Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man by Michael Taussig

Below is a brief summary of some main points from Michael Taussig’s book named “Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man.” All of the quotes from the book are accompanied by page numbers so that you, if needed, could find more detailed information in the book itself. If you choose to cite this in your school work, make sure to paraphrase or use quotation marks because this (like everything else in my blog) is my original content unless stated otherwise.

In the first part of the book Michael Taussig speaks of colonialism and “the magical realism of debt" - a fictional reality created by the whites during the rubber boom in Putumayo to enslave Indian workers; a fictional reality that led to the extermination of thousands of natives who were caught in the fragmented world of "savagery and business, cannibalism and capitalism," magic, torture, and subjugation (73). In the second part of the book he explores the realm of sorcery and its connections to colonialism and post-colonialism. The phrase "fictional reality" is frequent in his book, and it emphasizes the idea that realities (like historical narratives) are constructed by people - not preexistent.

This is a very important point. Very often we take the realities we live in for granted, forgetting that we ourselves create and recreate them every moment and every day. Our realities are not simply given to us – we are active makers of them, no matter what social positions we occupy. In my opinion, Taussig’s “fictional reality” doesn’t mean that the colonial world people lived in was “unreal.” I think the author means that the world was filled with myths and tales which often differed from factual reality, but eventually became real because they were reinforced by retelling and people’s beliefs. For example, the “primitive” weren’t really primitive, but European newcomers viewed them as such, so the label “primitive” helped create this new threatening and magical reality filled with wild and ungodly “others”.

Multiple fictional realities were created during colonial times. Some of them were those of the savage - a hostile, treacherous cannibal, or a gentle, humble, child-like creature. One of the assumptions drawn by Casement constituted a myth that Indians suffered a "mysterious displacement of their true selves" (87). Hardenburg tried to establish a single reality of the true Indian, but his attempts failed (85). During the rubber boom Westerners were ruled by the irrational fear of the jungle (and all its contents) and by the feeling of superiority over the native inhabitants. Out of fear, pride, and impunity of the newcomers rose fictional realities and the culture of terror, which the author calls "a mediator of colonial hegemony; the space of death where Indian, African, and white gave birth to the New World" (5).

The Church played a big role in creating the magical reality. Claiming that Indians had memories of the pact with the devil and of his teachings, and trying to erase these memories, the Church was "creating and strengthening them as a new social force, thereby ensuring the transmission of myth into reality and memory into the future" (143). That myth, once real, lived in the image of the shaman, a "pagan savage." According to Taussig, the colonizer himself becomes dependent on the pagan and its power in search for "salvation from the civilization that torments him as much as the savage on whom he has projected his antiself" (211). Here, after years of slavery and torture, the roles change - the shaman exploits the colonist (331).

Creation of the historical narrative is present along with the creation of magical reality. In the story of Nina Maria, for example, the author shows us how the official history was overpowered by multiple versions of the story. Some of the interviewed claimed that the Virgin was brought by the Spanish, and others believed that it was found by the Indians. Both attributed supernatural powers to the Virgin, saying that she helped her people overcome the enemy by creating illusions (193-197). The ultimate truth, if it existed, would be lost in the subtle battle of power and submission, in people's multiple descriptions of one past.

The array of stories, sides, and views touches all aspects of the world in which whites and Indians live side by side. Taussig mentions the existence of many divisions and oppositions in the fictional reality. There are the Church and the pagans; there are shamans who use yage and witches who learn their magic from satanic books; mediums and shamans of the lowlands and highlands who are distrusting and using each other; social classes that live in a constant struggle; the dark-skinned and the whites. There are also mediators (the highland shamans) who are in between Christianity and paganism, mediating both the spiritual and the social opposites (the masters and the peons) (254).
Taussig says that without imagined realities the conquest itself would be impossible. Stories of cannibalism, magical cures, wicked sorcerers, and savage primitives “functioned to create through magical realism a culture of terror that dominated both whites and Indians” (121).

Taussig, Michael (1987) Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.

Advertising, media, and beauty standards

Here is a beautiful paper named "A Critique of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty"

I guess many people have seen Dove beauty ads in the past few years, and if not, you can find them on Youtube.

The author of the paper, Sarah Scott, discusses these ads and their influence on our society in several ways. The question is, are these ads truly ethical. Is their sole purpose to bring more money to the company? Do they really help women?

Paper link: http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1129&context=comssp

Latest Dove ad:

Anthropology and activism

It is generally accepted that anthropologists are to observe and record cultural phenomena without trying to change or “fix” it. Anthropologists can become active participants of various cultural processes in order to gain information and better describe whatever it is they are studying, but they are not supposed to use their own cultural and moral norms to judge and correct other people’s belief systems, traditions, rites, and customs.

Cultures themselves are not static; they change through time. But we, anthropologists, are not there to bring the change according to our own standards of what cultures are supposed to be. On the contrary, often anthropologists often strive to record cultures the way they are before they change or cease to exist, like in the case of many disappearing languages. In a way, anthropologists are historians of the present. They make records for the future generations who will live in a very different world with changed, transformed societies which might view our present as unfamiliar, distant, and bizarre.

We also live in the world of globalization where societies, cultures, and ethnicities merge and blend together like never before. In this world of cultural interconnections, displacements, and marginal states of existence things change and transform constantly. Anthropologists must adapt to this fast-paced globalized world as well.

The idea of observing and recording things without trying to “fix” them goes hand in hand with cultural relativity and the notion that no culture is “right” or “wrong”. Good and bad are relative terms that exist within cultures and may not be the same for everyone in the world. What is accepted as normal in our culture may look horrible to someone from another, and vice versa.

But what do we do when we come across things like female genital mutilation, child brides, victims of torture, child labor, slave trade, destruction of various environments, and much more? Do we stand in the midst of the crowd, watch, and record like indifferent observants, or do we actively engage ourselves? If we try to “make things better”, do we cease to be anthropologists and turn into activists instead?

At this point I believe that anthropology and activism don’t have to be mutually exclusive. We may be anthropologists, writers, historians, engineers, business-people, teachers… But first and foremost we are all human beings. Each person plays a wide array of various social roles. You cannot be just an anthropologist, or just a police officer, or just a grandmother. Life is more complex than that. Our personalities are complex, as well as our ideas, thought processes, and beliefs. We change throughout our lives just like our cultures do. We are not static beings frozen in time. 

Being an anthropologist doesn’t mean being rigid. We must be flexible. We can remember about cultural relativism AND try helping those who are sexually and emotionally abused. We can observe AND fight against companies which employ little children to do dirty jobs in slave factories overseas. We are allowed to be non-judgmental and accepting of other cultures, but recognize when it’s time to say “you don’t have to be a victim of torture and mutilation; you are a human being and you must have rights.” We are anthropologists, and we do not judge, but we can describe things and let the society decide if these things need to be transformed into some relative “better.” 

How to prepare for the general anthropology exam

Anthropology exams don’t have to be dreadful. I know that different things work for different people, depending on the way their minds work to process and store information. I’ll describe what worked for me when I was a university student. You decide if this method of studying works for you.

For any general anthropology exam (cultural, social, and even physical), we must know four main things that work somewhat like strongholds for everything else.

1. Key anthropology figures

2. Key anthropology theories (approaches, “schools of anthropology”)

3. Key anthropology concepts

4. Specific examples to illustrate numbers 2 and 3

Our professors want us to remember the key figures who have influenced the field of anthropology, but who cares about names and dates if we don’t know what they practiced and believed in? For each anthropologist, we must know the following: 

- what does this person believe?

- how does he/she think the society works?

- his/her main focus (ethnography, linguistics, medicinal plants, evolution, gender, etc.?)

- which words and concepts does he/she like to use?

- most famous writings by this anthropologist

- other anthropologists whose approaches he opposes or supports

Also, as a nice extra, it’s always good to know one or two memorable quotes that you could gracefully use in your exam.

Being a visual person, I used both written notes and various charts. For example, as a basic memorization technique,  I would draw a big circle named “functionalism”, and write the names of all functionalist anthropologists inside. I did the same for evolutionists, structural anthropology, relativism, etc. I would also make bubbles and connect them to “school” circles. Inside the bubbles I wrote basic concepts and ideas for each approach and school of thought. Of course, this was just a bare skeleton, some very general information to remember.

Even if two anthropologists belong to the same school of thought, their ideas might differ greatly. So, they might be in the same circle – evolutionism – but their thoughts about what evolutionism is and how it works might be different. They can use different terms to describe their theory and come up with various categories. Also, anthropologists’ thoughts and ideas can change throughout their lives, so any given school of thought is not something rigid that an anthropologist must necessarily adhere to for ages.

In my studies I also wrote a particular name, let’s say  “Anthropologist X” on a piece of paper, and underneath I wrote all the key words related to that person. It could be a long list of various terms, names, countries, titles, for example, “structuralism, systems of exchange, reciprocity, New Guinea, opponent of evolutionism, opponent of anthropologists Y and Z, animism, believed behavior.” You can write this on flash cards for each anthropologist and carry them around, quizzing yourself throughout the day. A name will stick with a set of particular terms and titles, even quotes. If you do this in addition to reading all the assigned literature and actually understanding it, you WILL remember. 

In my experience, knowing anthropologists and their theories well is essential to passing any written exam in general, cultural, social anthropology. 

You can have brilliant ideas and examples from real life. You can remember a certain book or story well and use it to illustrate something in relation to the exam question. You can understand a concept and describe it without naming any anthropologist or school of thought. Most of the anthropology is actually real life, something we all deal with every day. It happens to us, around us, in the world we perceive from different angles. 

However, in our classes and during exams, professors do want to see that we remember what we have learned. They want us to understand existing theories and use the names of those who worked in the field before us. We must use their concepts and give them credit, and apply established concepts in our discussions. 

The Gift summary Marcel Mauss

In the book “The Gift” Marcel Mauss discusses a system of exchange and obligation which exists in several societies in the form of potlatch or the system of total services.

Throughout the book, Mauss repeatedly states that gifts given on various occasions among people in Polynesia and in the American Northwest have to be reciprocated. For example, among the Samoan, gifts of any kind, material or ritual, contain a pert of person’s spiritual essence. Keeping and not reciprocating them would be highly dangerous and immoral because active gifts seek to return to their original owner and to the place of origin. In Andaman Islands gifts serve as links between families, supporting the system of contract and exchange. In Trobriand Islands there is a system of intertribal trade called kula. During this event presents circulate among participants in a very strict order, and such circulation serves to reinforce legal principles and has strong spiritual connotations. It is not a mere exchange of gifts done in order to please somebody; it is a very elaborate system of services which “forms the framework for a whole series of other exchanges, extremely diverse in scope” (Mauss 1950:27).

In the American Northwest, there is potlatch, or the system of exchanged gifts. It is more violent than the system of exchange in Melanesia, and the notion of honor plays a huge role in it. Services performed during the potlatch gathering are seen as acts of honor, and the chief can keep his high status only by sharing his good fortune. The author says that “the obligation to give is the essence of potlatch” (Mauss 1950-39), and so is the obligation to reciprocate. Competition and power play are very prominent, and there is indeed a very strong connection between “circulation of gifts and circulation of rights and persons” (Mauss 1950:46). 

In the last chapter the author compares the notion of gift in the European society with that in the societies of Melanesia and the American Northwest. In the western society people generally see gifts are something that should be given free, in contrast to obligations and services that should be reciprocated. However, if we look at the history of Indo-European law systems, classical Hindu laws, Celtic laws, and others, we will notice that the system of exchange and obligation is not foreign to them. For example, in German villages there is something called gage (a pledge), during which gifts are exchanged to seal the contract between two parties. Mauss emphasizes throughout the book that gifts play a huge role in what he calls “total services of the agonistic type.” The system of exchange in several societies discussed by him serves to create and maintain social ties, reinforce laws and rights, and keep the society function in a certain way. 

Marcel Mauss, 1990 [1950] The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. W.D. Halls, trans. Norton & Company, Inc. New York. 

What is Habitus (Bourdieu)

Habitus is one of the main concepts used by Pierre Bourdieu. He defines habitus as a “subjective but not individual system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class and constituting the precondition for all objectification and apperception” (Bourdieu 1972:86). 

Personally, I understand habitus as an internalized perception of reality shared by a group of people who have been taught to perceive the world in the same way. To me it is almost the same as "culture", but culture is mostly about what people create and how they communicate symbolically. It can be defined simply as "the system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning" (Bates and Plog, 1990). Habitus is more about how people perceive and structure the world in their minds, and how they act according to these internalized structures. 

Habitus is produced by the past; as the product of history, it produces individual and collective practices in accordance with the past practices. Habitus plays a big role in social reproduction; it is both the product and the producer of social structure. Products of collective history, for example language or economy, reproduce themselves through habitus and exist in (or are enacted by) individuals who have been influenced by similar historical/material conditions of existence.

In the habitus, material conditions of existence determine various practices (for example, ritual ones), and schemes of perceptions of the individuals are in turn determined by those material conditions. It seems that according to Bourdieu, habitus is determined by the very things it determines and reproduces.

Habitus reproduces social order and causes members of the group to conform to it because not only group’s view of the world is structured by it, but also the group itself is structured by “the temporal forms or the spatial structures” which it reproduces, thus making them a reality (Bourdieu 1972:163). Members of the group and various institutions constantly reinforce order of things through practice, and so this order becomes self-evident, seems natural, and is unquestioned. Falling out of the established, realized rhythm of things, not conforming to the social order would mean defying social solidarity.

Bourdieu distinguishes between practical and logical relations; for example, if an ethnographer sees kinship in terms of a closed system of logical relationships, practical functions of its terms and relations might be misunderstood or even remain unseen. It is because representational kinship (or official kinship) is a self-representation of a group acted out according to the group’s scheme of perception. The author compares logical relationships as seen by an anthropologist to a map, and practical ones, which practically exist in a society – to “the network of beaten tracks, of path made ever more practicable by constant use” (Bourdieu 1972:38). This difference between theory and practice presents certain difficulties for the observers who search for the truth in native accounts.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1972) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press.

Homeless and living on the margins

Sometimes the invisible ones come out of the shadowy spaces to which they've been assigned by those who walk in the light. 

I was driving out of the parking lot of a big shopping plaza, and a homeless man was standing at the corner on my right. I looked to my left to see if the road was clear. The need to look left also saved me from making an eye contact with the man. I wasn't planning to give him any change, and not giving it to him made me feel guilty (regardless of my lack of information about his particular situation). He stood there, an alien, marginal being, and cars kept passing by, drivers looking everywhere but in the man's eyes, as if scared of the homelessness "disease"... As if looking at him could somehow contaminate them. 

In every society people have a set of ideas about the clean and the dirty. This varies from place to place although certain ideas might be universal. We, westerners, the children of the "civilized" first-world country, have our own untouchables. We frown at the Indian caste system, but fail to make note of our own behavioral and thought patterns here, at home, when we come across those who do not fit into our quite rigid concepts of
normal". 

I understand. We fear the different, the unknown. We don't know what to expect from those who live on the margins of our world because they may not live by the same rules. When you are a marginal being, your behavior may change along with the changes in your mode of existence, your perception of reality, your physical health, your value system. 

I've had a very unpleasant experience with one homeless man one day. I was walking down the street, and he walked toward me, talking to himself. He was a dark-skinned, tall man in his late forties. When we passed by one another, he threw our his hand and hit me in the head, mumbling something about "bitches". It wasn't hard enough to hurt me really bad, but I did  get a bump afterwards. I was so shocked that it didn't cross my mind to call the police. 

Are all homeless men aggressive? Are they all alcoholics, drug addicts, schizophrenics? No, of course not. But they do live in a marginal space of existence where more "fitting" members of our society fear to go. Very often the first inclination of a "normal" human being is to separate from the marginal one, to increase the distance between one another, to avoid all contact whatsoever. It's safer that way, and there's no need to think much. Just don't look and keep driving. 

The homeless man at the exit of the parking lot held a sign in his hands. I thought it would say something like "hungry" or "disabled vet", I wasn't really interested in knowing... But he wrote his sign in huge, dark letters that stood out, practically screamed at me. The sign said,

SMILE, GODDAM'IT !

I smiled. I gave him a huge, genuine smile. I wanted to laugh at myself when I imagined how I looked to him - a thirty-year-old woman with a dead-serious, grim expression on a tired face driving out of the shopping plaza. How did I really look? Exhausted, sad, pressured, irritated, unhappy? I avoided looking at him, but he did look at me. The "no looking" game is one-sided, you see. The homeless are invisible to us. We look away or through them because looking directly at them makes us feel uncomfortable, but they don't seem to have a problem watching us. 

Smile, God damn it. 

People in their cars, tired after work, worried about bills, kids, husbands, wives, tomorrow, and who knows what else. Tired after standing in line in WalMart, not looking at another human being in the corner because he is not really one of them. He is alien. Almost nonhuman.

Some people might feel offended reading this post. "We? No, never!? We don't judge the homeless, we see them as human beings, we give them change, we even talk to them!!" Maybe. Maybe some of us do. But the majority doesn't. The majority avoids looking at them because they are a threat to what is perceived as normal. 

I don't blame people for not feeling comfortable looking at other people. I am just pondering on the subject of  perception of reality. 

Have you ever wondered how the world looks to a homeless man? We know how the homeless look to us. Have you ever wondered how we look to them? 

I met a homeless guy named Henry a couple of months ago. Henry is about 50, he has a black lab and a bicycle (although I saw him without the bicycle about a week ago, maybe he doesn't have it anymore). He asked me to use my cell phone when I was passing by, so I lent  to him. He called his brother or sister, I can't recall now. He said he loved them. He smelled like a drunk. He had skull rings on his fingers and a heavy silver chain on his chest. I saw him a couple more times, my daughter played with his dog.

He called me "sister." He stopped being invisible when my daughter played with his dog and we talked about simple things. Instead, all the others became invisible to me for a brief period of time when I stood next to him. And I became "the weird one" to those others. After all, who in their right mind would stand next to the stinky homeless drunk and let her toddler play with his dog? 

What are your experiences with the homeless?
Are you afraid of them? Do you feel comfortable looking straight into their eyes? Do you perceive the gap between your world and theirs? Do you divide the world into "us and them"?