Anne Bishop - The Black Jewels Trilogy

This is a book about a rape. The victim is a twelve year old girl. There are two rapists. One is a villain while the other is the main hero of the book. Ms. Bishop's prose is sludgy. Her favourite enunciative verb is 'snarl'. She uses it excessively. Whenever someone speaks quietly, it is always 'too quietly'. When people are not raping twelve-year-olds - sadistic paedophilia is a constant theme - they interact like characters in a third-rate domestic comedy. It's as if someone had contracted the marquis de Sade to write a full season of 'Bewitched.' Except that de Sade wrote better. 

[timjmason]

Lian Hearn - Accross the Nightingale Floor

It's a pity that the first review of this book on this Goodreads page is so ill-tempered. Hearn takes no particularly untoward liberties with Japanese culture, taking institutions for what they are : flexible guide-lines the application of which varies with time, situation and social standing. The story is a fairly standard one of a young man discovering his hidden gifts and using them to confound his enemies. It is well-written, well-paced, the characters move about without overtly creaking, unlike the floorboards. There is sex and violence, but both are dispatched without overly laying on the detail - a relief when compared with much of modern fantasy, in which a street fight can be recounted blow by blow and a kiss can take up five pages of lingering description. I will certainly read the second volume.(less) [edit]not set[edi

[timjmason]

Samuel Delany’s Flight From Neveryon

I read the first three volumes over the week. I don't think I'll be going on to the fourth just yet, but I may come back to it. There are going to be spoilers in this review. Delany writes philosophical novels. Or perhaps he pastiches philosophical novels. Plato's dialogues lie behind several sections and almost the whole of volume 2 can be read as a cheerful response to Sade's 'Justine' Voltaire, Dostoevsky, and Anton Wilson drift in and out of the text. The author tackles psychology - mostly Freudian - economics (he's almost certainly wrong about the evolution from barter to money, which he seems to see as very important in the first volume, but which happily doesn't get much in the way of the rest of the series), literary theory and much, much more. Some of this rides with the story, but there are long passages which the reader may find pretentious, boring or mundane, depending on how much patience she has for academic quibbling. Delany's lead character is the leader of a slave revolt - and comes across as a Staggerlee as in Nick Cave's version of the tale. It is a little mysterious as to why he acts as he does; in several places throughout the books it is suggested that slavery is, in any case, pretty much a thing of the past. And indeed, this rather peculiar hero never seems to do very much, slipping clandestinely from place to place, and holding meetings which finish in mayhem, as those he has - perhaps - betrayed discourage would-be followers and attempt to assassinate him. When he does move into action, he is as much concerned to realize his Hegelo-Sadian sexual fantasies as to make much difference to the wider world around him. Delany spends pages and pages on his fornications, particularly with his successive lieutenants, but relatively little on his political and military campaigns. And once Delaney has wound him up in the first book, he is pretty much left to tick his way through the following two as a background figure that gradually takes less and less space. Delany is very much interested in gender questions, and several of the leading characters are women, particularly in the second volume. At one point, the heroine, a happier Justine, who is prone to embracing her opportunities rather than running away from them, finds herself caught up in a four-way drama of passion, setting up a rather interesting set of characters who then just disappear from view, to leave space for a rather pointless fellow who takes on the heroine's role as victim. The third volume is perhaps the most intriguing and successful of the three, and its final section, which winds back and forth from the fantasy world to New York at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, is, for the most part, wonderfully done. (less) [edit]

[timjmason]

Mark Lawrence’s The Broken Kingdom

Mark Lawrence is a very good writer. The Broken Empire, was a remarkable feat for a first novel, and this, his third outing, is a very promising successor. The Grey Sister is the second in the series. In the review that follows, there will be spoilers for both this volume and the first, The Red Sister. [ Lawrence's first major character, Jorg, the central force in The Broken Empire, found his initial well-springs in Anthony Burgess's Little Alex, the hero of 'A Clockwork Orange.' In his opening pages, Lawrence adopted some of the tics of language that characterized the narration of Burgess's classic. However, those were quickly pushed to one side by Jorg himself, who took hold of the story and ran with it, perhaps astonishing his author as much as he does the reader. The problem with stories that are reliant on the power of characterization is that if the central character never catches fire, the whole enterprise fails. This is what happens in the second trilogy, where although there are one or two actors who show promise, the narrator is pretty much a limp biscuit, sketched out through a few catch-phrases such as Dickens might use to summon one of his minor characters. Lawrence drags Jorg and one of main female characters from The Broken Kingdom into the action, but very little come of either of them. In the present trilogy so far, however, Lawrence manages to juggle a larger number of actors (juggling is a theme that runs through the book) which takes much of the pressure off his leading lady, a ten-year old girl. Piqued, perhaps, by some of the criticism that had been levelled at his earlier works, in particular by the accusations of sexism articulated in one particularly negative review - he was miffed enough to respond to it directly - he has set this trilogy in the feminine world of a nunnery, and his heros are, for the most part, female - as are most of the villains. The nunnery is imagined as dedicated to worship of a god who is referred to as The Ancestor. How this deity is conceived of is rather murky; the people who owe him their allegiance are something of an enigma. They are sometimes pictured as the descendants of four 'races', each of which is possessed of a characteristic inborn power. But at some moments in the book it seems that there were already people on the world before the 'races' arrived, and that there has been interbreeding such that most of the present population have no exceptional talents at all, while others have inherited them, and may even have several of the powers to varying degrees. It seems that genetics don't work the same way on this planet as they do on earth, as there are some specimens - the heroine herself is one of them - who may be 'full-blooded' exemplars of several of ancestral lines. The world itself is dying. The ice caps at both poles have expanded, until only a thin strip at the equator is left to sustain human life. This kept open by a satellite moon, launched by an earlier civilization, and which is, in fact, a magnifying glass that concentrates light and heat on the central zone. (I don't find this particularly convincing, but I am not looking for realism in a fairy tale, which is what this is). Things are getting worse, and many people cling to the belief in a prophecy that has it that the world will be saved by a messianic bearer of the blood of all four of the 'races'. Nona, the heroine, is understood by some to be an important figure in the prophecy. We follow Nona from her village, from which she is cast out after revealing her immense capacity for destruction and death-dealing, to the nunnery, to which she is brought by the Abbess, who saves her from the gallows after catching a glimpse of her true nature. The rest of the first volume is taken up by a variation on the boarding school novel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_...- which Lawrence handles with aplomb. The teachers are the usual mixture of sadists and thoughtful guides - sometimes both at once, as with Sister Apple, who cheerfully poisons her pupils in a variation on the pedagogy of violence which tends to underlie the genre. There are whippings, deadly tests, school bullies, false friends and false enemies and even the occasional exclamation mark. Nona passes all the tests, and suffers bloody beatings to rival with a Mickey Spillane detective. Nona is one of a cast of characters several of whom play important roles in the development of the plot. So although she is central, she is never the only focus of attention. In the second novel in the series, she shares her starring role with the Abbess, who is both a kindly mother and a Machiavellian schemer. In this book, after an opening section which continues within the school tradition - more bullying, more tests - both Nona and the Abbess take to the road, heading towards a grand finale in which Nona saves everyone's bacon (with a little help from her friends). The villains that Nona has had to deal with in earlier sections now become sub-villains to the more monstrous players who act upon the world stage, rather than in the confines of the nunnery. I found this second volume rather less powerful than the first. Although Lawrence gives himself room to excel in any number of fight scenes - he is very good at those, and the reader will be swept up in the brutal action as powerfully as if in the front row of a professional wrestling combat. But few of the characters reveal any great depths. Arabella and Zole, the two who may or may not be the Chosen One of the prophecy, are both little more than ciphers, and Nona herself, although inhabited by a devil for much of the book, has nothing like Jorg's depth and inner conflict. The one character that does show some complexity, Nona's false friend and betrayer, Clera, is mainly a plot device. Although the main characters are female, there is a handful of males. Nona has a feud with a family of nobles of whom we see only the men. They are satisfactorily villainous, and one may imagine them twirling their moustaches. A young fellow we met in the first volume shows up again, and we are lead to understand that he may be destined for emotional entanglement with Nona. He has the crooked smile of the romantic hero. The fantastic genre lends itself to an obsession with bloodlines. Witchcraft is an inherited substance, talents are handed down, sometimes in mysterious ways. Kings and Queens are born from the loins of Kings and Queens. One may take this as it comes, as simply a trope that is embedded in the genre. One may struggle against it, as, in these democratic times, many authors do. Lawrence occasionally genuflects to the demos : the Abbess proclaiming that the exceptional individual, however spectacular or miraculous their works, does not make history, but that it is the people in their mass that forge political and social destinies. But his story is, once again, of high inheritance. Nona at one point seeks her mother. She doesn't find her, and assumes her dead. I would not be surprised if both Nona's parents make key appearances of some kind in the third volume. (hide spoiler)]

[timjmason]

Anne Briggs’ Mercy Thompson collection

This series is like VI Warshawski with werewolves and vampires. So far, it has been great fun, although there are some signs that it may go the same way as Paretski's novels - the author finding more interest in her protagonists' relationships with each other than in the stories she has to tell. By book 4, the heroine has taken to wallowing in existential angst for several pages at a time. The reader - this reader - would rather she pulled herself together and slaughtered a vampire. Happily, there's still a lot of vampire slaying.

The heroine is a shapeshifter who turns into a coyote. Unfortunately for her, Old World night-bumpers have wiped out almost all the New World magical beings, so she has to make her way among werewolves, not all of which are ready to accept her. She also doesn't really grasp what Coyote is, and part of the fun is her gradual discovery of her otherworldly attributes. Rooted in the place, she may turn out to be considerably more powerful than the European in-comers. One of her superpowers may be to make friends and lovers easily; whenever she's in a tight spot someone else will turn up to help her out of it. Must be that Coyote is a lot more fun than your average Eurohellspawn

[timjmason]

Migratory Tweets

I don't listen to the radio. The outside world mostly penetrates through Twitter. At the top of my timeline at the moment, Nando Sigona is messaging from a conference on migration and border control. He makes what I think is a sarcastic comment, asking whether Dmitri Avramopoulos is proposing to build a smart border machine in the middle of the Med. For some reason this makes me think of a gigantic mill-wheel, something like Dante's Inferno turned on its side and put in motion. It sorts the souls of the migrant dead into official categories.

I see my analyst's head outlined against the window. His glasses hold my attention. There is silence as I run through the items. The dream.

A first sighting: a dark curve in the wave - a dolphin's back. One of my companions drags off his sodden shirt and waves. Water streams off the structure as it grows, a wheel turning slowly in the early sunlight. Beads clack behind me: Aminata, praying. We approach.

We are on a platform. Voices sound, but I cannot make out what is being said. Aminata tells me : "We must form a line." Hand to shoulder. I follow my companion into the darkness.

Three are seated behind a metal desk: my father, a man whose features I cannot quite discern, Aminata. She reminds me of someone. "Show me your papers," says my father. There is a canvas satchel beneath my left arm. I extract a file and pass it across the table.

We wait in the cold water as the wheel turns. There is a pod at the end of each spoke. Sometimes the wheel stops, and a line shoots out, dropping in front of one or another of the bobbing heads. The line is grasped. The pod ingests. We see feet wriggling in the slot.

A line drops in front of me.

[timjmason]

Talking to My Aunt

Last night I could not get to sleep. Thoughts and impressions rolled by. My Aunt asked me to explain the situation in the Middle East. I did so, starting with an outline of the geopolitics at the North Pole, where, I claimed, the land had been divided among nation states. This was by no means a natural way of determining rights to use of the land, I said. At this point, several of our listeners - a small crowd had gathered - voiced approval.

Although I felt a need to carry out some research before continuing, I then turned to the Middle East itself. I believe I gave what must be a fairly standard account, including allusion to the petrol industry, to the three faces of the single rather beastly tribal god, and the unfortunate destiny of that particular set of myths and mysteries. While holding forth, I was satisfied that I uttered several deep truths, couched in firm persuasive language, and deploying several metaphors of clarity and wit.

That my Aunt has been dead for about fifteen years, and that when alive she never would have given tuppence for my opinion on any subject, let alone a politically charged one such as this, did not trouble me. Nor did the fact that the jolly old dame had been a great one for opinions herself, mostly of a rather sinister nature. I once accidentally set her off on an antisemitic rant, and was reguarly treated to her belief that spastic children - she suspected me of suffering from a mild form, and would have me roll up in a ball on the floor to prove her point - should be euthanized. (She worked as a physiotherapist at a clinic for children suffering from the condition, so her theories were not simply idle speculation, but part and parcel of her professional self). We were not allowed to mention trade unions in her home.

I cannot remember whether my exposition came to any kind of conclusion. Perhaps I fell asleep. My Aunt was no longer listening by that time anyway. I don’t think she was ever very good at listening. I’m paid to explain, but that’s no guarantee.

[timjmason]

Of Lice & Men

Of Lice and Men (adapted from posts to Anthro-L)

Abstract : While wild beasts, large-scale climatic changes, floods and other dramatic changes are often invoked in current scenarios intended to explain the process of hominisation, more humble and less noticeable factors shaping the ecological niches within which our ancestors developed are left to one side. Spurning more heroic versions of our species' emergence, the authors of the present paper advance the idea that it is in our relationship with a small-scale predator or parasite that the key to the development of a number of the more prominent features of human beings may be found. Comparative hairlessness - the Naked Ape - the upright posture and the opposable thumb can all be understood as adaptations to the depredations of a particularly troublesome strain of lice. Subsequent interaction and co-evolution with the lice lead to the growth of our relatively large brains, and to the first fumblings of culture - the beach-robe and the dance. Key words : hominisation, evolution, culture, lice

It has for some time been clear that a well-disposed anthropological imagination is of far more use in the development of fundamental theories about the evolution of our species than is all that thumping about with spades and bone-measuring that archaeologists, serious-minded fellows, go in for. Stoczkowski's round-up of evolutionary scenarios1 demonstrates most clearly that a capacity to spin a good story is more profitable than careful measuring and theoretical caution ; so much so that David Batten2 felt moved to propose that our forefathers evolved to full humanity upon the snow-fields of Norway, where the discovery of skis led to their standing up so as to maintain equilibrium while freeing their hands to grip the skiing sticks.

So it is that I am emboldened to argue that our apish forebears - for I refuse to favour either male over female or the inverse, seeing this as a failing which has put too many scenarios out of court3 - developed in and through their relationship to a particularly vicious strain of lice. It was while reading Keegan4 on the development of warfare that I realized that some such drama must lie at the basis of our speciation. Keegan, in his analysis of Andreski's Malthus-inspired theory of the Military Participation Ratio5 - or MPR - makes the point that the case would have been harder to put if it had been published after the appearance of McNeill's 'Plagues and People'6, in which it is convincingly advanced that maladies cause far more deaths than does warfare.

McNeill's has always been a favourite bed-time book, but it was only at this instant that I saw that it held the key to the understanding of our evolutionary history. As Gould and Eldredge7 have argued, speciation is likely to occur when a small sub-population finds itself for one reason or another isolated from the main stream. We may imagine then - paleoanthropology allows or even encourages such feats of insight8 - that a small group of ape-like individuals found themselves cut off, through some dramatic geological or meteorological event, in a remote and rather swampy site within the African Rift-Valley. Isolated with them, of course, was a much larger sub-population of the lice that apes carry with them wherever they go9.

Under these conditions, the rate of reproduction is such that the lice would evolve comparatively quickly. We may imagine that, through genetic drift, a race of particularly voracious, efficient and dangerous lice developed. In the swampy conditions in which this population was trapped, the lice will probably have become vectors for a number of quite nasty diseases. For our fore-fathers and mothers the ability to defend oneself and one's offspring from the attentions of these ferocious parasites would become a sine-qua-non for survival and would, most certainly, have given rise to a number of radical adaptations.

In the first place, those children who had less hair, and therefore afforded less cover for lice, would have stood a greater chance of survival than would hairy infants. The adaptational benefits of hairlessness would, we surmise, have encouraged neotony10. This, in turn, would have meant that women, as mothers, would have had greater need of their hands, for as the species became smoother, and as offspring were born earlier, so babies would have become less able to hang onto their mothers as young monkeys do.

Bipedalism would also have been encouraged by the benefits of having hands free to scratch the head ; a hairy creature may get at most of the itchy bits by using its hind foot, as a cursory knowledge of canines or felines will confirm. But the ape whose hair is only to be found on its head will find it difficult get at the itch in a satisfactory way. This, I surmise, is why males also adopted upright walking.

Moreover, the upright stance, coupled with bipedalism, would have enabled the canny individual to keep an eye out for any con-specifics who were scratching suspiciously, and to step sharply out of their way, thus avoiding infestation. The need to eliminate the lice would have given the impetus for the development of the opposable thumb and the fingertip precision of human manipulations - this marks us out from our simian cousins who, infested by a less life-threatening form of the parasite, merely treated it as a stand-by food supply, to be gross-cropped when the need arose, but never entirely eradicated.

As to the development of language, our scenario owes something to Dunbar's work, but stands it on its head. Language developed in order to permit socialisation to occur at a sufficient distance to establish good relations with other individuals while nevertheless avoiding sharing their parasites. It is only subsequently that language, in turn, leads to the formation of larger and larger groups.

Scott MacEachern, in a praiseworthy attempt to fill out the paradigm established here, advances the idea that lice and human-beings co-evolved, for as we all know, any parasite that is *over*successful is ultimately *un*successful. So it is clear that the lice will have had to take measures to make their continued existence more palatable to our ancestors. Here is how I suspect that to have happened : I have always rather liked the Acquatic Ape scenario, but felt that it lacked in proper foundations - that is to say a convincing retroprojection of the American way of life onto the habits of proto-humans. However, with a little adjustment of the scenarios provided by Elaine Morgan, we can clearly see that our ape-like predecessors, in their struggle against the lice, will have taken to bathing on a regular basis in an attempt to wash the little beasts out of their hair.

This, in turn, lead to the development of culture. How was this? Why, as we all know, if you are to bathe in the waters of the sea or of an estuary, you need some protection against the cold - not while in the water, of course, for as any regular swimmer can testify, it is better in than out. It is only when you emerge that you need a beach-robe or garment of some kind to protect you from the cutting breezes that are ever blowing along such sandy shores as our forebears would naturally have favoured. The first cultural invention, then, was this garment.

And this it was that lead to the development of peaceful co-existence between ourselves and the lice. Obviously, lice would very quickly have taken to lying in wait for the bather in his or her own beach-robe. However, if they insects so thoughtless as to immediately set to biting and sucking the moment the individual donned it once more, he or she would only discard it and leap back into the water. So it would have been that a race of restrained lice developed, able to profit from deferred gratification.

This, in turn, would have been a lead for our quick-learning ancestors ; I hypothesize that the bath-robe would soon become a signal to would-be mates that the wearer was clean and could therefore be considered as a proper object of sexual desire. The confection and modelling of bath-robes was, then, one of the very first of cultural phenomena.

I believe that this would quickly have developed into a more general use of clothing to signal sexual desirability ; in particular, it would have lead to one of those continual and interesting battles between the honest fellow and the cheat that so pre-occupy theorists of evolution. For clothing of any kind would, quite obviously, have allowed the lice-infested to conceal the bloody traces of their presence. In their turn, the lice would, quite certainly, have developed an unerring instinct for identifying those individuals that were most skilled in the confection and display of alluring and concealing vestments. Proto-humans, for their part, may well have responded to the propensity to cheat by developing a taste for rituals of divestment, in which the desired partner demonstrated his or her freedom from lice by slowly undressing, while contorting his or her body in such a way as to allow it to be minutely examined11. (This lead to the evolution of rhythm and of dance ; music would have arisen to accompany it).

To counter this, cheats would have developed the cultural and psychological trait of modesty. In the long run, and with the invention of patriarchy, both these throw-backs to our evolutionary past would have been imposed on women by the dominant males.

Here follows a comment by Professor McEachern : I

think that some archaeological (read: serious-minded, spade-thumping) considerations need to be brought into this. Wanderings into more northerly zones would (especially during glacials) tend to inhibit full use of the seashore in the manner that you describe, since only a madman would ever attempt to swim in say the North Atlantic or the North Sea. Cultural adaptations to such conditions in the region involve quick submergence and then a pell-mell run back to the sauna, minimizing the potential for both display of lice-free status and the detection of cheating that you mention.

In addition, the biological stresses caused by high-lice status would decrease the general fitness of the population. This is obviously a possible explanation for the relative lack of cultural advance that we see in these northerly zones compared to more tropical climes. (The masochistic submergence behaviours exhibited by Brits at Brighton and by German bathers at a number of Baltic beaches are obviously the result of ancient genetic isolation of small populations [pace the Classic Neandertals]. It is unlikely that they have any adaptive value.)

The appearance of awls in Solutrean sites in Cantabria during the LGM (Last Glacial Maximum) may then be confidently explained as a response to these very difficult climatic conditions, allowing for the development of form-fitting fur bathing suits analogous to (but far heavier than) the wool suits of the LVP (Late Victorian Period). Patriarchy for the Solutrean may then be assumed.

The cultural advances associated with these new developments will explain the florescence of rock art during the late Solutrean and the Magdalenian. Hurray for intradisciplinarity.

To which I responded :

The pictorial art thing has been bothering me slightly, but I think a reworking of Knight's ideas about the use of red ochre15 may lead us in the right direction. I'd assume that ochre could be used both as a protective lotion for the bather and as an aid to the cheater, obscuring the red weals left by heavy albeit surreptitious scratching. This in turn would segue into early forms of scarification and body-painting. Once bodies were more usually concealed - that cold weather again - the frustrated artistic type would naturally turn to rock as a medium.

As you can see, the argument as it stands, although somewhat sketchy, fulfils the necessary criteria to qualify as a serious scenario in the context of palaeoanthropological discourse as it is practiced in today's universities. I have, of course, left the details to one side ; I do not wish to show my hand too clearly in this place, prior to the publication in a learned journal which will establish my intellectual property-rights. Unless, of course, I discover that I have here merely re-invented the wheel. Which would not come as a great surprise.

BTW, as someone who would, in his youth, swim in the North Sea even during the months of winter, I am reluctant to consign the hardier northern variants to an evolutionary back-water. But perhaps you are right, and our place is back there with Piltdown and his fossilized cricket-bat.

Notes 1. Stoczkowski, Wiktor, " Anthropologie naïve, Anthropologie savante : De l'origine de l'Homme, De l'imagination et des idées reçues ", CNRS Editions, Paris, 1994. Stoczkowski's thesis is that academic scenarios purporting to describe and explain the process of hominisation overwhelmingly follow in the traces left by folk-tales and philosophers, thus leaving to one side such possibilities as do not fit those grooves, even though they might be quite as scientifically valid and interesting.

2. Batten, David, "Bipedalism Revised", Journal of Anthropological Research, 42 : 81 - 82. (Cited in Stoczkowski, op. cit., pp. 86/7).

3. On this, see Haraway, Donna, 'Primate Visions ; Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science', Verso, London, 1992.

4.Keegan, John, " A History of Warfare ", Pimlico, London, 1994. Disappointingly, Keegan, although aware and admirative of McNeil's work, does not take a great deal of account of it in his book, and we find nothing of the impact of lice on the military. This must be considered a gross error.

5. Andreski, Stanislaw, " Military Organisation and Society",1954, cited in Keegan, op. cit., p. 223. Keegan gives the publication date as 1908, but as Prof. Andreski is still, I believe, at Reading University, this seems unlikely.

6. McNeill, William, H., " Plagues and People ", Penguin, London, 1979.

7. Gould, S.J. and N. Eldredge, "Punctuated Equilibria ; the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered", Paleobiology, 3, 115-151, 1977.

8. For some discussion of what is permissable within the field of paleoanthropology, see Knight, Chris, " Blood Relations ; Menstruation and the Origins of Culture ", Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1991, where he writes, among other wonderful things ; "... I am of course constructing a myth. I am doing what all palaeoanthropological storytellers have been doing since the birth of their science .. The test of a good myth, however, is that it is both widely and enduringly believed." (p. 5) Although Knight goes on to claim that the scientific myth must also obey other rules, Stoczkowksi (op. cit.) has demonstrated that these secondary rules of evidence are both flexible and permissive. As for my own thesis, I expect considerable resistance, for it unfortunately lacks the glamour of such accounts as the hunting scenario or the killer ape story. It certainly isn't as sexy as Knight's contribution - see my account of his book. Fingernails scrappling at an armpit seem far less heroic than a prehistoric confrontation with a hungry tiger.

9. Dunbar has grasped the central importance of the parasite in the life of our forefathers. Unfortunately, although he sees that language replaces the ceaseless hunt for lice, he has not fully understood the mechanisms by which this substitution took place. See Dunbar, Robin, "Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language", Faber and Faber, London & Boston, 1996.

10. In this scenario, neotony is not driven, pace Gould, by the large brain; the latter is an accidental consequence of the former. Lice, then, are the indirect progenitors of human intelligence. 1

15. See Knight, " Blood Relations ", op. cit. Knight points to the discovery of large quantities of red ochre in a number of sites associated with human habitation, and suggests that it was used in early rituals centred upon menstruation.But where he sees women as advertising menstruation, I see them as concealing lice

[timjmason]

"You no big fellow Master" : the Anthropologist's eye for the Bushie Lubra

Shame is a certain *kind of* sorrow which arises in one when he happens to see that his conduct is despised by others, without regard to any other disadvantage or injury that they may have in view.

Shamelessness is nothing else than a want, or shaking off, of shame, not through Reason, but either from innocence of shame, as is the case with children, savage people, &c., or because, having been held in great contempt, one goes now to any length without regard for anything.

Spinoza, Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being: Part 2, Chapter 12.  - ON GLORY, SHAME AND SHAMELESSNESS

Introduction ; Polly's refusal. In a letter dated 20th Dec., 1895, written to his partner and friend, Baldwin Spencer, the Australian ethnologist, F.J. Gillen, at that time in charge of the telegraph station at Alice Springs, evokes one of his wife's maids, an Aborigine woman known as Polly. After informing his correspondent that he has passed on the gift of tobacco which Spencer had sent for her, he goes on :

I had hoped to send you a photo of her au naturel by this mail but when, after handing her your tobacco, I approached her on the subject with exceeding delicacy, she gave me a look which I shall never forget and scathingly remarked, 'You all the same Euro, you canta shame! You no big fellow master! You picaninny master'. The emphasis on the picaninny was something to remember for ones lifetime. Since then she reverted to the subject to tell me that, 'That one big fellow master Puff fessa no yabba like it that him no poto-grafum, poto-grafum, poto-grafum lubra all day. Very good longa bushie lubra, no good longa Station lubra' and in a final burst of indignation she wound up by saying, 'No good no good potografum lubra cock!'

The savage – Polly – here accuses the white man – Gillen – of knowing no shame, and tells him he is a child. We also note that she distinguished between Gillen – you picanniny master – and Spencer – one big fellow master – in what seems to be an attempt to shame Gillen, and also that she seems uncertain as to whether it is her own dignity as a Station lubra, or the dignity of all lubras that she wishes to protect.

Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen were two of the earliest ethnologists to study the life and culture of Aboriginal Australians. Gillen, a self-educated man of Irish stock, was stationed in Alice Springs, on the territory of the people who were then known as the Arunta. It was there that he met Spencer when the latter, professor of biology at the University of Melbourne, was one of the members of a scientific expedition into the Australian desert. In what follows, the social distance between the two men should be borne in mind, for even though their relationship was one of friendship, Gillen maintained throughout their correspondence, a proper deference. When they discovered that they got on well together, and that they shared an interest in ethnographical matters, the two men collaborated on a series of books on the Aborigine peoples, their most influential work being their investigation of the Arunta, during the course of which both of them were initiated into the tribe – although, for obvious reasons, this will not have involved a full initiation – and permitted to observe and photograph some of the secret religious ceremonies, and to handle and even collect the sacred objects, or Churinga, which play so large a part in the Arunta conceptions of life.

Gillen at that time lived permanently at Alice Springs with his wife and children. They had a number of Aborigine house-servants, among whom was Polly. Polly appears about half a dozen times in the letters that Gillen wrote to his colleague and friend – today no one knows quite who she was ; Mulvaney, Morphy and Petch speculate that she may have been the woman known as Tryphena, one of Mrs Gillen's two personal maids mentioned in Spencer's Wanderings in Wild Australia, but this is, of course, a name given her by her employers and conceals her indigenous identity. One of the photos published in the Letters gives her name as Aritcheuka, but we are not told how or by whom she has been identified.

Polly is written into the record as a comic figure ; we first meet her as 'the portly Polly', yelling in fear as she comes across a snake. We are treated to examples of her 'Blackfella English', such as 'Puff fessa acoorna him Monkey yab' – or the comment with which I opened this talk. At one stage we learn that she is pregnant, despite her age, and Gillen has a certain amount of fun at her expense over the infant's skin-colour – Polly believes that the white flour served at the station may lead to her baby's being white. The last time she appears, Gillen has tried to photograph her once again, this time to show Spencer what she looks like when suffering from 'gummy eye' brought on by the local flies ; when she realizes that he is looking for his camera, she 'was scooting away for the hills, swearing like a tom cat in a fit'. It is not clear at this point whether she is still one of the station servants ; if she is not, then she would have been wearing 'bush clobber'.

Polly was not always to refuse to allow her photograph to be taken. Other Aborigine women seem to have been willing to be depicted without clothing ; Polly's reluctance is not the expression of a 'primitive' suspicion of the camera, but, it would seem, a refusal to compromise her dignity as a station servant. Thus we learn that Amelia Gillen's departure for a month is the occasion of much anguish :

The old dame (Polly) is greatly concerned about the Wife going away, she will be thrown on her own resources and the good nature of Solomon (her husband) for tuck out and after being so long with us she does not like the stern reality of a blue skirt and bushey tuckout.

We cannot now, of course, re-establish the reasoning that lay behind Polly's reluctance to be treated like a 'bushie lubra'. Had she already assimilated the contempt with which the immigrants regarded the indigenous savages? Did she crave the status of an honourary white woman? Or was she more subtle in her refusal to allow Gillen to treat her in a way which she knew full well he would not treat one of his own? As we will see, a number of the Arunta elders were willing to extend to Spencer and to Gillen the courtesies and privileges that they allowed the initiated of their own people; perhaps Polly was insisting that Gillen should reciprocate.

Seeing the ancestor's image But Polly may not have considered all the ramifications of photographic portraiture ; it may well be that neither she nor her fellow Aborigines had fully grasped what a photograph was and how it could be used. This is unsurprising ; neither Spencer nor Gillen, nor any of the other early anthropologists who used this technique for the recording of ethnographic data had fully sounded out the implications themselves in those early days. But the fact that an image of the individual could be captured, stored, and consulted was to be a source of much bitterness in later times. Spencer, who had studied under Tyler and who was in close contact with Frazer during the years of his collaboration with Gillen, could be expected to have foreseen the problem ; in The Golden Bough we read :

... one of the customs most rigidly observed and enforced amongst the Australian aborigines is never to mention the name of a deceased person, whether male or female; to name aloud one who has departed this life would be a gross violation of their most sacred prejudices, and they carefully abstain from it. The chief motive for this abstinence appears to be a fear of evoking the ghost ... (249)

Because Frazer is above all interested in finding regularities across cultures, he does not go into the specificities of the Aboriginals' reasons for avoiding the names of the dead. Both Spencer and Gillen, however, must have become at the least dimly aware of what an image of the dead might mean for the Arunta, for their investigations of Aborigine ceremony and of  totemism as practiced in the Australian desert had given them some precious clues as to the relationship between the living and their ancestors.

Each Arunta individual is conceived of as belonging to one or another of their totemic clans. Their clan identity is not handed down from father to child, or from uncle to child, as is the case with many other systems of personal identification, but is related to place, and in particular to the place where the mother finds herself at the moment that she realizes that conception has occurred ; at that moment, the spirit of one of the ancestors passes into her child. This spirit is linked to a Churinga, an object made of stone or of wood, and which is normally kept, along with others of its kind, in a special and sacred spot to which only a small number of old men have access. It is tied, in fact, to the spirit of one of the ancestors ; each time a child is born, it inherits the being of one of the original people – which one being determined by the older men. Each individual Arrernte, then, is an avatar of one of the first people. Under such circumstances, to invoke an earlier incarnation of the same individual is full of risk.

Gillen's thoughtless use of his camera is, then, a double rejection of the ties of convention ; he places Polly's status in danger both on the Station and in the bush. However, whereas both he and Polly recognize the first, neither of them appear to be aware of the second. And neither do the other Arunta, who are apparently quite happy to have their portraits taken ; we may see, for an example, a group of elders posing along with Spencer for Gillen's camera in the summer of 1896-7. And indeed, today, not all those who identify themselves as Aborigines are shocked or concerned by the existence of photos of their ancestors ; in fact some of them are happy to be able to trace the existence of their forebears, and have helped to identify the different individuals who helped the ethnologists in their researches.

Nevertheless, these considerations lead us to enquire whether the whole of the anthropologists' project could not be considered shameless, immodest, and impudent. In Gillen's account of his attempt to photograph Polly in the nude, we sense a degree of shock in his reaction to his servant's anger. Of a sudden, this woman who is normally a figure of fun, an ageing child, strikes him with her look and with her tongue; he will, he says, never forget this moment. Why should it strike him so deeply?

The howling Savage Lowie, in his history of anthropology, reports how one of the early figures of the discipline, Sir John Lubbock, in his book 'Prehistoric Times', declared that some savages had no feeling of shame and were at the same level of civilization as the wild beasts. While not all of his colleagues shared as low an opinion of those that they nonetheless regarded as 'primitive', almost all of them believed that peoples such as the Australians were representative of some previous stage of culture. The great interest that men such as Frazer or Morgan showed in the work of the Australian ethnographers was sparked by their belief that it was here that science would find the clues that would permit them to reconstitute the lives of our earliest forebears. Spencer and Gillen subscribed to this view : the Arunta were living fossils, relics of the stone-age. As such, they were unlikely to share the sensibilities and sensitivities of the civilized. In their 'Across Australia', written for the popular market and published in 1912, the year of Gillen's death, they describe the Arunta as 'howling savages' and insist upon the crudity and backwardness of their culture.

Indeed, if we reduce the concept of shame to a feeling of sexual modesty, the savages that Spencer and Gillen believed they were studying could be expected to have no such notion ; not only did they wear no clothing – the men did not even adopt the penis sheath that was found in Malanesian societies – but still maintained the vestiges of primitive promiscuity. It was believed at the time by a number of authorities, including Frazer, that primitive humanity had practiced some form or other of group marriage. McLennan maintained that brothers would hold a wife in common, while Morgan believed that groups of brothers would marry groups of sisters, and that within this group marriage individuals would have sex with each other indiscriminately. Both Frazer and Morgan hoped that the Australian ethnographers would find evidence of such an organization among the Aborigines.

Although Spencer and Gillen were by no means as much under the remote control of their metropolitan mentors as some commentators have suggested, they did set about looking for evidence of group marriage among the Arunta and their neighbours in the Northern Terrritory. They thought that they had found traces of it in the pirrauru system, in which a woman could take – usually with her husband's permission – a lover who was considered to have rights over her which, although weaker than her husband's, were nonetheless considered legitimate. It was also the case that travelling Aborigines would be offered access to the wives of their hosts when they stopped over in an encampment for the night. To the Victorian mind, women who allowed themselves to be treated in this way must have seemed to be very little more than sexual objects, to be accorded little respect. In several of his letters, Gillen reports excitedly to Spencer that he will be able to confirm the theory, even at one point linking what he believes to be reports of total promiscuity with habitual cannibalism, involving the eating of children. On the face of it, Gillen might be expected to be surprised by Polly's reaction to his request.

The unscrupulous anthropologist At about the same time, Gillen was beginning to become conscious of other acts of moral carelessness on his own part. We have seen how the Arunta associated their souls with the sacred objects that I have been calling Churinga, and we have seen how these objects were kept in specific sacred places. From time to time, one group might offer some of these objects to another group – always in the expectation that, sooner or later, the gift would be reciprocated. From a very early stage in the conquest of Australia, the immigrants had begun to collect these objects, and anthropologists were even more assiduous in hunting them out and carting them off than were the herders and gold-prospectors who pushed their way into the outback.  Gillen himself had participated in the pillage. Writing in 1894, he says:

Have got a splendid lot of stone Chooringa together since you left, including some from the Kytiche tribe, Barrow Creek. Some Glen Helen natives are now En route with a selection from a tribe inhabiting that locality of which I think you have some personal knowledge, since you left I have learnt that a number of Chooringa belonging to the Chichika tribe are deposited in a cave known to one of my Niggers and situated about 105 miles North West of here and I am about to organize a little expedition to annex the whole collection.

However, there is evidence that Gillen already had an inkling of what he was doing ; in a letter dated the same year to one his other academic mentors, Edward Stirling, director of the South Australia Museum, who had encouraged the telegraph men to collect ethnographical items, speaking of another haul of Churinga, he writes :

I used to have scruples about invading their sacred spots but the pernicious example of a distinguished FRS (Stirling himself) has demoralized me.

Certainly he has some idea of their importance for the Aborigines, for in March of 1895, he writes :

Under the old order of things and without the restraining influence of a Sub-Protector, any Woman or uncut youth seeing this pole (used in the subincision ceremony) would be killed or at least blinded with firesticks, the same penalty is attached to looking at the Chooringa Stones or sticks and I have known many poor wretches, male and female, to be blinded for yielding to a momentary curiosity and in some cases for what was a purely accidental view.

As he finds himself drawn into the ceremonial world of the Arunta, little by little he comes to empathize with their feelings for the sacred stones, and he begins to put a rein on his rapacity. By 1896, he is referring to an occasion when two investigators broke into a tsuringa store-house as 'the Kudinga robbery',  and will only take them himself when they are offered to him. The full extent of his conversion is made clear in a letter dated 30th July, 1897, when he writes :

... there must be no more ertnatulinga (tsuringa storehouse) robberies. I bitterly regret ever having countenanced such a thing and can only say that I did so when in ignorance of what they meant to the Natives – To fully realize this one requires to go as I did a few weeks ago with bush natives to their ertnatulinga and watch them reverently handling their treasures – It impressed me more than anything else I have witnessed.

However, it is not clear that either Gillen or Spencer ever understand the full extent to which they overstep the mark. The word Churinga, according to Strehlow and to Roheim, can be derived from two terms : the first is 'tsu' – and designates something which is both secret and shameful – and the second is 'runga', indicating personal ownership of a very intimate nature. The Churinga, then, carry a semantic load that puts them on a level similar to our own 'private parts'.

The Churinga are offered by initiated men to other initiated men, and may be thus transferred from one camp to another, from one ertnatulinga to another. But they do not leave the circuit of exchange. Both Gillen and Spencer were considered to be initiated into the Arunta tribe, and it was probably as initiated males that they were offered gifts of sacred stones. Under usual circumstances, they would be expected, sooner or later, to return them to their original keepers. Spencer and Gillen, however, when offered the stones, removed them altogether from the system. Their acceptance of the offerings, in this case, can be understood as a fraudulent effrontery.

On the other hand – and this is a question to which we will need to return – the possibility is open that the Arunta elders themselves understood full well the terms of the transaction. They knew that neither Spencer nor Gillen were initiates in any full sense of the term, for neither had undergone sub-incision. Neither of them could reveal the scars or shed the blood that would indicate their trustworthiness. Nevertheless, we find time and time again that the elders seemed not only willing, but even eager to reveal the mysteries of their beliefs to the two men. Spencer, in a letter to Fison, expresses his surprise at being allowed to witness one of the more important ceremonies (the Engwura) but observes that 'they seem really anxious to let us know all about them'. When the two men make their trip across the center of Australia, they are surprised, but gratified, to find that in practically every port of call, the people just happen to be holding one of their important ceremonies. Time and again, the old men of one or another of the tribes accompany them in their journey, pointing out places mentioned in the sacred stories, and explaining their significance. At one stage they are even taken to the dwelling place of the great snake, but seem to have little consciousness of the favour which is being shown them.

We cannot know what it was that motivated the Arunta elders, although one may speculate. As the European immigrants spread throughout Australia, it had become evident to a number of Aborigines that it might only be a matter of time before their culture was completely eradicated ; already they were having difficulty persuading the young men to allow themselves to be initiated, although relatively few among their number had turned to the Christian Church. Did they see the efforts of the ethnologists as an opportunity for them to record, as best they might, the truths to which they had been witness? Although the Aborigines of the central area had, until the later years of the century, been largely spared the immediate consequences of conquest and displacement, the pushing of the railway into the centre had introduced them to the realities of conquest. As Gillen writes on January 31st, 1896

From what I gathered on the way up, and from what he (an Aborigine informant) tells me, utter demoralization has set in amongst the Urrapunna and the Arunta where they come together, they were, during the construction of the Railway, in the hands and under the influence of something like 1500 Navvies ... Many of them died from typhoid and other diseases and now they are setting aside their ancient tribal laws and marrying anyhow.

The elders knew that their ceremonial beliefs might well not survive.

Blood shown and blood hidden Whatever the case, the Arunta seem to have been semi-willing participants in these violations. I will go on to suggest that this gives us some clues for an understanding of what we mean by 'shamelessness' or 'immodesty'. For the moment, and before returning to Polly, we need to follow the Churinga a little further. The stones – which it is now believed are to be seen simply as one manifestation of the concept referred to by Arunta term – are to be handled only on special occasions, and by particular individuals who have passed through a series of initiatory rites that afford to them the highest degree of status. These initiatory rites centre around the shedding of blood by the males through their penises. Subincision involves opening the penis and collecting the blood ; the scar which forms over the wound may never be allowed to heal over completely, and the penis may be opened on subsequent occasions to shed blood once again.

This blood is understood to be menstrual blood ; the men see themselves as having taken on the task of ritual, collective menstruation which was originally that of the women. Some of them see this as 'a trick we have played on the women' ; much of the secrecy that surrounds initiation and other rites seems to be designed to keep women from getting to the bottom of the trick. It is not clear, however, whether they in fact succeed in this ; even to play the small but important part that they do in the various ceremonies, the women must enjoy a more extensive knowledge of the true nature of the events that they witness than the men believe them to, and in their own stories, songs and rites they show that they have their own versions of the sacred knowledge. It seems that while open flouting of the rules can and does lead to swift and awful punishment, there is a tacit agreement to share an inner core of meaning without which the different groups cannot live through their lives together. The unwary youth or woman who, by act or word, publicises their familiarity with secrets is punished for his or her shamelessness, rather than for their possession of the knowledge in itself.

The collective menstruation of the men is known – and, it would seem, must be known – but not acknowledged by all. What about the menstruation of the women? This, as is the case in many peoples, including our own, is considered dangerous, and a woman who has her period must ensure that the males – particularly the young ones – are not contaminated by her. (One wonders whether Polly's anguished reluctance may not have been due to this ; although Gillen always speaks of her as 'old Poll', we know that she was still menstruating, for, as has been noted, she becomes pregnant). Although it seems that some Aborigine societies practised collective female menstruation, this does not seem to have been the case among the Arunta, where it would have been  private affair, during which the woman would withdraw from the social round, except at the time of a young girl's first menses.

It does need to be stressed that these periods of seclusion would not be as frequent as once a month ; menstruation among women living in small-scale societies is, for a number of reasons, less frequent than it is in our own. Persistent malnutrition, regular pregnancies and the habit of late weaning, which suppresses the fertility cycle to at least to some extent, meant that women would only need to obey menstrual taboos at comparatively long intervals. It does seem, however, that once a group becomes sedentary and has a regular source of nutrition – as will have been the case around Alice Springs – then the fertility cycle becomes more regular. If this is so, then the group of Arunta studied by Spencer and Gillen will have been undergoing a set of pressures which would have put a deep call upon on their cultural resources.

Hence, perhaps, Polly's appreciation of the clothing that the station provided ; the editors of 'My Dear Spencer' remark at one point upon the fact that the 'bulky clothing (that station Aborigines were expected to wear) must have proved an unhealthy hindrance'. But, as we have noted, Polly appears to have seen the clothing as an advantage. Is it altogether to be ruled out that her embrace of full European dress, even during the hot summer days in the Australian desert, could have had something to do with the fact that it may have enabled her to conceal the increasingly frequently menstruations brought on by her uninterrupted access to station rations - at least from the Gillens, who she may have expected to object to her working in the kitchens during her periods?

Conclusion In his confrontation with Polly, Gillen may have stumbled upon a truth about his relationship with the Arunta that it was difficult to him to admit. The importance of his work with Spencer was posited upon the fact that the people they were studying were as close to the realities of stone-age existence as it was possible to be : the Arunta, out in the middle of the Australian desert, offered the very last chance to observe the lives of our ancestors before they were destroyed and obliterated. Polly's distinction between the station lubra and the bushie lubra may finally be understood as more pointed than it appears to be on the surface : the Arunta know that they need the white man's photograph machine, his marks upon the paper, his recording regard. Through their pretence that Spencer and Gillen are fully initiated – a return, in a way, of the fond contempt which the anthropologists felt for the black fellow – through their acceptance of the risks involved in allowing them to tread upon the secret grounds, and handle – or even steal – the sacred objects, the Arunta elders were, it seems likely, playing the anthropologists at their own game. Today's Arrernte have done much the same thing in using the most up-to-date video equipment to record and celebrate their cultural rituals. But Spencer & Gillen's subjects were not willing to show everything ; there were places the anthropologists could not go, things they could not see. Polly's pudenda were classified amongst these.

Gillen's shamelessness, then, is, we may surmise, constantly controlled and checked by those whose susceptibilities he apparently overrides and ignores. As Polly's solemn face stares stonily out at us from the photograph that she did allow Gillen to take, and as the elders of the tribe allow us to examine their fly-gummed eyes and their handsome noses, we should not allow ourselves to be taken in by the assumption that they did not know what was going on. Although their names appear rarely in the two volumes of 'The Arunta', that book may be said to be as much theirs as it is that of the two men who are named as its authors.

Shamelessness, it may be surmised, is, as Durkheim suggested of crime, and Becker of deviance, always founded in and supportive of a recognition of the prevailing standards of modesty. The fool, the clown, the criminal and the deviant offer themselves as exemplars and markers of the social limits. But these limits are not, as Durkheim would have it, 'social facts'; they are the subject of ongoing negotiations, of recall and of forgetting. The shamelessness of children and savages, as invoked by Spinoza, or the shamelessness of anthropologists, lend themselves to the rule-makers and the rule-keepers as opportunities to rework the deep design within their social tapestry.

Spinoza distinguishes two forms of shamelessness ; one is innocent, and the other a knowing disregard for the opinion of others. But Gillen partakes of both ; continually in the discourse that I have evoked here we see him oscillating between knowingness and deliberate blindness. His approach to Polly is almost guilty, as he attempts to seduce her with a gift of tobacco. His first scruples as to robbing the churinga give way to rapacity only to return once again as he witnesses an old man's attachment to the stones.  In Gillen's sudden re-awakening to shame as he meets, and turns away from, Polly's gaze, we may read a fleeting consciousness of how the ethnographer's ethnography is written.

Notes

Mulvaney, Morphy & Petch, pp. 89-90.

He began working at the age of 11 as a postal messenger. Later, he followed evening courses at the South Australian School of Mines and Industries – see Mulvaney, Morphy & Petch, p. 4.

Today, the accepted spelling is 'Arrernte', but I will here stick with Spencer and Gillen's orthography.

The spelling has, once again, changed since Spencer and Gillen's time. Gillen had some difficulty with the word churinga : I don't like the term sacred atal, its not ... a good translation of the meaning of the word which is a blending of the sacred and the miraculous. (Mulvaney et al., p. 210).

From further evidence in Mulvaney et al., it would seem that this is, in fact, the name of one of the other maids, called 'Dolly' by the family.

Spencer and Gillen refer to this process as 'reincarnation, but Moiseefe insists that this term is inaccurate ; the Churinga is associated with a double spirit. This splits at the moment when a new life is created, leaving the eternal part behind. That part of the spirit which enters the foetus will die with the individual.

Lowie, 'Histoire de l'ethnologie classique', p. 29.

 It must always be remembered that though the native ceremonies reveal, to a certain extent, what has been described as an 'elaborate ritual', they are eminently crude and savage. They are performed by naked, howling savages, who have no permanent abodes, no clothing, no knowledge of any implements, save those fashioned out of wood, bone, or stone, no idea whatever of the cultivation of crops, or of the laying-in of a store of food to tide over hard times and no words for any numbers beyond three or four. Across Australia, p. 6.

See the editorial matter to 'My Dear Spencer', and my essay 'The Anthropologist's Bagmen'.

Mulvaney et al., p. 97.

ibid, p. 52. From the first letter, written in 1894.

Mulvaney et al., p. 6.

ibid, footnote to page 59.

ibid, p. 74.

See, for example, the letter dated 14/3/96, where, after witnessing one of the ceremonial exchanges, he does not even ask for a coveted churinga , writing 'I wouldn't have had the heart to ask the old fellow for his newly restored treasure. His affection for them was quite pathetic. ibid, p. 108.

ibid, p. 164.

ibid, p. 178.

Strehlow, Roheim, cited in Moisseef, p. 87.

There is evidence in both the letters and the book, The Arunta,  that just as Gillen understood but did not feel fully the shameful nature of his earlier robberies until he had witnessed the ceremonies, so he understood, but perhaps never felt the fraudulent nature of his acceptance of the gifts. He is fully aware by 1896 that Churinga are always to be returned to their original owners.

My Dear Spencer, note 331, p. 144.

Spencer & Gillen, 1912, pp. 410-412.

Mulvaney et al., p. 99.

When Spencer returns to the scene of their earlier investigations in around 1925, he finds that none of the group that he and Gillen worked with are still alive. Although I follow Bruce Reyburn (see his account of Spencer and Gillen's meeting with the Warramungu at  http://nativenet.uthscsa.edu/archive/nl/9306/0188.html ) in seeing the Aborigines as deliberately setting out to reveal their secrets to the two anthropologists, I do not interpret this in the same way. Spencer notes several times that the young men are considered unworthy to be fully initiated into the inner secrets, and concludes that he and Gillen have witnessed the very last of the great Arunta ceremonies. It is in part due to their having recorded it that it is still accessible to the Arrernte of today. I think it is quite possible that the old men were well aware of what they were doing.

It is interesting to compare this with the case of suicide in the Trobriand Islands reported by Malinowski ; the young man was driven to his fate by the fact that 'what everyone knew' – that he was having an incestuous affair with a classificatory sister – became public rather than private knowledge when a jealous youth made an open accusation.

Moisseefe holds that Australian aborigines do not lay much stress on menstruation ; the information on pre-contact practices is scarce, but what there is suggests that although women were not subjected to the kind of seclusion that obtains in many communities, considerable care had to be taken by the woman at this time. See, for example, Berndt and Berndt.

Australian Aborigine women and women of some Southern African tribes experience only about  160 periods during their lifetime after undergoing an average of six pregnancies and three years of breastfeeding per child. Thomson and Ellertson, The Lancet, March 11, 2000. It should also be mentioned that the Arunta practice of cutting the inside of the vagina at marriage may very well have had the effect of lowering fertility and interfering with the menstrual cycle.

We may note in passing that at about the same time that Spencer and Gillen's work was making a great impression in the intellectual milieu of the Occident, the sociologist and anthropologist, W. I. Thomas, was wondering whether our ancestors had not adopted clothing specifically to deal with the problem of menstruation. He decided that this was not the case, but it is tempting to speculate as to whether there is any connection between the quantity of clothing adopted and the frequency of the average woman's periods.

[timjmason]

One Land, Three Landscapes : Frank Gillen's Alice Springs

Key names and concepts Alice Springs, anthropology, Arrernte, Baldwin Spencer, Dreamtime, farmers, Frank Gillen, itineraries, mapping, nomads, Tim Ingold, religion.

Abstract I will examine the region around Alice Springs as it appears in the writings of Frank Gillen, (in his letters to Baldwin Spencer), and in his joint writing with Spencer (the ethnological texts). In the texts we catch glimpses of three modes of landscape : that of the invaders, farmers and pastoralists, that of their scientific comrades, the biologists, geographers and ethnologists, and that of those whose land they have stolen - the Arrernte. Three ways of dreaming a landscape, three ways of living one.

For the pastoralists, the landscape is seen in terms of property and profitability : the one goes with the other, and it is their capacity to make a profit from the land that gives them their right to occupy and own it. Consequently, the landscape is also a well-policed area, in which the unprofitable is tracked and hunted down.

For the scientists, the landscape is a patrimony, a shaft which permits them to delve into the beginnings of our time and follow the course that takes us to the present. The ethnologists discover that their project necessarily entails a consideration of the third landscape, that of the Arrernte themselves.

1. Introduction At the very end of the nineteenth century, Australia, and in particular the people living around Alice Springs, occupied a central position in the  development of the social sciences, and the writings of Baldwin Spencer, Professor of Biology at the University of Melbourne, and Frank Gillen, Chief Operator of the overland telegraph station at Alice Springs, were a rich mine of information for such figures as Frazer, Durkheim and Freud. The seam still offers bounty today, as Chris Knight, Alain Testart or Marika Moisseef will testify.

The two main sources that I shall be working with today are their first joint publication, "The Native Tribes of Central Australia" (Spencer & Gillen, 1968), which first appeared in 1899, and the collection of letters sent by Gillen in Alice Springs to Spencer in Melbourne and written during the period when they were collaborating upon the book (Mulvaney et al., 1997). I shall also be referring to their second publication, "The Northern Tribes of Central Australia" (Spencer & Gillen, 1904).

In recent years the term 'landscape' has made its way over from the world of art and aesthetics to that of the geographer, the anthropologist and the sociologist. I have found the work of the anthropologist,  Tim Ingold (Ingold, 2000), particularly interesting, because it challenges some of the assumptions which anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists have made in recent times and which one may find an exhilarating guide to territories for which there are no maps.

For Ingold is rather suspicious of the map. There has, he feels, been a tendency to attribute maps to everyone for all occasions, and he will not have it. The map is, he reasons, a cultural artefact of a very specific kind, made for very specific occasions and uses. You will not find it everywhere (Ingold, 2000: 56). In particular, he tells us, the nomad does not make maps. When the Australian squats upon the sand and traces out the conventional signs that relate to waterholes, pathways, rocks and serpents, she is not drawing a map, any more than you and I are when we give instructions to a lost motorist. Outlining an itinerary is not a form of cartography.

Moreover, we have allowed ourselves to be mislead as to the nature of landscape by our insistence on the idea that visual primacy is a key attribute of Western culture. Ingold rejects this idea; synaesthesia, he says, is not a bizarre deviation, but the norm for all human beings, including ourselves. He invites us to read with him Breugel's 'The Harvesters', and to experience not only the visual delights, but also to hear the sounds that the painting quite naturally would evoke for both the artist and his subjects. It is in these sounds that we recognize what he calls 'the taskscape' (Ingold, 2000: 195-199)  of which the landscape as we see it hung upon a museum wall is the 'congealed form'. It is through the task that the animal - human or otherwise - experiences the land. For humans, the task is acquired through active attention to those elements of the environment that are brought to our attention by those who already master the task. Land and task become one. But  at some moment in the development of the European world-view, Man lifted himself out of the land, in a vast conceptual disembedding. Disembedding is, says the sociologist Anthony Giddens, one of the basic processes underlying modernity (Giddens, 1991: 21 ff.). To be disembedded is to be precipitated into the Modern.

2. Taskscapes The pastoralist, of English, Scottish or Irish stock, perhaps, rides across the ground that he considers his own. He checks the fences, taking care to see if any wretched native has cut the wire. He traces the cattle, on the look-out for a butchered carcass. If he finds one, he may call upon the local policeman, P.C. Cowle or P.C. Willshire (Mulvaney et al., passim). Or he may not; he has a gun upon his saddle, and few qualms about using it. He surveys the straight lines that are his boundaries and his roads, lines that will be drawn upon a government map somewhere to justify his claim to the land.

Frank Gillen, a little out of breath, follows a bearded Australian up the rocks, questioning his guide in a mixture of halting Arrernte and pidgin English. He follows the man's gestures and, with some satisfaction scratches out a sketch or two. This evening, back in his den, he will be able to mark out some new traces upon the map that Winecke has procured for him. These lines represent what he calls, remembering his bible, the wanderings of the totems.

The Arrernte woman makes her way from the camp seeking roots, honey, lizards. She and her companions know the places where these things are likely to be found, they know the signs that tell them where to dig and where to raise their heads. They know what places to go to, and what places to avoid. For they know that they are not alone in the land, that they are a part of something larger, something living and, sometimes, dangerous (Morphy, 1995: 199). The dangers may be immediate; see something you should not, and you may be blinded by a man's firestick, sexually assaulted, or killed. The dangers may be more long-term; if by your actions you upset the balance between one being and another, between one time and another, then the land may die. These are matters of fact, matters of habit, matters of attention and care.

Three taskscapes, two of which are mappable. The first map wipes the land clean of incident and accident :

[...] taking all things into account, the black fellow has not perhaps any particular reason to be grateful to the white man [...] To come in contact with the white man means that, as a general rule, his food supply is restricted, and that he is, in many cases, warned off from the water-holes which are the centres of his best hunting-grounds, and to which he has been accustomed to resort during the performance of his sacred ceremonies ; while the white man kills and hunts his kangaroos and emus he is debarred in turn from hunting and killing the white man's cattle. Occasionally the native will indulge in a cattle hunt; but the result is usually disastrous to himself, and on the whole  he succumbs quietly enough to his fate, realising the impossibility of attempting to defend what he certainly regards as his own property (Spencer & Gillen, 1968: 50)

The second attempts to place the Aborigines back upon the landscape from which the first has eliminated them. Gillen tries to map the unmappable. The Arrernte, for their part, must accommodate their taskscape and adapt it to the new era. They need to learn about guns, cows and maps. Necessity is a fine teacher.

3. The Blood of the Cow For the natives of Central Australia, the first cows will have demanded some quick thinking. This animal that had something of the kangaroo and something of the lizard may well have occasioned a little head-scratching. The kangaroo and the lizard were old neighbours with whom the Arrernte shared a common history, a common ancestry, and concerning whom the basic rules of social congress were known to all parties (Testart, 1992: passim). And if a kangaroo were to be killed, it was known how the different parts of the beast should be distributed among the members of the hunting party and their interested kinfolk. Rules concerning intercourse with the cow, however, might be something of a mystery. First, there was their relationship to the land: a kangaroo found itself upon its territory because its ancestors had left seed in the land, seed that had been  nurtured by the Aborigines themselves through what we regard as religious ceremonies but which, to their participants may have had something of the same resonance as the turning of the earth with a wooden plough will have had for an early European or African farmer. But the cow was anchored to the land by the guns and fences of the invader, by a conception of territory that, for the nomads of the desert, made little sense.

Nomads, Ingold tells us, do not make maps. That is not to say that they are unable to make iconic representations of those features of the landscape that are important to them, nor that they err haphazardly upon the surface of the earth, although that is what some of the early European settlers seem to have believed. It is that their own relationship to the land is most thoroughly embedded and indexical. The land is in their stories and their stories are  in the land: they themselves live the land and are lived by it. To speak about the land, to represent the land, is to talk about movement and encounter, repeated, renewed. The land is experienced bodily.

The settlers have maps. A map represents the land as if from a great height: it privileges no particular point of view from within the terrain. The map cuts space up with lines, lines that refer to some external standard: height above a distant sea, position in relation to a distant pole, territory as determined by laws laid down by a House on the other side of the globe. The cow, standing by the newly erected fence, is a vector of these conceptions. If the Aborigine sticks his spear into the flesh of the cow, he risks an encounter with one the other vectors, in the person of Police Constable Willshire or Police Constable Cowle. At the behest of Frank Gillen, master of the telegraph station at Alice Springs, and magistrate for the Central District, he may be flogged (Mulvaney et al: 149).

The Aborigine is no stranger to pain. He knows what it is to shed his own blood; it is possible that the policeman who lays into him has far less clear an understanding of the ritual in which he is engaged than does his victim. As the bloody lash falls across the hunter's back, it inscribes the lines of the map upon his skin. At his entry into manhood, he gave blood to the land and became one with it. Under the policeman's whip, he gives blood to a new disposition, a different alignment of the land. Several times in Gillen's account we meet the Aborigine who, after punishment, becomes himself an agent of the English law (see, for example, Mulvaney et al: 127). By the Arrernte elders, Gillen is afforded a title which confers upon him the right to organize and oversee ceremonies of initiation. The master of the lash is also the Oknirrabata or Great Teacher. (Mulvaney et al: 144)

4. Landscape, and the Map Landscape - or landshape - stresses the relationship between human agency and the terrain to which the community gives form, both on the ground itself, as it were, and as a mappable representation. An agriculturalist experiences the land as an exploitable resource, to be owned, that is to say to be protected against other men. The nomad is his natural enemy, for the nomad has routes and places, rather than boundaries and farmsteads.

In the desert, all things live. The rocks and the waterways, the kangaroos and birds, the people - all have consciousness, motivation and means of communication. The different beings have their different roles which all contribute to the maintenance of the whole: humans have their tasks. Some of these tasks are readily recognized by the interlopers: hunting, digging, wielding the fire-stick are all activities that can be accounted for within terms available to sheepherder, policeman and scientist alike. Others are more opaque; to deal with them, the European, in so far as he is interested at all, will invoke the sacred. Gillen calls upon the Eucharist, and upon the wanderings of the Israelites.

Gillen fills in a map. Upon the map, he traces out the wanderings. He maps the Dreamtime. Let us be clear about this: the Dreamtime is a European conception. It is, originally, Gillen's conception.  Gillen takes a flat piece of paper, and upon it he traces out lines and points.

Gillen's informants have already been inveigled into a momentous disembedding of task from taskscape. Why they agreed to show the telegraphist and his companion, Baldwin Spencer, their ceremonials is not known. How 'authentic' were the scenes witnessed by the two anthropologists is a matter for dispute. What does seem clear is that the two men were treated to a special show, during which they were able to see and question activities which were, in the normal run of things, treated with a great measure of secrecy. As Gillen himself remarks, if an uninitiated man or a woman were to catch sight - even by inadvertence - of one of the stone or wooden tsuringa, or if they were to wander into a zone which was forbidden to them, they risked their eyesight or their lives. Gillen and Spencer were welcomed.

Spencer writes the land. First he places it. Then he penetrates it :

We may first of all briefly outline, as follows, the nature of the country occupied by the tribes with which we are dealing. At the present day the transcontinental railway line, after running along close by the southern edge of Lake Eyre, lands the traveller at a small township called Oodnadatta, which is the present northern terminus of the line, and lies about 600 miles to the north of Adelaide. Beyond this, transit is by horse or camel; and right across the centre of the continent runs a track following closely the course of the single wire which serves to maintain, as yet, the only telegraphic communication between Australia and Europe. From Oodnadatta to Charlotte Waters stretches a long succession of gibber plains, where, mile after mile, the ground is covered with brown and purple stones, often set close together as if they formed a tessellated pavement stretching away into the horizon. (2)

The road and the wire drop mainly English names across the Central Desert. Beltana - the local word for 'Running Water', Strangways Springs, The Peake, Charlotte Waters, Alice Springs, Barrow Creek, Tennant Creek, Powell Creek, Daly Waters, Katherine, and Yam Creek to Port Darwin. English adventurers and their wives absorb Aborigine waters. The men of the telegraph set their concrete block houses down next to the springs and creeks. Sometimes the waters did not survive.

Upon this fresh sheet, Spencer maps the people into their places. He calls them 'tribes'; the concept is an attempt to fit the fluidities of the nomad onto flat parchment, to abstract the landscapes of gesture, task and sound and fix them. From Tigers, through Tribes to townships the mapmaker moves. The anthropologist finds his space between Tiger and township.

But this space is not the Aborigine's space. Spencer sees it with the eye of a naturalist and geographer. It is an eye that classifies, compares and analyses from a distance. The mountains are of a type, as are the Steppe lands. Further to the south and west lies 'true desert'. And although the mountains are allowed to be 'by no means devoid of beauty', the desert is monotonous :

Nothing could be more dreary than this country ; there is simply a long succession of sand-hills covered with tussocks of porcupine grass, the leaves of which resemble knitting-needles radiating from a huge pin-cushion, or, where the sand-hills die down, there is a flat stretch of hard plain country, with sometimes belts of desert oaks, or, more often, dreary mulga scrub. (6)

There is a figure in the landscape :

In this desert country there is not much game; small rats and lizards can be found, and these the native catches by setting fire to the porcupine grass and so driving them from one tussock to another ; but he must find it no easy matter to secure food enough to live upon. (6)

The Aborigine withdraws into the desert much as the !Kung withdrew into the Kalahari. As the wire fences and the cattle proclaim the advent of a new distribution of space, the nomad finds refuge and adapts to meagre pickings. Spencer draws the tribes onto his map, pinning down Aboriginal accommodations to the colonial ecology.

5. Displaced ceremonies Where there is water there is place. The telegraph plonked its blockhouse down on one of the most important ceremonial sites in Central Australia. To that place came Gillen. There had been others, and the men of the place had tried to tell them about the land. Gillen, unusually, listened; he was interested.

One of the men whose land had been taken over took Gillen in hand. This man, referred to by Gillen as 'The Old King' was keen to show the stationmaster how the land needed tending. He arranged for him to witness the tasks that made the land right - tasks that were becoming more difficult to perform now that the invader had built his fences. He soothes over the political difficulties that internecine rivalries between one group and another place in the way of the white man's investigations. What exactly his role might have been will forever remain obscure, but if we read the letters carefully we can catch glimpses of the extent to which he and his fellows did all they could to enable the anthropologists to enter their universe.

Clearly this was not easy, and Gillen often gives vent to a certain exasperation; you never can tell when you have achieved bed rock, he complains. The Arrernte elders may well have felt exasperated themselves as do their descendants when asked by a court official to estimate the width of a dreamtrack (Layton, 1999:  213): Gillen and Spencer could not comprehend the rites until they could see the land, and they could not see the land unless they had comprehended the rites. The rites and the land are one.

A room in a museum, the walls lined with Turners, Constables, Gainsboroughs: landscapes plucked from the places of their making and assembled beneath a city roof. Visitors stroll past, women and men who have never seen the land which is depicted, city-dwellers whose habitus is not of earth, water, livestock. Men and women who have never killed, never wet the soil with blood. The hunter, standing on the ceremonial ground, cuts a gash in his arm and lets the red liquid flow onto the earth. In County Meath, in Ireland, an old hag flies across the hills at Sliabh na Caillighe, dropping stones from her apron to fall upon the summits and mark her passage (Cooney, 1999: 53). They are still there today.

Gillen and Spencer negotiate with the Old King; Alice Springs will host a vast ceremonial reunion, lasting over four months - what the white man, plucking a word from one land and making it native of another, calls a corroboree, but of immense proportions. Gillen provides provender: flour and tobacco.

The Engwura, or, as it is called in some parts of the tribe, Urumpilla, is in reality a long series of ceremonies concerned with the totems, and terminating in what may be best described as ordeals by fire, which form the last of the initiatory ceremonies ... The natives themselves say the ceremony has the effect of strengthening all who pass through it. It imparts courage and wisdom, makes the men more kindly natured and less apt to quarrel ; in short, it makes them ertwa murra oknirra, words which respectively mean "man, good, great or very," .... (Spencer & Gillen, 1968: 271)

Such occasions bring together people from far and wide, and participants may travel over a hundred kilometres on foot. The last time such a celebration had been held was three years previous; it seems to have been a rather more modest affair. There are good reasons to believe that such vast meetings were less likely to have occurred prior to contact, and that the size of the Alice Springs Engwura attended by the two anthropologists was exceptional. It was Gillen's willingness to provide that made the meeting economically possible. It was the Old King's skills of organization and persuasion, and his determination that the two agents of the invading power should see and - at least partially - understand rites that covered so vast a territory, that made it politically possible.

6. Sacred Spots Gillen takes a map. Upon it, he inscribes the paths traced out by the different groups of ancestors. Spencer had come to some understanding of what was going on while watching the ceremonies, and had set his colleague on to investigate further :

It was a happy inspiration that caused you to start me working out the wanderings of the various totems and much of the information now going to you is the outcome of that work, if we had possessed this information before the Engwura it would have helped us to a better understanding of the various ceremonies ... I spent a day and half with the old King at Quiurnpa and felt that I was treading upon historic ground - The name is applied to a stretch of country some square miles in extent, and each of the Ulpmirka Quiurupa ceremonies we saw were especially connected with certain spots, often some miles apart ... Next week I am off on an expedition to the great Oknanakilla place of the Yarumpa at Ilyaba, Hamilton Peak, where I hear there are some drawings never seen by White men ... (Mulvaney et al: 166-7)

The King must have felt that he was making good progress in his attempt to educate Gillen. The anthropologist calls on totem and taboo, more borrowed words that have already become the jargon of his trade. The lapsed Catholic summons the Eucharist. The Arrernte Dreamtime is lifted out of the desert and displayed to the world. Now a thing of patches, totemic patches. Gillen maps rites and stories. He maps a group of women that carry spears and do the things men do. It all has to do with the women, but he can't figure out what. The Old King squats on the floor in the white man's study. He too is puzzled and asks questions. Later his descendants will come to the conclusion that White Man has got no Dreaming, but the King confers upon Gillen the title of Great Teacher.

7. Conclusion Three landscapes. One is the landscape of the pastoralist, with straight lines and fences. Within the boundary of the fence what is, is mine. The other is the landscape of the nomad, its routes and its places, where man and kangaroo commune and the earth lives. The third is found in the deliberations that reach from the first to the second, and which, inevitably, denature it in the doing. There is a fourth, which I have barely evoked in passing, and which is the work of the Old King.

To create Gillen's map, it was necessary for the Arrernte to bring the rituals to the anthropologist, to lift them out of their setting in land and taskscape, and perform them as display items, almost on their way to becoming folklore. It was only once this had happened that Gillen was able to make the connection that brought him to the edge of the Dreamtime. Some weeks before the Engwura, he had summoned an old man from some kilometres away, wishing to see his rain-making ceremony. The man performed the ritual, and Gillen describes the occasion in one of his regular letters to Spencer. He ends with a caution :

My rainmaker was careful to point out that his performance here was only an imitation ... he could not make rain here, the ceremony to be effective must be performed on the spot within the (totemic) circle ... the ceremonies attached to a (totem) can only be performed by the heads of the (totem) and within the totem circle. (Mulvaney et al: 103)

It is only after he has seen the show produced for him by the Old King that Gillen sets out upon his travels. In the second of his books with Spencer, 'The Northern Tribes of Central Australia' (Spencer & Gillen, 1904), he and his scientific companion set out upon a guided tour of the sacred sites, wandering upon the desert lands of Australia, welcomed in each spot by old men eager to show them the landscape of the Dream.

Gillen's life, and the old King's end in personal tragedy. But in their patient attempts to come to an understanding of the land and what it meant to live on it, they may have laid down some kind of foundation, earth tamped down with blood, for a later Australia, a later world.  And an Irish witch may hint that the King's message does not lie beyond translation.

Notes

But see Bender, 1999.

It is not a simple matter to name the peoples who inhabit the land we call Australia. The term 'Aborigine', although considered acceptable today, carries with it questionable assumptions. The term 'Australian' carries other, equally questionable, baggage. Even to use the 'tribal names' has its dangers. See, for example, what Carter (Carter, 1988:  326 ff) has to say about the ways in which the English determined the names of the original inhabitants.

As Mulvaney et al. acknowledge in a footnote, this was illegal.

For some consideration of this question, see "The Anthropologist's Eye for the Bushie Lubra" (Mason, 2000)

On the monotony of the Australian landscape, see Carter, 1988: 247-8.

"By disembedding I mean the "lifting out" of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space." (Giddens, 1991: 21) It is not only social relations that undergo disembedding; textual and iconic representations are lifted out of their immediate ritual context to become stories, myths, works of art, and the stuff of anthropological theory.

Gillen's work with Spencer never gained him the recognition of his scientific peers, and may have cost him advancement in his career with the Post Office. He ended his life a cripple, paralysed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and his eldest son killed himself in a shooting accident. By Spencer's account, the Old King and most, if not all, his family had disappeared, presumably dying of disease, by the time he returned to the site of his ethnological endeavours in 1904

Bibliography Bender, Barbara, Subverting the Western Gaze : Mapping Alternative Worlds, in Layton & Ucko, 1999, pp. 31-45. Carter, Paul, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1988. Cooney, Gabriel, Social Landscapes in Irish Prehistory, in Layton & Ucko, 1999, pp. 46ff. Cosgrove, Denis, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison & London, 1998. Cosgrove, Denis (ed.), Mappings, Reaktion Books, London, 1999. Frazer, J.G., The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic & Religion, Abridged Edition, Macmillan, 1987 (1922). Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991. Hirsch, Eric & Michael O'Hanlon, The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, Clarendon, Oxford, 1995. Ingold, Tim, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Routledge, London, 2000. Layton, Robert & Peter J. Ucko, The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape, Routledge, London, 1999. Layton, Robert, Relating to the Country in the Western Desert, in Layton & O'Hanlon, pp. 210-231. Mason, Timothy, "You No Big Fellow Master": The Anthropologist's Eye for the Bushie Lubra, http://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/Publications/Impudeur1.htm, 2000. Moisseeff, Un long chemin semé d'objets cultuels : Le cycle initiatique aranda, Cahiers de L'Homme, Editions EHESS, Paris, 1995. Morphy, Howard, Landscape and Ancestral Past, in Hirsch & O'Hanlon, 1995, pp. 185-209. Mulvaney, John, Howard Morphy, & Alison Petch, My Dear Spencer ; the Letters of F.J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1997. Spencer, Baldwin, and F.R. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, Dover, New York, 1968 (Macmillan, London, 1899). Spencer, Baldwin, and F.R. Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, Macmillan, London, New York, 1904. Testart, Alain, De la nécessité d'être initié : Rites d'Australie, Société d'ethnologie, Nanterre, 1992.

[timjmason]

Swallowing Stones

The Anthropologist's Magician by Timothy Mason

Introduction

The works of Bronislaw Malinowski and of Napoleon Chagnon, probably the two best-known male anthropologists of the twentieth century, open and close the period of the classic ethnography, which runs from 1922, with the publication of the former's 'Argonauts of the Western Pacific', (10) to 1968, when the first edition of the latter's 'Yanomamo ; The Fierce People' (2) appeared.

Two ethnologists. Two medicine men. In a well-known photo of Malinowski we see him sitting at the entrance to his tent which, pitched inside the inner forbidden area of the village, next to the chief's dwelling, marked him out as of special character. In this, he was similar to many of those that ethnologists have labeled shamans, for they too often live in marked domains - either on the inside or the outside of the encampment to which they are attached. The healer, the magician, is often a liminal being even in his living arrangements. Malinowski, in his tent, received visitors and dispensed the white man's pharmacopia.

Chagnon also. At the very beginning of his stay among the Yanomamo he became involved in an effort to innoculate this isolated - and therefore vulnerable - people against measles. As is often the case when a healer appears, the effect of his intervention upon the subjects of his attentions was ambiguous; the vaccine produced symptoms which were interpreted as the work of witchcraft, and the anthropologist found himself treated with some suspicion thereafter. But then, as he himself recorded, he was treated with suspicion from the very beginning.

But if the two men worked some form of magic upon the peoples that were the subjects of their ethnographies, they also worked magic upon the places and peoples from which they themselves had come. Malinowski and Chagnon were both myth-weavers; however the stuff of their myths was not so much the Primitive or the Savage, but their own efforts to shape and continue the discipline of anthropology. Malinowski made of himself the founding father of ethnographical field-work, and the story that he constructed around the time he spent in Melanesia became the measuring stick against which subsequent workers would be tallied. From the very beginning, he laced the scientific presentation of his work with nods to a more primitive vision of the world :

... in my first piece of Ethnographic research on the South coast, it was not until I was alone in the district that I began to make some headway ; and at any rate I found out where lay the secret of effective field-work. What is, then, this ethnographer's magic, by which he is able to evoke the real spirit of the natives, the true picture of tribal life? (10, p. 6)

Chagnon, for his part, willingly picked up the magician's gown, shook the dust off it and added new ornaments to the old. As we shall see, he was brought face to face with the magician from his very first meeting with the Yanomamo, and was, in one of those acts of desperate courage which characterize his ethnographic style, to shamanize on his own account.

But if Malinowski invoked a white magic, a fertility potion with which to encourage the growth of professional field-work and thus to place the discipline of anthropology on a firm footing, Chagnon - Set to Malinowski's Osiris - recognized the darker side of the shaman's art. If Malinowski was to assist in the birth of modern anthropology, Chagnon was to do his best to bring about its dissolution and death. (He is today professor of sociobiology, a discipline which is anathematical to many anthropologists - and in particular to the followers of Boaz staffed the American university anthropology departments at the time when he was a student).

The Myth of Field-work

Modern anthropology is - at least in the United States, and perhaps to a lesser extent in the UK - centred upon the conception of field-work as a rite of initiation. No-one can feel that they have been fully admitted to the inner circle of the trade until they have been out in the field. And even that will not suffice; stories circulate as to how X never really got on with the Bongo-bongo, and, really one shouldn't fully trust what he says about them. Much of this is rooted in Malinowski's writings; in the foreword and chapter one of 'The Argonauts of the Western Pacific', he gave a picture of the relationship between himself and the Trobrianders that set the highest standards for empathy and understanding. Yes, he said, you will find it difficult, you will suffer, but in the end, you will - you must - be accepted by them. Thus he writes :

Soon after I had established myself in Omarakana ... I began to take part, in a way, in the village life, to look forward to the important or festive events, to take personal interest in the gossip and the developments of the small village occurrences ; to wake up every morning to a day, presenting itself to me more or less as it does to the native. (10, p. 7)

And he goes on to add :

Also, over and over again, I committed breaches of etiquette, which the natives, familiar enough with me, were not slow in pointing out. I had to learn how to behave, and to a certain extent, I acquired 'the feeling' for native good and bad manners. With this and with the capacity of enjoying their company and sharing some of their games and amusements, I began to feel that I was indeed in touch with the natives, and this is certainly the preliminary condition of being able to carry on successful field work.(ibid).

This chapter was to become the charter for subsequent anthropological field-work. (Malinowski reinforced the message in 'The Sexual Life of Savages', where he wrote that it was imperative for the ethnologist to cultivate 'personal friendships which encourage spontaneous confidences and the repetition of intimate gossip' (11, p. 238)). The young men and women who followed his call to turn away from the study and get out into the field expected to be able to emulate his example. For although not all might succeed as he had done, all might, by following his advice, partake of the 'ethnographer's magic' :

... in this type of work, it is good for the Ethnographer sometimes to put aside camera, note book and pencil, and to join in himself in what is going on. He can take part in the natives' games, he can follow them on their visits and walks, sit down and listen and share in their conversations. I am not certain if this is equally easy for everyone - perhaps a Slavonic nature is more plastic and more naturally savage than that of Western Europeans - but though the degree of success varies, the attempt is possible for everyone. (10, p. 21)

And indeed, anyone could make the attempt. But what if you failed? What if the savage rejected your offer of friendship, what if he - and she - turned away when you attempted to converse upon an equal footing? Would this not reveal some fatal flaw in your character (a lack of Slavonic savagery, perhaps, too thick a veneering of civilization to allow you to unbend sufficiently) - and would you not be marked as unworthy of the calling to which you had answered so enthusiastically? Which is perhaps why, beneath the comedy, one hears a terrible note of panic in the following account of one young man's first meeting with the people that he was to study :

In just a few moments I was to meet ... my first primitive man. What would he be like? I had visions of entering the village and seeing 125 social facts running about altruistically calling each other kinship terms and sharing food, each waiting and anxious to have me collect his genealogy....Would they like me? This was important to me; I wanted them to be so fond of me that they would adopt me into their kinship system and way of life....I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! Immense wads of green tobacco were stuck between their lower teeth and lips making them look even more hideous, and strands of dark-green slime dripped or hung from their nostrils....I just stood there holding my notebook, helpless and pathetic. . . . What sort of a welcome was this for the person who came here to live with you and learn your way of life, to become friends with you? (2, p. 9)

It is likely that you will have recognized this passage, for it is one of the most regularly quoted paragraphs in ethnology. It is, of course, the account that Chagnon gave of his first encounter with the Yanomamo. And the pain, the fear, are well-founded; Chagnon's enemies within the profession - and he has many of them - are always ready to raise what they may well see as being the foulest skeleton in his cupboard; he never, they will tell you, could get on with the Yanomamo.

But, wonders the outsider, how many among them have not echoed at some time that young man's cry : 'What sort of a welcome is this for the person who came here to become friends with you!'? As Malinowski's diary revealed, the relationship between anthropologist and subject is often strained, and ever to be renegotiated. The price he or she pays for the power that the myth affords is to live forever in a state of liminality, to be always something of a magician.

Living the myth has, as living a myth always will, its dangers. We may catch some idea of these by listening to Roberte Hamayon, one of the foremost specialists in Shamanic studies. With some distaste, she makes it clear that she will have no truck with those who - like Carlos Casteneda or Michael Harner - have surrendered to the sirens :

Certains anthropologues préfèrent rendre consciente leur subjectivité propre, et l'insérer dans les réseaux de subjectivités locales ; j'ai préféré le choix contraire, pensant pouvoir ne pas interposer le filtre d'un écran personnel, et espérant pouvoir respecter, dans son alterité, la croyance de l'Autre : m'aurait-il crue si j'avais voulu jouer le jeu de ses croyances, moi qui n'ai pas les mêmes ancêtres que lui? ... "Chacun ses dieux" répondaient jadis les Bouriates aux divers propagateurs de vérités universelles qui les visitaient. (5, p. 754)

But one might protest that this forefronting of the anthropologist's subjectivity is given by the very nature of the undertaking. On reading Malinowski, one is struck by the extent to which he himself appears in his own texts. To some, this may appear uwarranted, a personal and rather tasteless foible. However, there is more to it than that, even if Malinowski could be uncomfortably self-regarding. It can be argued that the discipline of Anthropology found itself confronted with the shortcomings of modernism almost from its inception, and that the interaction between scientist and subject - and the scientist's subjectivity - were understood as being of central importance. To some extent, the problem was elided by sleight of hand : Spencer and Gillen, for example, always took great care to include in their publications only those photographs that showed the Arunta naked, although the men and women with whom Gillen had everyday intercourse would as often have been clothed as not - much of the time, presumably, in Gillen's own cast-offs. Malinowski, however, took the bull by the horns ; it was by placing himself within his narrative that he could best neutralize his constant presence. It allows him to assure the reader that, by taking part in the day-to-day life of the village, he was able to meld in so successfully that he was no longer an alien presence.

Chagnon also places himelf within his ethnography - but whereas Malinowski's presence is that of the cool and friendly observer, even when he is - as he often is - deliberately setting out to provoke a response, Chagnon's is comic, perturbing, a flurried series of eruptions, gesticulations and pantomime by which he attempts to thrust himself upon the group and wring the answers to his questions from them. He reports, with rueful satisfaction, that the Yanomamo gave him the name 'Irritating, buzzy Bee'. He makes little pretence of having had no effect ; on the contrary, he clearly intervenes, distributing  not only medication, but also steel blades - a gift which, to a people who were still using stone axes, could not fail to make a difference.

Chagnon's depiction of field-work can be read, then, as a negative of Malinowski's. There are indices that he knew exactly what he was doing, and that his account was a deliberate challenge to orthodox anthropology as he saw it. Subsequently his anthropological colleagues were apt to report that he was overly aggressive in his social relationships, and that he had been too well socialized by the Yanomamo. It seems clear that whatever else may have happened in the Amazon jungle during the time of his first foray, he certainly lost any great affection for cultural anthropology.

But if Chagnon rails against the myth and against those who propagate it, he does so, it would seem, from within. He is a satirist rather than a revolutionary - at least in the early work. It is not surprising that this should be so, for the myth itself is bindingly full of resonance, particularly in its USAnian version. We now need to look at this more closely.

The Vision Quest

Since those high imperial times when the anthropologist first pitched his tent alongside those of the heathen, he or she has been seen as particularly prone to that worst of crimes against his race - 'going native'. Within the discipline of anthropology as it has developed in both the United States and in England and its former colonies, such as Australia, the danger is ever-present, for the practitioner, to be fully recognized by his or her peers must, at some time, have spent a considerable period participating as fully as possible in the lives of the ethnological Other. This period is seen by the profession itself as initiatory, and the American anthropologist sees his sojourn among strangers as being an equivalent to the Plains Indian's 'Vision Quest', during which the young man ventures out alone into the wilds, starving himself into a state of receptivity during which he will encounter his guardian spirit. Mandelbaum (13) reports of the Plains Cree that a boy who chose to seek visions (it was not an obligation among the Cree, but many did so) would be taken into the wilds by his father, who, after smoking a pipe with him, would leave him to his business.

For several days and nights thereafter, the boy wept and prayed and fasted, continually concentrating upon his desire for supernatural visitation. He might take it upon himself to stand all through the day, or to look into the sun, or to perform any other feats which would hasten the vision, for the spirit powers came to a person because they knew of his suffering and pitied him. Therefore, the greater tortures a boy underwent, the more certain was he of attaining his purpose.

The young man who returns from his solitary initiation brings with him magical powers. These vary both in kind and in power :

While the boy slept, he might see a person coming toward hlm. It was the power that was to be his spirit helper. The visitor identified himself, often by momentarily changing into the guise of its namesake. The boy was led to an assemblage of spirit powers, all in human form, who sat around a great tipi. There the youth was told the gifts that had been granted him. Very often he was informed that he would be able to cure the sick. The procedure he must follow and the song to be used were then revealed. Some youths had conferred upon them the right to perform a certain ceremony, perhaps the Sun dance. Others obtained the ability to construct a buffalo pound. A much desired blessing enabled a man to lead a war party.

Like Malinowski's field-worker, the young Cree male was encouraged in his seeking for spirit helpers by the relatively open and democratic nature of spirit possession. Although not all those who sought visions would be granted them, anyone who so desired could make the attempt. A successful vision quest would, in later life, be the basis upon which some measure of personal distinction would be constructed. Similarly, the anthropologist would hope to found an honourable career upon adequate completion of his first stretch in the field.

But, as we have seen, in order to effect that field-work, the young man or woman was expected to enter into full and warm relationships with those he was to study. To be accepted by a savage people, the anthropologist would have to adopt a recognizable role ; in many small-scale societies, this involves initiation. We have an early and interesting example of this from the work of Spencer and Gillen among the Arrernte of Alice Springs. Both men were identified as initated members of the group, with names that indicated that they were the avatars of one or another of the heroes of the Dreamtime. Thus it is that we find Frank Gillen writing in his field-notes :

In the afternoon we witnessed Quabara Udnirringita of Unthurqua ... I am especially interested in (this ceremony)  because the performer represented Urangara, my ancestor of the Alcheringa or dream times, and the ceremony is in reality my property: I am supposed to be the reincarnation of a celebrated Alcheringa man who is famous for his skill as a great magician, the old men of the tribe had to account in some way for the remarkable interest I took in their manners and customs and the quite unusual sympathy I showed for their beliefs so they talked the matter over and persuaded themselves that I was the reincarnation of the great Urangara whose name must not be mentioned in the presence of women or the uninitiated. (15, p. 335)

If the natives take the anthropologist at all seriously - and it would seem that the Arrernte did take Spencer and Gillen seriously - then they are likely to bestow upon them an identity of some power. Malinowski was, argues Stocking, very probably seen as a member of the local aristocracy among the hierarchically organized Trobrianders. But the Arrernte were hunters and gatherers living at the very edge of subsistence, and among such peoples, who produce little or no surplus, social relationships are, as among the Cree, less solidly stratified. It is, I think, of great significance that the role which Gillen was offered by the subjects of his inquiries was that of magician ; the magician, medicine man, or shaman was, among the Australian Aborigines - as he was among the Cree or other American First Peoples - a liminal being, a personage who navigated between one world and another, between the world of men and of spirits.

For the anthropologist himself there is much advantage to be drawn from such a designation. Recognized as a man of power, and as an equal by those most likely to have privileged knowledge of the ceremonies and beliefs which are meat and drink to members of his trade, he has good reason to encourage his identification as a magician. But while to Gillen it was all something of a lark, for his successors in the field, less solidly established in their roles than was the 'virtual administrator of central Australia' (15, p. 6) , to be able to claim to have been initiated into their tribe as a shaman would be a mark of singular success. The resonances for the trainee field-worker of the Research as Vision Quest Myth are considerable.

Anthropologist and Shaman

As we can see, the anthropologist is confronted in a particularly acute fashion with a problem that lies at the heart of all the social sciences ; the relationship between observer and observed. This question has been faced up to, with greater or lesser success, since Anthropology first became an academic discipline, but it is arguable that, as the twentieth century progressed, so the recognition of the difficulties posed by intersubjectivity became sharper and sharper. In the early years, relations between researcher and the populations studied, while not without problems for both sides - see Malinowski's diary for striking evidence of this - were pursued in a context in which the sources and possiblities of power were clear. Sometimes the anthropologist might be an officer of the colonial government, as Evans-Pritchard was in the Sudan, or as a number of the American researchers among the First Peoples of their newly subjugated land were. But even where this was not the case, it would rarely have been in the interests of the peoples living in small-scale societies to express overt hostility to the white man. However, as the century wore on, field-work was to become more difficult to effect, until by the mid-seventies the profession as a whole encountered a full-scale crisis.

North American anthropologists tend to discuss this problem by invoking the twin concepts of emic and etic. These terms were first proposed in 1954, and were derived from the linguist's distinction between phonemic and phonetic. Intended as a clarification of methodological issues, the twin concepts have had a troubled history ; in so far as it is possible to sum up the meanings that have constellated around them - meanings not necessarily given in Pike's original formulation -  one can say that the  emic perspective seeks to construct a model of a culture based upon the meanings and values of its members, while the etic perspective uses analytic tools drawn from *outside* the culture, and which are intended to facilitate the construction of cross-cultural comparisons.

Obviously, in some sense one would expect a scientific account of culture to make use of both perspectives - and most anthropologists would probably pay at least lip-service to such a conception. However, although some manage to move reasonably gracefully from one position to the other, for many the tightrope which stretches from etic to emic and back again is so perilous that they find freedom of movement difficult. So we find some brands of the discipline which are sternly etic, and others which plunge, with but a rare glance over the shoulder, into the emic.

As might be expected, the study of magic in general, and of the shaman in particular, challenge the dichotomy in interesting ways ; an emic approach calls upon the anthropologist to leave to one side some of the very values and norms upon which the discpiline was originally founded, and which remain even today at its core ; a belief in the efficacity of a spirit world contiguous to our own does not chime well with the tenets of modern science.

Which is one of the reasons why the history of the relationship between the anthropologist and the shaman is long and complex. Narby and Huxley write a Whig version in which we move from outright incomprehension to a sympathetic understanding. Hamayon, restricting her remarks to the Siberian shaman sees three broad periods - Devilization, Medicalization and Idealization - all of which are characterized by a deblitating ethnocentrism. She would, indeed, almost certainly see Narby and Huxley's presentation of the phenomena as a clear exemplar of Idealization. And indeed, their collection 'Shamans Through Time', subtitled '500 Years on the Path to Knowledge' is something of a hymn to New Age approaches to sprituality. They cite Edith Turner, who is a heroine within the discipline, and who has embraced a mystical spiritualism which owes much to her work among the Ndembe :

In the past in anthropology, if a researcher "went native," it doomed him academically. My husband, Victor Turner, and I had this dictum at the back of our minds when we spent two and a half years among the Ndembu of Zambia in the fifties.

All right, "our" people believed in spirits, but that was a matter of their different world, not ours. Their ideas were strange and a little disturbing. Yet somehow we were on the safe side of the White divide and were free merely to study the beliefs. This is how we thought. Little knowing it, we denied the people's equality with ours, their "coevalness," their common humanity as that humanity extended itself into the spirit world.

Try out that spirit world ourselves? No way (21)

Subsequently, Turner did try it out and came to the conclusion that :

... the Africans were right. There is spirit stuff. There is spirit affliction; it is not a matter of metaphor and symbol, or even psychology. And I began to see how anthropologists have perpetuated an endless series of put downs about the many spirit events in which they participated-"participated" in a kindly pretense. They might have obtained valuable material, but they have been operating with the wrong paradigm, that of the positivists' denial.

To reach a peak experience in a ritual, sinking oneself fully in it really is necessary. Thus for me, "going native" achieved a breakthrough to an altogether different world view, foreign to academia, by means of which certain material was chronicled that could have been gathered in no other way. (ibid)

Even psychology. Turner finds herself fully implicated in the belief-system which she set out to study ; travelling from the etic to the emic, she sees no reason to remount the tight-rope (although, as her earlier work testifies, she and her husband had made the trip back and forth on several occasions), and make her way back to an externally given theoretical system. However, others who reach that point in the journey where Turner is content to repose, rather than returning to social theory, go through the stopping point, as it were, rather as Alice goes through the mirror. When they do so, they tend to adopt mentalistic options, as Feleppa notes. Shamanism, on this kind of reading, taps into latent powers that are built into the human mind ; it is a practical psychology, and - much as the ethno-herbalist may study the uses of medicinal plants by primitives and, by using scientific techniques, isolate and synthesize the active agents, so the specialist in shamanism may strip what Eliade has called the 'techniques of ecstasy' down to their bare bones.

Several examples of this approach are to be found in the Huxley and Narby's collection ; of particular interest are the extracts from Michaael Harner's  work.

Harner, unlike Castenada, has been consistently honoured by his profession. He has held academic posts at several institutions, and was at one time chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York.  He was also at one time co-chairman of the Anthropology Section of the New York Academy of Sciences. He now heads The Foundation for Shamanic Studies. On their web-site, one may read the following :

 Now you can join more than 5,000 people each year who take our rigorous training in core shamanism, the near universal methods of shamanism without a specific cultural perspective. 200-plus training programs are given each year in North America, Europe, Latin America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

Founded by internationally renowned anthropologist Michael Harner with a three-fold mission to study, to teach, and to preserve shamanism, the Foundation for Shamanic Studies has built a reputation of consistency and dependability by providing reliable training in core shamanism to interested learners worldwide.

Harner has been recognized as a pioneer in the field of anthropology and shamanism since the early 70's when he chose to immerse himself in tribal spiritual traditions rather than restrict his study to more traditional academic techniques.

Harner, in his book for popular consumption, 'The Way of the Shaman', describes how he came to his intitiation, while doing field-work among the Canobos and Jivaros of the Upper Amazon in 1960-1, thus :

J'ai vécu la plus grande partie d'une année dans un village conibo auprès d'un lac d'un affluent du Rio Ucayali. Mes recherches anthropologiques sur la culture des Conibos s'étaient révélées satisfaisantes, mais mes tentatives pour découvrir des informations sur leur religion ne rencontraient que peu de succès. Les gens étaient amicaux, mais hésitaient à parler du surnaturel. Finalement ils me dirent que si je voulais vraiment apprendre, je devais boire la boisson sacré des chamanes, une potion à base d'ayahuasca, "la plante de l'âme". J'acceptai avec curiosité et excitation, car ils m'avaient averti que l'expérience pouvait être effrayante. (6, p. 26)

Harner offers his obeisance to the image of the good field-worker ; like the Malinowski of Argonauts, his relationship with those he studies are excellent, and he has thus been able to make a scientific contribution. However, he has not yet penetrated to the inner mysteries, and may do so only at a price - his reaction to the thought of paying that price, although he is warned that it may be terrible, is fully positive. Harner will face the sun.

After this first experience with the drug, during which he met strange subterranean monsters, whose identity he leaves in some mystery - are they tribal gods, dark angels from the Book of Revelations, or visitors from outer space? - he returned to the United States. However, he was now determined to delve more deeply into the question of shamanism. In 1964, he returned to live among the Jivaro, intending to acquire the techniques employed by their medicine men to penetrate the world of spirits.

This time, his spritual guide leads him deep within the forest. At one point, he finds himself abandoned, and it is only with great difficulty that he catches up with the old shaman. After several tests of his endurance, he once again takes a hallucinogenic drug. This time, his voyage begins with an experience of utter terror :

Enfin ce fut l'heure. Akachu me donna la calebasse. Je la soulevai et en avalai le contenu. Le goût en était quelque peu désagréable, un peu semblable à celui des tomates vertes. J'éprouvai une sensation d'engourdissement. Je pensai à cet autre breuvage qui, trois ans auparavant chez les Conibos, m'avait conduit ici. Ma quête chamanique, valait-elle le risque? Rapidement, cependant, la logique de mes pensées s'évanouit à mesure qu'une inexprimable terreur m'envahissait tout entier ... Mes compagnons allaient me tuer! Je devais m'enfuir! J'essayai de bondir, mais instantanément ils furent sur moi. Trois, quatre, une infinité de sauvages luttaient contre moi, me maintenaient à terre. Leurs visages étaient au-dessus de moi, crispés par des sourires sournois. Puis ce fut l'obscurité.(ibid)

This is the anthropologist's nightmare.

Harner persevered. His investigations and his reading lead to his identifying a number of basic, universal techniques which he calls 'core shamanism'.

By not imitating any specific cultural tradition, but" rather by training in underlying cross-cultural principles, core shamanism is especially suited for utilization by Westerners who desire a relatively culture-free system that they can adopt and integrate into their contemporary lives. Today core shamanism is the dominant mode of practice of shamanism in most of the West. (6b)

Harner contributes to a process which the sociologist Anthony Giddens refers to as 'disembedding' ; in this process, symbols and relationships are lifted up and out of the specific contexts in which they emerged, and are codified and made open to inspection. Giddens sees this process as leading to the production of symbolic tokens - he gives 'money' as a prime example of this - and of expert systems. Harner's 'core shamanism' shares some of the characteristics of expert systems - but not all of them. For the expert systems 'take care of you' ; you are expected to trust them - to 'have faith', as Giddens puts it. Harner's success, however, stems from the increasing lack of trust that people have in the expert systems that deal with their health - whether spiritual or organic. One of the ttractions is that, like field-work or the vision quest, anyone can, if they so desire, access the fundamental techniques. They can even do so, Harner assures us, by reading 'The Way of the Shaman' which is basically a teach-yourself manual.

Or at least, this is what he tells us in the book itself. On the web-site, we find, however, that in the case of core shamanism, as with so many of the New Age cognitive playthings that swept out of California through the sixties and seventies, the only full route to knowledge is by way of personal implication :

A small introduction to some of the principles and practices of core shamanism may be found in my book: The Way of the Shaman. However, the most important practical teaching in both core and indigenous shamanism is not to be found in published literature. Rather, it is the result of person- to- person experientially based instruction, by example, by direct communication from the spirits, and through personal experimentation and practice. Furthermore, much of this experiential learning is ineffable and thus has not been communicable to non-participating Western observers and interviewers. (ibid)

Accused of Witchcraft

Harner is not alone ; as Huxley and Narby's volume demonstrates, a number of anthropologists have come to see in shamanism something other than a cultural practice to be studied, analyzed and understood.

Most field-workers do not, of course, surrender to the temptation in quite so spectacular a way as Harner, or as Barbara Myerhoff. But that the temptation exists is clear, and  even the most scientifically minded can, on occasion, cede to it.  I.M. Lewis argues that

There must be few anthropologists who have not had a brush with the supernatural in the course of their field-work in the 'high-spiritied', exotic communities which they customarily study ... Even very skeptical anthropologists have had daunting experiences. Illnesses or misadventures after slighting or quarrelling with a local witch-doctor or medicine man are frequently reported. Certainly there are few of us who could cross our hearts and honestly say that we had not felt discomfort, qualms about what might happen, when threatened with cursing - or the evil eye. (9, p. 18)

Maintaining good relations with the witch-doctor - or shaman - has always been something of a priority, as we have seen. But if you cannot do so, then it is perhaps even more effective to become a shaman oneself. Let us return to Chagnon.

You will recall his description of the men who were his 'first savages' ; He mentions that 'dark green slime was hanging from their nostrils'. This, we learn, was because they had been breathing in a powerful hallucinogenic drug, in order to come in contact with the spirits. Among the Yanomamo, as among the Cree, any male who wishes may become a chamane. However, they must pay for the privilege, as is often the case, by fasting and by abstaining from sexual intercourse for long periods. Chagnon is by no means troubled by those considerations that keep the emically minded anthropologist from holding on to external structurations ; he is keen to adopt a view of human-kind that is as common-sensical as was Malinowski's, and offers an explanation of this behaviour that reduces it to basic principles :

One must, however, train to be a shaman. This entails a long period of fasting, a year or more, during which the novice loses an enormous amount of weight. He // literally looks like skin and bones at the end. ... I sometimes suspect that the older men have put one over the younger men by insisting that it is good to be a shaman and that all of them should try it - and then insisting that they have to forsake women for effective periods of time. It is an effective way to reduce sexual jealousy in the village, one of the chronic sources of social disruption, and to allow more mating opportunities among the older men.(2, p. 116)

Holding to this view, Chagnon might be expected to resist any temptation to shamanise on his own accunt. However, according to his arch-enemy, Patrick Tierney, he did do so, and the memory of that moment remains engraved in Yanomami memories :

This depiction of Chagnon was supported by many of the Yanomami with whom I spoke. In 1996, in the village of Momaribowei-teri, a man named Pablo Mejia told me that when he was twelve he had witnessed Chagnon's arrival in his village: "He had his bird feathers adorning his arms. He had red-dye paint all over his body. He wore a loincloth like the Yanomami. He sang with the chant of his shamanism and took yopo"-a powerful hallucinogen used by Yanomami shamans to make contact with spirits. "He took a lot of yopo. I was terrified of him. He always fired off his pistol when he entered the village, to prove that he was fiercer than the Yanomami. Everybody was afraid of him because nobody had seen a nabah"-white man acting as a shaman. (20)

According to Chagnon himself, he played the shaman on only one occasion, in an effort to wean them away from what he saw as the pernicious influence of the Salesian missionaries. He was, by his own account, doing his best to maintain the Yanomamo culture in its pristine state ; struggle as he might against the anthropological community - amongst whom he now has very few friends - he remains within the fold. For without the primitive, what can the anthropologist find to do? Little, it seems, but to come back home and dispense the secrets of the tribes' lost wisdom - Harner's solution. Chagnon, the last heroic descendent of the line founded by Malinowski, strained, with all his might to hold the hands of the world's clock at one minute to midnight.

Conclusion

All human endeavours secrete their charts, road-maps, metaphors to live by. Inevitably, those of the human sciences are self-referential. They are often proferred playfully, ironically, knowingly, as if through a magical act of distanciation their power could be attenuated. But, as Granny Weatherwax can confirm, we do not escape so easily from our myths, even when they are clearly laid out before us. Anthropology as a discipline was born in and through an attempt to explicate the strange and unscientific beliefs of savage peoples : Tyler and Frazer saw in them little but the flickerings of the cavern fires. But as the anthropologist moved out from the study and into the brush, he and she had to cope with praxis. Even in the exact sciences, the actual practicalities of lab-work are often learnt as much through imitation and exhortation as through the establishment of rationally constructed systems of rules, and the ground-rules that govern the context of discovery are hinted at in legends and folk-tales. So it is – but 'even more so' – in the human sciences, even though it is one of their tasks to unravel and analyse the relationships that can pertain between story and reality. But stories are indeed powerful, and when the anthropologist takes the shaman to be his mirror image, s/he perhaps falls into one of the very oldest of all the stories.

Works Cited :

1. Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella, ' The Yanomamo' at  http://icarus.ubetc.buffalo.edu/users/apy106/cultures/yanomamo.html 2. Chagnon, Napoleon, Yanomamo ; The Fierce People, 1983, New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 3. Feleppa, Robert, 'Emics, Etics, and Social Objectivity' in Current Anthropology, v. 27, No.3, 1986. 4. Ferguson, Brian, 'Yanomami Warfare; A Political History', Santa Fe, School for American Research Press, 1995. 5. Hamayon, Roberte, La chasse à l'âme : Esquisse d'une théorie du chamanisme sibérien, 1990, Société d'ethnologie, Nanterre. 6. Harner, Michael, La voie spirituelle du chamane, Albin Michel, 1982, and (b) Science, Spirits and Core Shamanism at http://www.shamanicstudies.com/articles/1027871950.htm 7. Harris, Marvin, 'The Rise of Anthropological Theory; A History of Theories of Culture', Altamira Press, 2001. 8. Hell, Bertrand, Possession & Chamanisme ; Les maîtres du désordre, Paris, Flammarion, 1999. 9. Lewis, I.M.,  'The Anthropologist's Encounter with the Supernatural', in Lehmann & Myers (eds) 'Magic, Witchcraft and Religion ; An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural', 3 edition,  p. 18 10. Malinowski, Bronislaw, Argonauts of the Western Pacific : An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, 1922, New York, E.P. Dutton. 11. Malinowski, Bronislaw, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia ; An Ethnographic Account of Courtship, Marriage, and Family Life among the Natives of the Trobriand Islands, British New Guinea, 1987, Boston, Beacon Press. 12. Malinowski, Bronislaw, A Diary in the strict sense of the term, 1967, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World. 13. Mandelbaum, David, G, The Palins Cree; an ethnographic, historical and comparative study, 1979, on line at : http://www.schoolnet.ca/aboriginal/Plains_Cree/index-e.html 14. Mason, Timothy, The Anthropologist's Bagmen; Frazer, Spencer & Gillen and the Primitive in Australia, Cultures of the Commonwealth ; Rewriting History, No. 5, Winter 1998-99. 15. Mulvaney, John, Howard Morphy and Alison Petch, 'My Dear Spencer; The Letters of F.J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer',  Hyland House, 1997. 16. Narby, Jeremy & Francis Huxley, Chamanes au fil du temps, Paris, Albin Michel, 2002. 17. Stocking, George W.  Jr., The Ethnographer's Magic and Other Essays', 1992, University of Wisconsin Press. 18. Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge; Towards A Post-Critical Philosophy, Chicago University Press, 1958. 19. Pratchett, Terry, Witches Abroad, Victor Gollanz, 1991. 20. Tierney, Patrick,  Darkness in El Dorado ; How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, New York, W.W. Norton, 2000. 21. Turner, Edith, 'The Reality of Spirits,' at http://www.shamanism.org/articles/957283797.htm

Notes

During initiation, the would-be shaman may swallow or otherwise incorporate small stones or crystals. Later, she will be able to use these both to cure and to injure. During the curing process, the shaman may suck a crystal from the body of the sick person – in this case, she must take care not to swallow it. The ethnologist has also to exercise discretion when handling the nuggets that she comes across in the following her trade.

See (17, p. 47). Stocking notes that, after spending several nights in the men's house in Mailu, he found that 'total immersion was not easy for him'. On another occasion he had put up in a palm leaf tent sixty meters from the village, and found that easier on his soul. Stocking comments : "The ethnographer's tent - fragile canvas artefact of civilized Europe - embodied (...) ambivalence. Pulling its flaps behind him, Malinowski could to some extent shut out the native world and retire to his novels when the strain of the very intensive study of a very limited area became too great." (ibid, p. 44)

For an insider's account of Chagnon in the field, see Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (1, passim). She notes the fact that his book 'The Fierce People' was 'sometimes so perversely funny'.

On this question, see Brian Ferguson (4). Ferguson argues that by the time Chagnon arrived,  the Yanomamo were already implicated in a trading network that brought them into the modern world. When Chagnon offered them machetes, they knew what they were getting - but, if Ferguson is right, the gift was often poisoned, for the violence which Chagnon observed was, he argues, in part sparked off by the anthropologist's largesse.

See Bacipalugo (op. cit.) on this.

Chagnon's equivalent interest, as we have seen, lead to the Yanoamamo's giving him a far less honourable name. Gillen had the great advantage of not being a professional anthropologist.

In Gillen's case, the term subject is doubly apt. As the local Protector of Aborigines, and as the person in charge of the the Alice Springs telegraph bureau, he was a figure of some power in the lives of the Arrernte. For some account of this, see 15 & 14.

Amongst Melanesian and other Pacific peoples, the European is often seen as coming from the world of spirits. One of the tenets of Cargo Cults is that white men are the returning ancestral spirits, bearing gifts.

Not all anthropologists study small-scale societies, and some of the more solidly anchored host communities might simply swallow up the eager young field worker with consderable indifference, amused contempt or that mild degree of benign interest that one may bestow upon the stranger in a strange land.

This is extrememly rough and ready. For fuller definitions and some discussion of the diffiulties raised by this distinction, see 7, pp. 568-604, and 3, pp. 243-255.

At one stage, Chagnon was involved in an attempt to turn a large tract of the Amazonian Basin into a sort of theme park in which the Yanomamo could continue to live according to their traditions.

Terry Pratchett's narrator (19) holds that stories are so powerful that they shape the actualities of human lives. Ms. Weatherwax won't be having with that.

See, inter alia, 18, passim

[timjmason]

Your Host

In his socks, he just tops six feet, although age is shrinking him both physically and mentally. Shoulders hunched from hours of practicing scales upon his guitar, his chin is more often on his chest than off it. His guitar holds steady upon his paunch and his hair, the envy of his ageing companions, covers his eyes from view. His wife complains that he shaves neither frequently  nor predictably.

Given to long periods of taciturnity, interspersed with moments of intense volubility, he occasionally punches his way through silence with harsh screams and snatches of unlikely song. Recognizable in his repertoire are "Mickey's Son and Daughter' as sung by the Bonzo Dog DooDa Band, Neil Young's 'Southern Man" which kicks its way through the bathrooom door in the high-pitched groan that he must imagine to be a replica of the Canadian's voice, and the Who's version of "Daddy Rolling Stone.' Whether any of this bears witness to feelings of some kind is a matter for conjecture. He himself is ambivalent on the question, and gleefully imagines that this enrages his analyst.

The members of his parents generation having kicked their various buckets and his children having arrived at the age where partnerships and marriages dissolve, explode or are frittered away, leaving yet another bunch of bewildered infants, he stands upon the final high place overlooking that ocean to which we will all return. Lacking the imagination with which to construct any afterlife in which a self would be so constituted as to be said to survive, he thinks more of his belly than of his becoming.

This is unfortunate, for it is the sad truth that his belly, although more prominent a feature of his physique than it had been in the high lost time of his youth, was now less tolerant of his guzzlings, and had got into the habit of sending him wasp-like reminders of the hard labour that his indulgences incurred. He lived on a fine line between desire and dyspepsia.

Ms. Scott broke into his self-musings briskly, and he was little surprised to discover that she had been talking for some time, although he had paid her no heed. He would have to hope that M had caught and tagged the line, whatever it might have been. M rose, and with a practiced hand brushed off her bum, a gesture which surprised him, as the wooden pew had seemed to be quite spotless when they had seated themselves.