Europe, a common heritage. François Lupu. Gone forever?
Since the 19th century (with the emergence of the concept of folklore, the establishment of ethnological and folk museums and the recording of “folk wisdom” etc) the notion of a traditional heritage and the ideas of tradition and lore have constantly harked back to the past - a past gone for ever, obliterated by “modern life”.
This perception is a reworking of an old, largely nostalgic image of the simplicities of bygone days, an image peculiar to European civilisation with its very specific conception of time. The important question now (and better to ask it late than never) is whether what we call traditions and lore are, in fact, things of the past.
Is heritage merely a set of places and customs, a treasure trove of
memory and sentiment that we can contemplate (or need to contemplate) in order
to reaffirm our identity through a form of ethnographic irredentism that draws
a clear line between our ancestors (seated round the fire on long evenings
handing on their wisdom) and ourselves in the here-and-now (whatever form that
may take), finding our way in the modern world, rootless as we are. It is a
vision rather too heavily imbued with Sturm
und Drang and historical and social romanticism.
Memory
is alive and well, with work to do
While heritage, in its broadest sense, is certainly the preserve of memory, it is important not to confuse the notion of memory with that of museum (or repository of knowledge). For memory in this context is not static, but dynamic. According to Roger Bastide, imagination is impossible without memory - and that is the nub of the question: at a basic and intimate level, the landscape of heritage shapes the pathways of our imagination. One has only to read a little science fiction or watch films of the heroic fantasy genre to realise that the furthest forays of unbridled imagination (whether into a mythic past or a starry future) stop short at the boundaries of the possible, and that the forms contained therein reflect or resemble those present in our vision of the world - a vision which, although functional, is entirely bound up with heritage.
The human and humanoid
characters in Star Wars, for example,
turn out on analysis to be cloned in every case on figures and descriptions
from mediaeval Imagines Mundi [images
of the world]. The resemblance is neither fortuitous nor anecdotal: it
testifies to the durability of the imaginary in Europe, and that durability
shapes our approach to time and space, just as it shapes our definition of
humanity and its place in the chain of life (including its relationships with
animals and nature).
A
cultural heritage of the mind
It is obvious that factors such as architecture (whether in grand public and ecclesiastical edifices or ordinary buildings and homes), the historic pattern of communication channels and layout of roads, the dividing-up of farmland, traditional forms of land-use and the emergence of industrial wasteland all shape the landscape, giving it definition and worth, making sense of it and directly or implicitly determining how it evolves. The same practical evidence of the past that can be seen in landscape exists in the mental landscape of our various cultures (indeed, of all human cultures).
The cultural geography imprinted upon all our minds helps us to
realise our potential and leaves scope - beyond the sometimes all too obvious
manifestations of nationhood and/or language differences - for a deeply rooted
“European mentality” (the term is somewhat loose and calls for further
analysis) to express itself along common lines and through simple common
structures, the notion of “common” here depending on an awareness that any
structure must adapt in order to survive. The phenomenon identified by Georges Dumézil in his own field of research is not confined to the distant past. On
the contrary it is still at work here and now.
Interactive
epigenesis and the cultural context in which we perceive things
A child learns in two ways: explicitly via the spoken word and, perhaps more importantly, implicitly via everything related to the body and the cultural stimuli of the constructed environment. To take a banal and rather exaggerated example, the mindset of a child born into a culture that ate only fried food would be significantly determined (for better or worse) by a set of smells, tastes, emotions and memories for which frying was the frame of reference. Without a word having to be spoken on the subject, the child’s universe and way of being would be moulded around, and derive sense and meaning from, fried food. If the child then had to live in a culture where food was never fried, then despite all efforts at adaptation and integration, however successful, he or she would be permanently exiled from a personal reality. It is this nameless form of “education” - in effect a process of interactive epigenesis - that leads to the phenomenon of the “cultural melting-pot”.
Looking beyond our fictional example, this interactive epigenesis (which, rather than directly generating meaning, creates the conditions under which it is generated) works on an infinite variety of levels. These include cultural perceptions of cleanliness and dirt (see the work of Sabine Kahn, Université Lyon 2), order and disorder, light and dark, and good and bad smells, and our threshold of tolerance for worn or broken objects.
Despite appearances,
this systematisation is not an insurmountable barrier to intercultural dialogue
inasmuch as a single community (in Europe, for example) is made up of people
who have followed different routes in the epigenetic process, and the routes
intersect at strategic points offering potential for encounter and two-way
communication. The key lies in tracing the various routes, particularly in the
neglected area of simple everyday existence. Maurizio, in his history of
European eating patterns, uncovered the main food-related systems upon which
culinary epigenesis depends. Although his work is definitely of its time (the
1920s), it nonetheless provides a basis for current research in the same field,
which is an extremely important one, given that the art of cooking may be the
primary cultural marker in relation to food (as the distinction between what
people are and are not prepared to eat supersedes the question of what they can
and cannot eat).
The
body as a cultural symptom
Medical anthropology and ethnomedicine seek
ways of tackling the intercultural communication problems that frequently
confront doctors. They offer practitioners ideas and information enabling them
to put standard practice and western medical science into perspective and get a
clearer picture of their patients’ needs (whether or not the patients are of
foreign origin). The key to this approach is the recognition that bodily
phenomena - and hence therapies - have a cultural dimension.
Every regional culture develops a conception of the human anatomy associated with particular systems of reasoning and specific images. Each defines the organs and their functions differently. Notions of sickness and health depend upon this general - and relative - anatomy. In every culture the notion of sickness is part of an overall worldview that also incorporates the origins of humankind and its relationship with animals. It brings into play a whole chain of cause and effect between the visible and invisible, and between immediate activity and activity that is spatially or temporally remote. It involves concepts of balance in relation to life and physical health, and notions of the static and dynamic that differ from one culture to another.
When they consult a doctor, patients bring all this varied baggage of experience and knowledge with them, and in very many cases the almost inevitable misunderstandings make effective treatment impossible.
The human body is in itself a cultural symptom. Like a geologist’s map it is a two-dimensional guide to an internal (in this case, cultural) structure. Specific symptoms can be understood only in terms of this overall logic. Each is an integral part and a reflection of a basic system. From the ethnologist’s point of view, the symptom must be treated as a cultural toponym with the potential to yield information about what lies inside. It is thus metonymic, testifying almost homothetically to an internal, invisible order. Neglecting this aspect of the situation will impede the doctor-patient dialogue on which all therapy depends, and may cause other problems such as the apparent absence of symptoms at the moment of examination, which is all too often explained away in terms of a pretence on the patient’s part. For a doctor to establish a therapeutic relationship with a patient, both parties must be talking about the same body.
Once we have agreed that the human body is relative, culturally speaking, and have accepted the notion of differentiated cultural knowledge, we can look at the culturally conditioned classification and description of diseases and their aetiologies. This is the real interface between western and non-western medicine, the point at which doctors can find the right approach to their patients, and patients can grasp the purpose of the therapy, aware that both parties are symptoms of their respective cultures. This two-way logic helps to counter the sense of European medical treatment taking place in a vacuum.
Once doctor and patient are talking about the same body, the doctor can grasp the nature of the suffering to be treated. Here, as in other cultural spheres, the particular “cultural heritage” of each European region gives people a specific perception of themselves and a specific way of handing over their bodies to be treated. These factors must be acknowledged through what amounts to a process of charting the development of anatomical and therapeutic awareness. At the intersection of the lines on the chart there are clues to the definition of the “European body” - a concept to be shared and debated.
Once
upon a time there was a rhinoceros ...
This could be the opening line for most
works of ethnology.
In 1515 the German artist Albrecht Dürer produced an engraving of a rhinoceros. He had two sources of reference for his image: on the one hand, reports and hearsay about the animal and, on the other, the ancient iconographic tradition in which the legendary dragon is portrayed. On the basis of this research Dürer gave the beast the characteristics that recurred in the descriptions. The feature of chief interest, in relation to our argument here, was the extraordinary toughness of the creature’s hide. All the reports referred to a virtual armour. And so, Dürer’s rhinoceros wears armour - a cladding of jointed, riveted plates.
The engraving was soon famous and became the model for representations of this strange and fabled animal, particularly by natural historians, until the end of the 18th century.
In 1790 the Scottish explorer James Bruce included an image of a rhinoceros in his book Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile. This time it was no anonymous rhinoceros. The picture was a life drawing of a specific animal, about which Bruce supplied details including its birthplace “at Tcherkin near Ras el Feel”. Moreover, the Scot took pains to distance himself from Dürer, criticising the master engraver’s rhinoceros as very poor representation in every respect and blaming it for the many deformed portrayals of the animal that had subsequently appeared. Bruce’s rhinoceros is certainly less fantastic than Dürer’s, and more credible zoologically ... except in one respect. This authentic African beast in its native surroundings is clad not in a leather hide but in plates of armour.
It was not until the advent of photography that the rhinoceros ceased to be thus depicted.
What was the link between Dürer’s imaginary animal and the creature that Bruce imagined he saw? There is none except that for the explorer in 1790 a rhinoceros already existed and conditioned his representation of the living beast. Did he draw what he saw - or see what drew?
The same question should be asked of every ethnologist. In relating to anything, do we describe what we see or do we see what we describe? To put it another way, is there a savage being that predates all written descriptions, drawings or photographs of “savages”, ie of the untamed human body? What are the real sources of our knowledge about our origins, and what shapes our view of them? Once again it is a question of interactive cultural epigenesis.
The anthropological approach to European cultures and traditions developed in an urban environment at a time of industrial and scientific “progress” which people saw as rationalising the world and human behaviour. The system set up for information gathering and processing was based on that very particular worldview - and with anthropology, as with medicine, one first needs to know where the science is coming from before considering what it addresses. This system of anthropological research led to various “obsolete” bodies of knowledge being classed as beliefs and superstitions, ignoring the fact that they were based not on instinctive experiment but on detailed protocols handed down as such.
Any study of traditional European lore must begin with recognition of the shared protocols of knowledge and ways of transmitting it, specific practices and systems of interpreting the world. I believe that in my own field - medical anthropology and ethnomedicine - there are no “beliefs and superstitions”, but only bodies of knowledge that although obsolete are perfectly functional (in villages, families and communities that live together). Self-medication (such a headache for official medicine) is in fact based in most cases on a different vision of the body - a vision that, although perfectly “scientific”, is governed by protocols no longer recognised. If there is such a thing as a European community, then this is its territory - a territory as yet unexplored and one that has nothing to do with folklore.
The
original savage
The first accounts of voyages of discovery
and conquest in the Americas are full of strange bodies, described in what turn
out to be strategic passages in the texts. There are headless people with faces
on their chests, people with dog’s heads, people with a single leg, people with
no buttocks, and savages bounding around on goatlike hooves.
Such descriptions and drawings have too often been ascribed to pre-rational, pre-scientific minds that peopled the world with impossible or possible beings entirely at random. Historians and ethnologists generally regard the images as anecdotal, illustrating a sort of archaeology of knowledge. But we should pause for a moment and take a serious look at these so-called fantastic creatures.
Little research is required to establish that these beings, which encircle humanity and reinforce its definition of itself, do not emerge from mis-perceptions of new worlds or from ill-understood reports given too much credence. There is ample evidence of their presence here in the Old World - in Europe. These beings are amongst us. Their territory is the forest and the borderlands of our minds. In ancient Greek and Roman times, and also in the old Germanic world, forests and caves, the edges of the known world and remote islands were full of satyrs and Sileni, centaurs and wild hairy or leafy beings, bear-men, troglodytes, huge red-haired mutants, wolf-men, elves, dwarves and the like.
Silenus playing a lyre, detail of a fresco from the Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii, c. 50 BC
These beings that lie outside the definition of ordinary humanity crop up in myths where they mark out the boundaries between us and “otherness”. The barbarians who spoke like birds and the savages who dwelt in the forests had their origins in this functional universe of the imagination. Present in myths, they were also represented in costume form in festivals, ceremonies and initiation rites.
Until the middle of the Renaissance - and much later although in different forms in the intergalactic spaces of science fiction (the modern-day Imagines Mundi) - the symbolic, imagined savage infiltrated human territory as if from a parallel time zone. There are particular connecting moments when primitive and human time coincide, producing a form of spatial and temporal contraction that periodically recasts civilisation.
Why
we need the savage
Whether imaginary, provisional and
controlled - or real and required like the Spartan helots to dress in animal
skin - “savages” have, since ancient times, peopled and helped to shape our
spatial and temporal environment. They have a function.
Western civilisation, in Greece as throughout Europe, was founded on a contradiction from which humanity draws meaning. On the one hand is the town - the place in which human beings define themselves - and on the other the country, ie the forest, whether cleared or virgin, the realm of nature which holds the key to all possible life-forms.
In order to be ourselves, we live in the town or in tidy urbanised nature. But we were not born here. We travelled here, and we live here thanks to a form of asceticism that strips us of our original rusticity. The town is our creation. Consequently we mirror, in our bodies, what we have done with the world: we are divided, and the primitive life source has apparently dried up under the social constraints of urban and village life.
As urban dwellers we need to re-establish contact with our roots, to recharge our energy in the world of the savage, where human life takes different forms. And we do this at regular intervals, at connecting moments when we can step from one world to the other without the risks of a real journey. Drunken revels, wild hunting parties and carnivals in their original form were all ways of making the contact, moments for the savage to re-inhabit us, injecting us with fresh life-force, before being expelled again to the murky wildwood where time is distorted, as if moulded by darkness. The savage plays a necessary role in setting the pace of urban life.
Western humanity has created a need for the savage in all its forms, as a mechanism for surviving civilisation. That need has in turn generated a body of knowledge - a collection of organised skills, a spatial and temporal geography, systems of bodily classification and bodily types and functions.
Free time, empty time, strategically vacant time, vacation. In the turning of the modern year, civilised and primitive time combine in one body. We in the west have made ourselves composite bodies, which we work to change in the brief vacant interval of our summer holidays. We acquire a primitive body with a virtually obligatory tan, and dedicate it, almost compulsively, to physical exertion and physical love without social consequences. The result is a transient, coded external form, a body that sends out certain signals, a temporary body.
A
temporary world
By defining ourselves in a certain way, we
Europeans have ipso facto created a
“savage”, which, while not in diametric opposition to us, holds up a picture of
where we originated and the paths we chose not to take.
A study of the texts and images that have accumulated down the centuries makes it clear that primitive man is the subject of an entire fictional ethnology.
Long before explorers actually discovered other kinds of people, European culture was rich with ethnographic descriptions of potential variants on the human theme. These include humanoid communities dwelling in inaccessible places, peoples whose characteristics collectively comprise a bodily and intellectual geography of functional difference.
When Europe set out to discover the world, its baggage included several centuries of intellectual experimentation with bodily otherness. In their physical appearance, these “other” bodies comprised, in conjunction with our own, a transitional universe underpinning questions about the human condition and, as in a hall of mirrors, shaping our own image, for to “the others”, we are “otherness”.
In practice these questions were resolved at the moment that shifted all perceptions, the moment of confrontation with real otherness. After the first shock of encounter, it was through the use of analogy and recognition that questions about this reality began to be asked.
But at best, those who answer explorers’ and ethnologists’ questions answer only the questions asked; they never answer unasked questions.
In short, we had already prepared the pigeonholes into which we gradually sorted human communities, just as we sorted different European traditions.
At every period of history, in the process of questioning our existence, whether in a transitional world or the real one, the necessary figure of the savage has emerged to fill a particular function.
Through something like a chemical reaction, truth is replaced by probability. Instead of describing, we construct. Before deciphering, we classify. Between us and them we interpose a perceptual grid that shapes the facts to suit our internal need for consistency. We rely on differential analogy to frame our question and then organise the answers.
Primitive
world and natural world
When Christopher Columbus set sail he left
behind a continent in the final throes of the transformations that ushered in
the modern era. In relation to our theme, two aspects of this process are
important.
Having finally driven the foreign invader from its soil in the “Reconquista”, Renaissance Europe was putting the finishing touches to its vision of the world. Into its former perspective, now fragmented, it integrated elements of the classical world to make up a sort of perceptual puzzle, an arrangement of forms neither entirely new nor entirely specific. We should not imagine that there was real continuity of thought between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, nor between the Middle Ages and the ancient world. What occurred was simply the gradual and increasingly explicit development of a historical frame of reference, within which humanity could plot its co‑ordinates. This reconstituted Antiquity became and remained the reference for rhetoric about the emerging world.
At the same time, our mental landscape was absorbing the impact of the great mediaeval forest clearances. Nature was changing in form and meaning. The wild world of forests and hidden caves could no longer supply the spatial context for transitional otherness. Nature was being organised and developed, and our conception of it was to undergo the same process. The mental geography of dark places gave way to a geography of routes and pathways along which meaning was conveyed.
In fact, a new form of transitional space emerged, complementing rather than replacing the old one. Alongside the primitive world, we now had the natural world. It was the age of gardens - and meaningful paths mirroring out worldview. The savage of the forests and mountains was joined by the “natural being”, who dwelt in the gardens of Bomarzzo, in ruins and follies, and in the landscaped countryside of the 18th century. It was not a matter of “good savages” and “bad savages”. From our European perspective we saw simply the “savage” and the “natural being”. Their images intertwined and were coloured, inevitably, by our functional, reprocessed notion of the ancient world.
Primitive
festivals
We have seen how, in our transitional
universe, the savage of the borderlands and forests made periodic incursions
into our lives. At special connecting moments such as the changes of the
seasons, urban humanity confronted, and drew energy from, the world of
otherness (or rather, of the image of otherness). Hairy, hooded and masked, the
savages paraded through our streets and squares, and for a time licence
reigned. The meaning of the body was inverted and shared values were
overturned, allowing us to internalise the primary matter of other human
natures. Urban civilisation was momentarily rocked and disorientated by the
collision. Then, the festival over, it continued on its course revitalised.
Today there remain traces and reminders of those connecting moments that, from the days of Greece and Rome until very recently, served as landmarks or beacons in the flow of European time.
For thousands of years, western humanity fashioned itself in terms of an opposition between the urban world and the world of savage otherness. Then towards the end of the Middle Ages, the town invaded the countryside, a countryside transformed by the emergence of a new bodily universe: the “natural body” in a “natural world”. Our transitional “primitive body” was gradually squeezed into a smaller and smaller space, under religious and political pressure from all sides. The bodily image of the “savage other” collapsed in upon itself, intensifying to the point where, like a veritable “black hole” of the mind, it was expelled to another place. Its new territory was the New World that Europe was beginning to conquer, and the forced migration of “the savage” was accompanied by the displacement of the primitive festival.
Henceforth we envisaged such festivals in places that offered an appropriate setting: dense virgin forest, steamy equatorial jungle, improbably sodden grey-green bogs and inhospitable icy wastes. Savages don’t get around much nowadays. Instead, we travel to visit them, heading off on initiatory quests or unplanned journeys in search of some Holy Grail that persists in the shapes of our memory. We traverse a sort of void - in commonplace terms, our vacation. When the primitive body does come to us, it is through books, images and films – ultimately our own representations of it.
Natural
festivals
“Natural beings” inhabit a new transitional
universe interposed between the urban and savage worlds. Like savages, they
have particular characteristics and a specific purpose. They range across, and
define, the buffer zone that we have found it necessary to create between
primitive nature and urban nature.
This intermediary universe is the natural world, the setting for Rousseau’s "Rêveries du promeneur solitaire". The beings that inhabit it have human form or, failing that, a refined type of monstrousness. The body of the “natural being”, while primitive in some respects, is primarily pastoral. They are beings whose lives follow the rhythm of the seasons, who tend their flocks and sate their appetites on the earth’s bounty.
This body - a final throwback to Hesiod’s "Works and Days" - is a cultivated body that belongs to cultivated nature. It is the product of some remote garden distantly echoing the Garden of Eden. From it we draw an image of ourselves not yet distorted by urban asceticism. It is the essential repository of all possibilities, all future failures and all forms of utopia. Coded in its behaviour and its reason, it is intensely real, though inaccessible, and it has ousted the body of “the savage” – now despatched into the magma of eternal darkness. The natural being is an island, moored on the tide of time.
Whereas primitive festivals recharged our bodies, natural festivals bathe them in a refreshing nostalgia. Et in Arcadia ego might well be the motto for the land of natural beings, and the god Pan provides the underlying melody for the endless festivities reputed to take place there.
Unlike the primitive body, the natural body is a spectacle - a carefully staged performance – and we are the spectators. We see something of ourselves reflected in the performance, yet it is not ourselves. In the European world of natural festivities there is no longer any need for connecting moments, for seasonal or ritual punctuation. Theatre, ballet, follies, gardens, ruins, novels, utopias, rural games and torchlit festivities are all natural islands in the sea of urban civilisation - and mooring points for the perceptual grid through which, in reality, we sift and separate the primitive from the natural.
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