The relevance of tribal studies

Abstract

WE ALL have the same human body, with the same number of orifices, using the same energies and seeking the same biological satisfactions. Yet tribal rituals are highly selective in their treatment of these themes. I cannot think of any physical condition of which the ritual treatment is constant across the globe. Even fear of the dead, even corpse pollution which Malinowski thought to be a universal human experience, has not been taken up universally in ritual. There are cultures, such as the Mae Enga of the New Guinea Highlands, where contact with corpses does not have to be ritually cleansed, though they cleanse themselves from sex pollution [l]. While in other parts, say among the Nyakyusa of Tanzania, elaborate washings, seclusions and fumigations are necessary to make the mourners and burial party fit for normal society again [2]. The same for menstruation: in tribal society it is not universally hedged with ritual taboos. Each primitive culture makes its own selection of bodily functions which it emphasizes as dangerous or good. The problem then is to understand the principles of selection. Another point to consider is that rituals are not fixed from time immemorial. They are not unchanging hard cores of some mystic cosmology. It is a mistake to think of people as being set somewhere below and apart from their cosmological ideas. To some extent they themselves (or we, ourselves) get this feeling of being controlled by an external, fixed environment of ideas. But the feeling is an illusion. People are living in the middle of their cosmology, down in amongst it; they are energetically manipulating it, evading its implications in their own lives if they can, but using it for hitting each other and forcing one another to conform to something they have in mind. If we can realize how much a language changes in a lifetime, without the speakers recognizing their own contribution, we can realize how rituals and beliefs change. They are extremely plastic. These two points should be taken together: first, that rituals select some bodily conditions and ignore others, second that they are being manipulated by people trying to live together. Jointly they provide a clue to the interpretation of ritual, for we should look for circumstances that are not universal, not common to all mankind to discover the principles of selection, and we are likely to find these in the social environment, the dimension in which people are using everything they can, particularly mystic ideas, to influence one another. The next stage is to distinguish various levels of meaning. Take a common bodily condition and consider the range of rites which seek to control it: there will be several psychological meanings, by which I mean meanings for the person undergoing that