A Report on Politics and the Humanities

A group of eminent academics, led by Paul Boghossian and Kwame Anthony Appiah, recently issued a Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.  They did not like what they found. The authors are highly disturbed by politicization of scholarship, which, they find, often reaches the point of denying that there is any value in seeking the truth:

For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, UCLA anthropology professor Akhil Gupta declared that “anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences ... because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism”.

In a reply published in American Anthropologist, University of Colorado Boulder population geneticist Fernando Villanea emphasised the point that “the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective,” but rather to “serve the interests” of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past. Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that “all ethnographies”—the stock in trade of cultural anthropology—have as their goal “not voyeurism but advocacy”; as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding. 

If anything this careful critique understakes what has happened in anthropology and sociology, where the very notion of truth has been completely discarded in favor of advocacy. There are many spaces – journals, conferences, private conversations – where “seeking the truth” is mentioned only as a concept held up to mockery, and questioning the assumption that scholarship exists to serve the marginalized draws either laughter or furor.

The authors have a different ideal in mind:

Part of the raison d’être of a university is that it should engage in disinterested inquiry — inquiry aimed at knowledge and understanding, both for their own sake and for the sake of further goods that require genuine knowledge and understanding, rather than ideologically informed opinion, for their promotion. This, at least in part, is what universities are for. Indeed, it might well be thought that one of the greatest contributions a university can make to society is to provide a model of what disinterested inquiry can be and how it might thereby be of value. If the pursuit of disinterested inquiry is compromised, it strikes at the very foundation on which a university should be based, just as the corrupt administration of justice strikes at the foundation upon which a system of justice should be based.

I agree.

Shorter, less bureaucratic version of the argument in Quillette.

Civilization and Evolution

From an excellent, fascinating interview with geneticist David Reich:

The context that lot of my work in the last few years has been focused on, and that I'm tremendously excited about right now, is to try to use genetics from ancient people to understand how people got to be the way they are today biologically. So what we've done in our research group in the last few years is that we've generated data on an absolutely huge number of people. 

The paper that we are currently publishing has data from more than 10,000 ancient people from Europe and the Middle East. These individuals are from all over and from all time depths up to 15,000 years ago. So the last 10,000 years, this is the time period when, in Europe and the Middle East, agriculture comes in. It's a very eventful period culturally, it's a period of extreme population growth, when people began to live differently. We can compare the rate of evolution at the beginning of the time period to the end of the time period and it's gotten faster. And not only has it gotten faster, but genetic variants that were under positive natural selection before in some cases switch to negative selection, so it's a period of oscillation of natural selection. 

What seems to have happened is that there's cultural change, due to differences in the way people live, with agriculture, living more densely, living with animals, urbanization, other things that are changing, and they are prompting changes in the genome that are resulting in, on average, changes in frequency of the genetic variants that might be useful for people living in these new and differently challenging environments. But if you look at the individual positions that are significant in Europe, they tend to move in the same direction in East Asia, even though the histories are completely independent in this time period.

If that is right, then cultural change, in particular agriculture and urbanization, has caused a sort of convergent evolution across Eurasia, with the same genes being favored in widely separated populations. Which is fascinating.

Coming to Believe

How do people come to believe in things that are esoteric, unprovable, and not widespread in the culture? The best book I know on this question is anthropologist T.M. Luhrman's Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (1989). I used this book way back in graduate school, but one of the drawbacks of that kind of scholarship is that I was just diving into it for use in one particular argument and never read it cover to cover until now.

Luhrman investigated the world of British magical practitioners, both Wiccans and the neo-Hermeticists who follow the "Western Rite." She did a staggering amount of work. She somehow got invited into the meetings of a dozen different schools and covens, participated in many rituals, interviewed hundreds of people, and read a library's worth of books. She found that the people who were drawn to magical practice were not crazy or poor, but were on the contrary educated, middle class folks, many of them from the computer world. How did they come to believe in the efficacy of magic?

Luhrman introduces a concept she calls "interpretive drift", a

slow shift in someone's manner of interpreting events, making sense of experiences, and responding to the world. People do not enter magic with a set of clear-cut beliefs which they take to their rituals and test with detachment. . .  Rather, there seems to be a slow, mutual evolution of interpretation and experience, rationalized in a manner which allows the practitioner to practice. Magicians did not deliberately change the way they thought about the world. Becoming involved in magic is exciting, and as the neophyte read about the practice and talked to other practitioners he picked up intellectual habits which made the magic seem sensible and realistic. He acquired new ways of identifying events as significant, of drawing connections between events, with new, complex knowledge in which events could be put into context. (12)

Luhrman also noted that the vast bulk of accummulated magical lore and the difficulty of mastering certain techniques gave adepts a sense of being real experts.

I would argue that the rift between magician and non-practitioner is carved out by the very process of becoming a specialist in a particular kind of activity. Becoming a specialist often makes an activity seem sensible. The specialist learns a new way of paying attention to, making sense of and commenting upon her world. The important point is that the significant features of becoming a specialist can be identified. There are new ways to define evidence which offer grounds to the expert that the non-specialist cannot see, and ways to order event so that the specialist sees coherence where the non-specialist sees only chaos; there is a body of specialist knowledge which given discrimination and depth to the specialist's interpretations; there is a semi-explicit philosophy which creates the assumptions which frame most conversations. . . .

The striking observation is that in the course of practising magic the magic comes to seem eminently reasonable to the magicians, and that rather than realizing that their intellectual habits have changed they feel that they have discovered that the ideas behind magic are objectively true. (114)

I think this model explains a great deal of human belief. 

Persistent Impermanance

From a review of David Stuart's big book on the Maya:

Yet Stuart views their history not as an arc but as a series “of numerous ups and downs, of many foundations and abandonments.” He tracks the building of Maya urban centers, their peak during a period of expansive power, and their sudden collapse and relinquishment. “Persistent impermanence,” he writes, characterized the Maya approach to life, which, at its core, they saw as ephemeral. This transitoriness expressed itself in their cyclical calendar, which established precise turning points defined by catastrophic pivots, occasions for renewal, and the intervals in between. In retrospect, the Maya’s desertion of cities likely owed to a combination of factors—among them, overpopulation, war and political polarization, drought and the changing weather patterns, the scarcity of water supplies, and unstable commercial structures. Of course, scores of other peoples—including in our time—have suffered similar bouts of inclemency. None gave up their habitations with such regularity.

This persistent impermanence also characterized the Mississippian societies of the US, towns like Cahokia and Mounville that rose to glory for a generation and were then abandoned and largely forgotten. 

In my philosophical moods I think about this regularly. What endures? Often that is the basics of the socio-technical system, for example the grain-growing village of western Europe, or the irrigated wet rice societies of east Asia, where peasants lived as their ancestors had for millennia. But other things that loom large in our imagination were fleeting experiments, taken up with enthusiasm but soon abandoned. Cities that rose to power under mighty rulers but faded away under their weak grandchildren are known around the world. If you follow the careers of artists or scholars in Renaissance Italy you see that they moved from place to place as particular courts were glorious for a while but then broke up or fell to conquerors. At a lesser level you often read about the wonders of some community in some particular era – Greenwich Village in the 70s, say – accompanied by mourning that it did not last.

Such, it seems, is human life.

Chimpanzees and Crystals.

There is archaeological evidence that people have been into crystals for hundreds of thousands of years. So some researchers gave crystals to chimpanzees and discovered that they love them too. 

NY Times:

For the first experiment, the researchers used two pedestals that were installed in the chimps’ yards. On one, they placed a multifaceted quartz crystal that stood about a foot tall, and on the other, a sandstone rock of similar dimensions. (Dr. García-Ruiz named this experiment “The Monolith.”)

The chimps went crystal cuckoo. In one yard, they repeatedly approached the monolith until the alpha female, Manuela, wrenched it off its pedestal. After that, the crystal rarely left the troop’s sight, while they largely ignored the sandstone rock. One video shows a 50-year-old male chimp named Yvan carrying it while he climbs and eats cabbage, passing it between his hands and feet with great panache.

In the other yard, the experiment was cut short after a chimpanzee named Sandy immediately grabbed both items from their pedestals and brought them into the dormitories, where human caretakers don’t generally go. . . .

For the second experiment, researchers set out piles of pebbles in the gardens, with a few small crystals incorporated into each. The chimpanzees immediately sorted the crystals out of the piles.

Then they carried them in their mouths, turned them in the light and held them up to their eyes like old-timey prospectors.

Xeroxed and then Scanned Photo of a Cache of Crystals

I find this completely unsurprising. The human attraction to bright, shiny rocks, especially when they have interesting geometries, seems very primal to me, something so old as to defy any assignment of "meaning." Archaeologists are used to finding caches of crystals in all sorts of places; the one in the photo above was found buried next to the foundation of a house on the Manassas battlefield, probably built around 1870. The occuants were free African Americans, and an interest in in crystals seems to be a habit their ancestors brought from Africa. But they were far from the only ones to have such interests; I know of a cache of crystals hidden in the coffin of a wealthy white woman buried around 1920. Notice the stone point that was included in the collection above; this is also a common habit around the world, and many folks have been interested in the stone tools shaped by their distant ancestors.

We love bright, shiny, interestingly shaped things, and always have.

Mongolian Shamanism

I've been reading about Mongolian shamanism. A few observations:

There isn't much emphasis on the shaman journeying to other lands; instead, the role of the shaman is to communicate with spiritual beings and placate them with rituals. The exorcism of demons is a common rite.

Men and women can both be shamans, and little is said about any difference between them.

For the past 800 years, Mongolian shamanism has gotten mixed up with Buddhism. The more Buddhist sort of religion is called Yellow Shamanism, presumably because the Tibetan Buddhism that influenced it was called Yellow Buddhism. Shamans who reject Buddhist influence are called Black Shamans; some sources say this school formed in the 1700s as a reaction against Buddhist and Chinese influence.

Shamans recognize a variety of spiritual beings. The most important category is the 99 Tenger, or Tingri,  which is sometimes translated "gods" but some aren't very powerful. The Tenger are divided into 55 associated with the color white and the east, who are generally well-disposed toward humans, and 44 associated with black and the west, who are generally hostile or at least grouchy. Some sources say that most shamans specialize and only communicate with one sort of Tenger, but others deny this.

Shamans also venerate the spirits of the ancestors. These are usually the ancestors of their own family or clan, perhaps even recently deceased people that the shaman knew; but on the other hand Genghis  Khan is venerated as the great ancestor of all Mongols. Some sources indicate that Genghis Khan is particularly venerated by black shamans who oppose Chinese/Buddhist influence.

Plus there are lots of other, lesser beings: nature spirits, spirits of game animals, spirits of springs and streams, and so on. Living beings also have spirits that a shaman can access through arcane means. 

Shamans venerate the vault of heaven, which makes sense for people living on the open steppes but also may reflect Chinese influence.

More recently, Mongolia was under Soviet domination, and many sources speak of a major revival in shamanism after the Soviet Union fell, as part of Mongolians asserting their national identity and trying to reclaim their traditions.

One of the most important rites is fire sacrifice, which is traditionally performed in mid-winter. This involves building fires, roasting several kinds of meat, and singing long songs; here is a snippet:

We drop melted grease on
Your flame and pray for you;
We may stay in boundless ecstasy
By having numberless animals
By sanctifying this holy spirit of worship;
Let our animals increase
Let our life be longer
Let us live in incomparable rapture;
We beseech the offerings
From magnanimous mother-fire
Whose origins are from heaven
Whose birth was from earth. . . .

The rite is surrounded by taboos, for example:

• It is forbidden to stoke a fire with an iron poker within a week of the ceremony of worshiping fire (this is considered to be a period of the absence of the fire-god);
• Maternal nieces are forbidden to enter when the maternal uncle’s ceremony of worshiping fire is performed;
• It is forbidden to give dairy products and grains to somebody within three days of the ceremony of worshipping fire;
• Mothers who recently gave birth are forbidden to come near the burning fire;
• It is forbidden to burn anything that can defile a fire or make it dirty;
• It is forbidden to pour water on a fire.

Mongolian shamans practice several sorts of divination, for example by throwing dice and looking into mirrors.

And, finally, many Mongolian shamans now make their livings performing for tourists, which probably means they have all the conflicts about who practices the real tradition and who just puts on shows for tourists that also bedevil shamanism in South America.

Stationary Bandits in the DRC

There is a theory of state formation, associated with people like Mancur Olson and James Scott, in which which early states are modeled as parasitic predators. Matt Yglesias: 

A settled farming community can produce more food than it needs to survive, which means that raiders can profitably steal it. But as Mancur Olson pointed out in his later work, as profitable as banditry may be, a skilled group of warriors might decide that it’s even more profitable to act as “stationary bandits.”

Instead of sporadically raiding farming communities, stationary bandits live nearby and tax them — they are, in other words, the government. 

As a generalized model of state formation, I find this lacking; in particular I do not think it applies to the earliest states we know anything about, in Sumer and Egypt. But there certainly are cases in which conquering elites have acted in exactly this way. As Yglesias puts it, this view is "cynical about government, but not entirely negative."

One of Olson’s points is that stationary bandits, unlike roving ones, have some genuine interest in encouraging the communities they govern to prosper. They need to protect their victims from other bands of bandits. If they provide things like law and order, basic infrastructure, and other growth-oriented public services, then there’s more tax revenue to secure. 

So they may end up being pretty good governors; a famous example here might be Tamerlane, who was a brutal conqueror but under whose rule the cities of central Asia thrived like never before.

In a fascinating paper, an American professor named Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra uses the chaotic eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a laboratory for considering stationary bandit theory. The most valuable products of this region are two minerals, gold and coltan. The prices of both have fluctuated dramatically over the past twenty-five years. When the price is high, the returns to controlling the trade are very high in local terms. So those high prices lead local armed groups, whether militias or units on the Congolese Army, so set themselves up as stationary bandits:

The first result is that, in response to an increase in the price of coltan, armed actors create monopolies of violence; that is, they emerge as “stationary bandits” (Olson 1993), create illegal customs to tax mining output, and provide protection in the mines where coltan is produced— thus creating Tilly (1985)’s “essential functions of a state.”

Sánchez de la Sierra also found that price spikes in the two different materials led to different behavior by armed groups:

A positive demand shock for coltan, a mineral whose bulky output cannot be concealed, leads armed actors to create illicit customs and provide protection at coltan mines, where they settle as “stationary bandits.” A similar shock for gold, easy to conceal, leads to stationary bandits in the villages where income from gold is spent, where they introduce illicit mining visas, taxes, and administrations. 

They also set up courts that adjudicate disputes, punish thieves, and other judicial functions.

The hardest part of the study, and the one that raises the most questions for me, concerns the incomes of people in these areas. The methods used are described in detail in the paper, but for me they did not inspire confidence; basically, Sánchez de la Sierra and his assistants did a lot of interviews. But, anyway, this is his finding:

Having a stationary bandit from a militia or the Congolese army increases welfare. These findings suggest that armed actors may create “essential functions of a state” to better expropriate, which, depending on their goals, can increase welfare.

Very interesting.

T.M. Lurhman on the Anthropology of Faith

American anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann's whole career has been about trying to refine the notion of "belief." In her studies of British Wiccans, American evangelicals, and others, she has shown that people's statements about what they "believe" vary dramatically from day to day and situation to situation. What is core to religion, in her view, is experience, and belief is often secondary or even irrelevent to religion.

For as long as it has existed, anthropology has been partly about describing other societies and partly about critiquing the anthropologist's own society. Consider Tacitus using the supposed marital fidelity of German tribesmen to attack the morals of Rome, or Margaret Meade using Samoan practices to question the sexual repression of the early twentieth-century west. In this fascinating essay, Luhrmann asks how that works when it comes to religion. We often see anthropologists praising the child-rearing practices of those they study with the idea that westerners should copy them, but not so much when it comes to religion. Published anthropological studies almost all take a view that might be called methodological atheism, that is, one simply does not get into whether religious beliefs are true or false, or good or bad. 

Yet god is the most radically other of radical otherness. One might think that exploring this otherness might be the greatest challenge any anthropologist could bring to the everyday expectations of the world back home. Why have we not done so?

A group of anthropologists sometimes called "ontological" have indeed done this to some extent:  

The ontological turn might seem to be the place anthropologists have risen to this challenge of confronting radical otherness. The early ontological writings certainly seemed as if they would. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Morten Pederson, and Martin Holbraad wrote fiery texts about the ways that most anthropologists examined the belief commitments of people like those in Amazonia, Cuba, and Siberia. These ontologists argued that most anthropologists treated such beliefs with scorn.

They argued that most anthropological observers presumed that such beliefs must be wrong, or that we needed to provide an account of why people held false understandings—and that view, the ontologists argued, was driven by deep-seated colonialist impulses or a kind of scientific imperialism. The point of the ontological turn was to insist that we should abandon these presumptions and decolonize anthropological thought. Willerslev and Suhr quote Viveiros de Castro: “Anthropologists must allow that ‘visions’ are not beliefs, nor consensual views, but rather worlds seen objectively; not world views, but worlds of vision” (2011: 133).

But these ontological anthropologists have not brought back observations from these local worlds in order to reimagine their own. One strongly doubts that Viveiros de Castro himself believes that women can become jaguars (to borrow the famous example). Neither Martin Holbraad nor Morten Pedersen has argued for an ontological understanding of his own world that seems different from the one he held before setting out to do fieldwork. Instead, in the recent (and admirably clear) summary of their position, they both appear to have pulled back from the claim that these other beliefs are veridical accounts of reality. To the extent that Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) accept these non-European belief commitments (the woman became a jaguar), they simply insist that these beliefs are veridical to others—and that, as James Laidlaw (2012) so articulately points out, leads us not into ontological confrontation but into epistemological relativism, the position that anthropologists have always held.

The anthropologists who are interested in how westerners might be changed by the encounter with others often focus on their own experience in a radically individual way:    

Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr make a different intellectual move. They focus on moments that are intellectually inexplicable from within an anthropologist’s secular worldview, and yet common in the lives of many fieldworkers.

Willerslev and Suhr draw from these moments a disciplinary epistemology of uncertainty and openness. They take the lesson that these events are the way that anthropological insights are made—that it is the shock of such moments that leads people trained into a certain worldview to break open into a different way of seeing. Anthropology grows, they say, with the ability to doubt what one knows, and through doubt, to change what one imagines. “This personal commitment to existential transformation of the self is as essential to the anthropological project as it was to Socrates” (73)

But since Luhrmann's study is focused on experience rather than belief, she sees the question differently:

To my mind, the powerful insight that arises out of the encounter with an alien god—alien to the anthropologist, that is—is that the purpose of life itself can be imagined differently as a result. We secular observers focus on the concept of “god” as a claim to a kind of stuffness— a real immateriality, a nature beyond ordinary nature (a supernature); perhaps, as George Eliot put it, the sound on the other side of silence. We often miss the important social fact that those of faith also take god to be radically other, too, and as a result, are often more committed to moral purpose than to supernatural reality. As an observer of the faithful, I want to point out that the most fundamental observation about faith is not that divine stuff exists, but that moral purpose in the face of uncertainty will change the world as we know it.

Faith is about seeing the world as it is and experiencing it—to some extent—as the world as it should be. Faith is about having trust that the world is good, safe, and beautiful. The blunt fact that these commitments are held in a world that is often brutal and unfair tells us that faith is hard and requires effort. Belief in a just, fair, good world is not some kind of mistake, not a deluded misconception that observers need to explain, but the fundamental point of the faith commitment—regardless of the supernatural nature of the divine. Faith is about holding certain commitments front and center in your understanding of reality even when the empirical facts seem to contradict them. That is why faith takes work and why faith changes the faithful. It is also why the encounter with the radical otherness of divinity should be central to anthropology, because it encourages the anthropologist to imagine how his or her own world and own life could be fundamentally different. . . .

The anthropological problem with god is that we treat the belief in the supernatural stuff as the heart of the matter. It is not. Far more central is the concept of radical otherness and its concomitant commitment that a sense of moral purpose can change the world as it is into the world as it should be whether anything empirical about that world changes at all.

Luhrmann, along with Weston La Barre, changed my own view of religion. I used to be a naive young atheist who always wanted to ask, "how can anyone believe that?" Now I see belief as a secondary phenomenon, something that arises from a commitment to a certain way of living and a strong desire to see meaning in the world, and I no longer wonder how smart people can immerse themeselves in it.

But I also find that I personally can't get away from belief. The problem, for me, with church services and the like is that people are always referencing beliefs that I don't share. Even a phrase like "Jesus said" launches me into questions about what we actually know about Jesus. I have met atheists who love divine music, but at least when it is sung in English I always get caught up in the theology. I am by nature an overthinking intellectual whose musings about divinity always start from facts, like those two trillion galaxies I like to reference. Regardless of what I feel, I can never shove the facts as we know them from the center of my mind long enough to experience the world in any other way.

Lewis Hyde, "Trickster Makes this World"

Trickster Makes this World (1998) is a semi-famous book about twentieth-century art, 90 percent of which focuses on the worldwide myth of the Trickster. The book has been extravagantly praised, but not by anthropologists or folklorists; it is artists and writers who love it. I am enough of a folklorist and anthropologist to understand why it might bother academic researchers – and, I imagine, storytellers rooted in Native traditions – but taken for what it is, it is quite wonderful.

I can remember first encountering traditional trickster tales and being both baffled and disgusted. In some traditions, stories of characters like Raven, Coyote, and Rabbit are the most holy lore, told only in winter, in complete darkness. Some of them concern first things: creation, the separation of earth from heaven, the origin of death. And yet, they are bizarre, ridiculous, disgusting, and immoral. In various stories Coyote plucks out his eyes and sends them for a walk, eats his way out from under a mountain of shit, burns his own anus when he mistakes it for a monster's mouth, lies, steals, cheats, disobeys direct orders from the high gods, and violates every taboo. Coyote is a creature of monstrous appetites for food, sex, and fun, frequently unable to restrain his desires. There is a whole class of stories in which somebody tells Coyote, "but above all, don't do X," whereupon Coyote immediately does X.

Why would sacred stories of cosmic origins be mixed up with such nonsense?

When Christian missionaries encountered such stories, first in Africa and then around the world, they often associted Trickster deities with Satan. They weren't just demonizing the enemy, but had understood something vital about these myths. In the Christian tradition it is the temptation of Adam and Eve by the Serpent that sets human history in motion, breaking the perfect sterility of life in Eden and launching us onto the path of birth, death, creation, and destruction. Many Tricksters do the same. As the missionaries saw, they played the part of Satan, evoking and invoking the desire that condemns humanity to life in a world where we can walk freely, but which is walled around with time and death.

One way to think about life is to imagine a balance between order and chaos; too much of either is intolerable. Other gods have a strong tendency toward order. Trickster upsets their orderly systems, breaks their rigid rules, and helps turn a perfect but perfectly boring universe into the crazy one we know. 

To Hyde, this is what avant garde art does. It shakes up our world by breaking rules and pointing the way from sterile stasis toward something more vibrant and interesting. Some modern artists, notably Picasso, have embraced this role and publicly identified with the Trickster. I wrote here several years ago that I see Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei as a Trickster figure, joking his way through a profound challenge to Chinese authority.

In one interesting section Hyde asks why avant garde art has often been criticized for obscenity. Systems of order, he writes, are often inscribed on bodies; the way people dress and carry themselves is often seen as the most powerful expression of social control:

It should by now be easier to see why there will always be art that uncovers the body, and artists who speak shamelessly, even obscenely. All social structures do well to anchor their rules of conduct in the seemingly simple inscrption of the body, so that only after I have covered my privates am I allowed to show my face to the world and have a public life. The rules of bodily decorum usually imply that the cosmos depends on the shame we feel about our bodies. But sometimes the lesson is a lie, and a cunningly self-protecting one at that, for to question it requires self-exposure and loss of face, and who would want that? Well, trickster would, as would all those who find that they cannot fashion a place for themselves in the world until they have spoken against collective slience. We certainly see this – not just the speaking out but the self-exposure – in Allen Ginsberg. . . . To the degree that other orders are linked to the way the body is inscribed, and to the degree that the link is sealed by rules of silence, the first stuttering questioning of those orders must always begin by breaking the seal and speaking about the body. (p. 172)

That's a typical bit of Hyde on art, using the cosmic significance of Trickster's ludicrous amorality to deepen our understanding of art from which many people have recoiled.

Another theme Hyde finds in Trickster stories is a dialogue about power, fate, and divinity. Many West Africans, and their New World descendants, use divination via lots to ascertain the will of the gods. But in many stories, the gods themselves resort to divination. What are they consulting, if not themselves? In the African traditions, divination was created by the Trickster figure – Eshu, Legba – when he separated the human and divine worlds. The most important conduit between heaven and earth, therefore, passes through the unreliable hands of the Trickster. Tricksters represent the limits on the Gods' power; they can do many things, but not control Raven, Coyote, or Eshu. This is why Trickster figures are abhorent to the Abrahamic faiths, which cannot accept any limit on God's majesty, and do not admit that there any situations when divine commandments should be disobeyed.

But if the Gods are good, and all powerful, and love us, why are things the way they are? Maybe because Trickster screwed up the Plan. In so doing, he gave us the opportunity to live freely, and to make choices that matter. But his gifts bear with them shreds of the original chaos against which the other Gods erected their creation. We may be free to walk along the cosmic border for a while, but in the world Trickster made we never cross to safety, and eventually fall back into the void.

Father Jetté wanted very much to make a collection of tales, but there were difficulties. The Ten'a were reluctant to let the Raven stories be put in writing, for one thing (though another group of tales – "the inane stories," Jetté calls them – could be had for the asking). Jetté tried to transcribe tales as they were being told, but the utter darkness frustrated him. Nobody would repeat the stories in daylight, and at night whenever he struck a match to light a candle, the storyteller fell instandly silent.

Helen Rountree and E. Randolph Turner III, "Before and after Jamestown: Virginia's Powhatans and Their Predecessors"

Helen Rountree (born 1944) has long been the leading historian of Virginia's Indians. She turned a girlhood obsession with Pocahontas into a successful academic career, writing several books about the people she calls Powhatans. The books she wrote herself cover the period from European contact to the present, and she has also teamed with archaeologists to write two others that take the story back in time.

Before and After Jamestown (2002) is a popular book written at a pretty basic level, but it is full of good information. It is particularly strong on how we know what we know about the Indians of 1607. The sources are: English narratives, especially those of John Smith, William Strachey, and (three generations later) Robert Beverly; archaeology; ethnographic comparison with other Native American communities; and "living history," i.e., modern attempts to re-create past technologies. Rountree makes no use of supposed Native "traditions" until a much later period, when she refers to oral histories recorded in the late 1800s to reconstruct the movements of tribal communities in the reservation era. Rountree is a fan of the English narratives, and while she thinks they misunderstood much, she generally defers to specific claims they made.

For example, John Smith tells us that Powhatan (the person) received the English seated among a dozen of his wives, who were all decked out in their finery. Historians of a feminist bent have challenged this, asserting that the women Smith saw must really have been the Women's Council. But none of our sources mention that Virginia Indians ever had women's councils on the Iroquois model, and even among the Iroquois women's councils had nothing to do with receiving foreign ambassadors, which was entirely managed by the men. Rountree follows Smith's version.

When it comes to archaeology, Rountree is also – how to put this? – pro Eurocentric scholarship. She makes much use of evidence that comes from excavating human burials, including demographic data  and chemical analysis that can document diets and movement between regions. Some modern Indians regard information gleaned from looting graves the way others see the work of Nazi scientists, and think it should never be cited. Virginia's Indian communities have until recently been officially on board with Rountree's approach, and have insisted only on reburial of remains after study. One of the biggest Indian events in Virginia in my lifetime was the reburial of the skeletons from the Great Neck Site in Virginia Beach. I think this probably stems in part from the struggles Virginia's Indians have gone through to establish their identity as Indians, which has made them value historical information over purity. I have the sense, though, that this is changing, and younger generations of Native leaders will try to block any excavation of Indian graves.

Rountree participated for decades in living history programs, introducing generations of her students to Indian basketry, ceramics, house-building, and so on. Some participants in these programs have gotten good enough at the tasks involved to give us real data on how long things like weaving reed mats or stitching shell beads to deerskin actually took. The answer is always some version of "a long time." Certain moderns like to fantasize that more primitive peoples lived laid-back, lazy lives, but this was not true of North American Indians. At least two Indian men are recorded as bragging that they were at home wherever they went, since their houses could be put up in a few hours. But that few hours only covers the assembly of the house. The preparation of the materials could take months, especially in areas where the roofing was reed mats. One of John Smith's famous observations was that forests around Indian villages had been completely stripped of small trees and downed branches, so you could gallop a horse through them unhindered. That was done by women collecting firewood, and it means that after a village had been in place for a few years the women had to travel miles to find fuel for the fires they kept constantly burning.

Rountree has a good eye for issues that are interesting in both the scholarly and general senses. She devotes quite a few pages in Before and After Jamestown to the great difference between men's and women's lives. She has the same impression I have, that certain Indians considered men and women to be separate species that had to come together to make babies but otherwise avoided each other. We have descriptions of Indian women treating their husbands as little more than sources of meat and hides, and mocking or even divorcing them if they failed to provide enough. As for the men, when they entered adulthood they went through a rite that comes down to us under the name of Huskanaw. This was a verion of the standard Woodland Indian initiation rite, in which adolescent boys were taken into the woods and made to hallucinate through some combination of hunger, thirst, pain, exhaustion, and drugs. In the Powhatan version they were supposed to imagine themselves being reborn and emerging with everything they learned in their childhoods forgotten. They even had to be retaught to eat and drink. It's hard to know how seriously to take that claim, but William Strachey wrote it down, so Rountree and I both believe some Indian told him that. Anyway the newborn young men were supposed to forget all childish things and everything else about the years they spent in the company of their mothers.

Randy Turner's contribution to Before and After Jamestown uses archaeology to extend the story back to around 900 AD, when Virginia Indians took up growing corn and beans. This section is pretty thin, because, honestly, what archaeology tells us about Indian life is pretty thin. We have the outlines of their houses, quite a lot of their pottery, enough animal bones to confirm what John Smith wrote about their diets, and thousands of stone arrowheads. Virginia has the worst kind of soil (acidic) and climate (alternately wet and dry, cold and hot) for preservation of anything else. We have next to no art, and all of what we do have was preserved by being taken to Britain. (Like the deerskin cloak above, to which hundreds of small shells were stitched; the Ashmolean calls it Powhatan's Mantle.) We know the Indians made cloaks covered with feathers, but none survive from this part of the world. We know they made music, but we have none of their instruments. 

That leaves us with the burials. From them we learn that Virginia's Indians had a harsh age pyramid, with many people dying young and very few living past 50. We learn that they traded for copper from the Great Lakes region and used it to make ornaments. We learn that they had several different ways of treating the dead, which is honestly one of North American archaeology's more puzzling discoveries. Every Indian a white man ever asked said, "Among my people we treat the dead like this," without any qualifications about different approaches for different kinds of people, but the archaeology shows this was not so.

It is humbling for an archaeologist to consider that there is more information in any one of the three main English accounts of Powhatan life than we have ever been able to learn or could learn by any technology we have or could imagine. 

What archaeology can do is push the story very far back in time. So far as we can tell, after AD 900 Indians in eastern North America were living in pretty much the way that Smith and Strachey described. They were also ethnically the same people, speaking similar languages. Which is why Turner and Rountree started their book at that time. Rountree in particular has been a great advocate for Virginia's Indians, which had led to her being made an honorary member of two tribes, which I think is yet another reason why she chose this framework of dates.

Because so far as archaeologists can tell, the cultures that formed across the eastern seaboard when Central American agriculture arrived – the triad of corns, beans, and squash – were not ancient. Before that Indians practiced a limited sort of agriculture with native North American plants such as sumpweed and sunflowers, but without corn their lives seem to have been quite different. Tracing the story back 10,000 years we can see people living as hunters and gatherers with low population densities, a world Powhatan people would have found very strange.

Linguistics also tells a story. The Powhatans spoke Algonquian languages that anthropologists are pretty certain came from the Great Lakes region within the past 2,000 years. The archaeology points to c. 500-700 AD as the most likely time. And this is, after the issues of burials, the place where scholars and Indians have lately come into the most stubborn conflicts. After having been shoved out of one place after another, many Indians have taken to insisting that their peoples have lived in their current homelands "forever." For eastern North America, this is not true. Archaeology tells a story of repeated migrations and replacements going back thousands of years. As in Europe and Asia, the spread of agriculture seems to have been accompanied by large scale migrations and conflicts. Of course that never means total replacement, and the Indians who lived in Virginia presumably had some genes from people who had lived in the region 5,000 years ago. But archaeologists don't do "forever."

By starting in AD 900 Turner and Rountree avoided all this controversy. Which is fine, their book is about the Powhatan people, who can't really be said to have existed before then. As I said, as a book about the ethnography and history Virginia's Indians it is very fine. It is also highly accessible, even for students, which is a real achievement. So if you are curious about that time and place I recommend it. I wonder, though, if the historical consensus represented by this book can long endure, or if it exists even in the 2020s. The agendas of Indian activists and people who want to science the past have lately been moving ever farther apart, and I expect that will continue.

OJ Simpson and the Question of "Misogyny"

The death of OJ Simpson reminds me of something I've been thinking about for a long time: what his murder case says about the generalized notion of "misogyny." It used to be very common for feminists to attribute crimes like rape and spouse abuse to "misogyny" as if the problem were just that men hate women. I heard more than one person say that the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson was "misogyny." But OJ Simpson seemed to me like the perfect case of a man who actually loved women and ended up brutally killing one partly because he had loved her very much.

Anyone who ever watched OJ on "Wide World of Sports" saw his comfort with women on regular display. He was friends with all the black female runners and some of the white women as well. He could talk about women's issues like training after pregnancy and childbirth that left his fellow male reporters sitting in embarassed silence. Watching him one never got any sort of impression that he disliked women.

I think OJ killed Nicole because of a particular problem, the homicidal jealous rage that afflicts so many men.

What may be the oldest claim in the field we now call evolutionary psychology is an explanation of precisely this problem. Chimps don't have families in our sense. They have mother-child bonds, and bonds between female friends, and coalitions among males, but there are no relationships between males and females. No male chimp knows or cares if a baby is his. The argument goes that one of the crucial early steps in hominid evolution was the formation of the nuclear family, in which the father invests very heavily in the support of his offspring. He will only do this if he has good reason to believe the child is his. Hence, the jealous rage, and the thousands of years of men trying to control female sexuality.

This theory is a century old now but still hangs around because 1) we honestly have no clue how humans came to practice permanent pair-bonding and involved fatherhood, both of which are a lot more common in birds than mammals; 2) male jealous homicidal rage is such an ancient worldwide problem that it presumably has some explanation in terms of human fundamentals; and 3) the theory puts the nuclear family, which so many humans worship, at the center of our identity.

Whether it is true or not I won't hazard a guess; I don't think we know much about the events of two million years ago. I just mention this to point out that OJ Simpson-style murderous rage is a problem that humans have been pondering for a long time.

Changing directions: what is misogyny, anyway? There are men who just seem to despise women. This was always my idea of misogyny, the kind of guys who think women are crazy emotional wrecks you're better off staying far away from.

But maybe I'm wrong. Feminists have used the word in a lot of other contexts, for example, men who seduce lots of women. This one used to puzzle me; wouldn't men who hate women prefer to avoid them rather than spend a lot of time in bed with them? Or OJ-style murderers.

So maybe an alternative definition of "misogyny" might be, "a desire to control women and a refusal to treat them as free, equal people." This fits the problematic cases I have mentioned, and I think it probably gets closer to what most feminists have in mind than just disliking women.

The thing is, this is an awful explanation of male behavior. It takes a particular, emotionally intense situation and generalizes it to a species-wide problem of belief. "You killed a woman in a fit of rage, therefore you have a generalized view that women are inferior" is a terrible syllogism. After all, men kill each other even more than they kill women, and they presumably do not do this because of some general view that men are inferior. 

I maintain that there is no necessary connection at all between what a man believes and what he will do in a fit of violent rage. I think it is simply false to assert that what people will do in an extreme emotional situation is any kind of guide to what they are like the rest of the time. 

I want to push this generalization hard. These days the complaint, "I'm lonely and can't find a girlfriend" is likely to be met with, "you think women owe men sex." But the statement "I am lonely" is not in any way a statement about how women ought to act. It is a statement about a particular person in a particular situation and cannot be generalized into anything.

I want to fight this generalizing habit. I want to fight the notion that people who did one bad thing, even one terrible think like murdering your ex wife, are bad in every way. I think that nobody is bad in every way, or good in every way. I violently resist this way of understanding humans. That a man killed one woman says absolutely nothing about how he feels or acts toward other women.

I want to fight any kind of thinking that goes, "You did X, therefore you are Y." 

I would have sent OJ to prison, but not because he is a misogynist, whatever that means. 

Scott Siskind, Elizabeth Hoover, and What it Means to Belong

The New Yorker ran a weird story by Jay Caspian Kang a few weeks ago about Elizabeth Hoover, the latest "Native American" professor to be unmasked as entirely white. Scott Siskind was disturbed by it and wrote a long response. Siskind's essay is good in that he probes at important questions about identity in America; we put huge cultural and some legal emphasis on ethnic and other identies that mostly lack any clear definition, and that creates pain and suffering. But he misunderstands what it means to belong to a traditional community.

I'll let Siskind summarize the story:

A woman named Adeline Rivers drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1928. By the time her granddaughter Anita was growing up, family legend said that Adeline was a Mi'kmaq Indian who committed suicide to escape an abusive white husband. Anita leaned into the family legend and taught her own daughter Elizabeth to be proud of her Native American heritage.

As a kid, Anita would take Elizabeth to pow-wows (Native American ceremonial gatherings) where she would play with all the other young Native girls. As she grew up, many of her closest friends were Natives, and she practiced Native American dance. By the time she was a teenager, she had taken a Mi'kmaq name, wore Native clothing, and was involved in Native political causes. In college, she wrote a thesis on Native American issues in the US, then got a PhD in anthropology, where she studied Native American affairs, then got a professorship at Berkeley teaching about Native American culture. She married a Crow Indian and went on trips to various Indian reservations where she studied and wrote papers about the problems they faced, and she was informally adopted by one of the Native families she stayed with. . . .

At some point, maybe after going to the Mi'kmaq reservation during grad school to hunt down family members, Elizabeth must have noticed holes in her family legend; it seemed that her great-grandmother wasn’t really Native American, just some ordinary white woman who drowned for unclear reasons. Although nobody knows for sure, it seems like after realizing this, Elizabeth tried to hide it - maybe from herself, but at least to others. She kept claiming Native ancestry, and even writing about her (nonexistent) Native relatives.

After Elizabeth Warren and other high-profile cases brought the issue of fake Indians ("Pretendians") into the spotlight, some people from the Native community started going after Professor Hoover, challenging her to prove her Native descent. Over time the challenges got louder and louder, and eventually she had to admit she wasn’t Native after all. Some of her students wrote an open letter demanding that she resign, which said:

We find Hoover's repeated attempts to differentiate herself from settlers with similar stories and her claims of having lived experienced as an Indigenous person by dancing at powwows absolutely appalling. [She has] failed to acknowledge the harm she has caused and enabled.

At which point Hoover's life fell apart.

Siskind has a long history of siding with victims of the cancel mob, so he immediately identified with Hoover and felt that attacks on her were unfair. I had the same gut feeling; by the moral code of a gentle modern soul like Siskind or me, the attacks on Hoover are barbaric. But I know enough about traditional communities to understand what happened here.

First, after a short discourse on what race means in our world, Siskind notes that the key variable seems to be "lived experience":

Although race doesn't exist biologically, it exists as a series of formative experiences. Black children are raised by black mothers in black communities, think of themselves as black, identify with black role models, and face anti-black prejudice. By the time they're grown up, they've had different experiences which give them a different perspective from white people. Therefore, it’s reasonable to think of them as a specific group, “the black race”, and have institutions to accommodate them even if they’re biologically indistinguishable.

Siskind's main mistake is assuming that this post-modern sort of definition applies to a traditional community like an American Indian tribe. What defines membership in such a community is not "lived experience" in some generalized sense; it is personal, family ties to other members of the community.

This comes across very clearly in the New Yorker story. When Hoover tells Mi'kmaq Indians that she is Mi'kmaq, they don't ask how many pow-wows she has been to; anybody can to go a pow-wow. They ask, "Who are your kin? Where are they?" As Siskind suspects, this is where Hoover's story fell apart. Confronted with these questions, she looked, found that she had no such connections, and realized that by the Mi'kmaq definition she was not and could never be one of them. If Hoover's family legend had been true, she might have found some of her relatives, and if they had welcomed her (as they probably would have) she could have begun the process of becoming a member of the Mi'kmaq community.

There is a ton of anthropology about how this works, and I read a significant swath of it while writing my dissertation. Consider that in many languages, there is no common word for "friend." You call your best friends "brothers" or "sisters" and your secondary friends "cousins" and your more distant friends "kinsmen." That is the paradigm under which many Native American tribes have historically operated.

This does not necessarily have anything to do with blood; many Native tribes have strong traditions of adoption. But if you are adopted into a tribe, and really want to be thought of as a member, you have to work at it. First, you work on really joining the family that sponsored you, and then you work your way out into the broader community. If you don't build up those personal ties, your formal membership will not count for much. (Unless somebody in the tribe wants something from you.)

To most Indians, whether you wear Indian clothes and take an Indian name and dance at pow-wows is of no real importance; Indian wannabees have been doing that for a century. What counts is your personal, family ties to community members.

(For tribes with membership rolls, formal membership is also important, but in the first place those lists were really built up from family ties, and in the second your formal membership will not avail you much if you don't know anybody else in the tribe.)

The second point I would make concerns the viciousness of the attacks on Hoover:

Her graduate students stopped working with her and switched advisors. Her department tried to prevent her from attending meetings, and made her promise not to do work on any Indian reservations. The entire academic and Native American communities are giving her the cold shoulder. She wrote an apology letter saying that she had "put away my dance regalia, ribbons skirts, moccasins, and Native jewelery . . . I've begun to give away some of these things to people who will wear them better," but privately described her life as being in “ruins".

I could never participate in such a shunning. Which is another way of saying that I have no strong community allegiances at all.

Real world communities only endure if they viciously defend their boundaries. Think of the scorn that many groups have heaped on wannabees and poseurs, or, in reverse, they lengths to which people will go to fit in to their chosen group, changing their speech, clothing, etc. For our tribal species, community membership is of extreme importance.

One of the ugliest such fights going on in the world right now is between trans women and so called "TERFs", feminists who want to police the boundary of womanhood and keep out the poseurs and the wannabees. There is nothing mysterious about this; if you think membership in your group is important, you pretty much have to defend its boundaries, and TERFs are not at all unusual in their willingness to be cruel about it. 

Or consider how many Americans who think of "American" as an import category feel about people sneaking across the border.

Yes, race in America is really weird right now. I am dismayed by the whole apparatus of "Native" scholarship and the like, which I find bizarre. Universities are western institutions rooted entirely in western values, and their attempts to accommodate Native American or African "perspectives" are always going to be fraught. I find it offensive to say that no white person should teach Native culture or African history. I place much of the blame for stories like Elizabeth Hoover's on the academic valuation of ethnic belonging, which I don't think has any place in a university setting.

But as long as people value their ethnic groups, they are going to police the boundaries of those groups, and so far as I can tell Elizabeth Hoover really was on the other side of the line than she claimed to be.

Stephen Houston on Maya Kingship

From an article about the Maya city of El Zotz by anthropologist Stephen Houston, MacArthur winner and professor at Brown, these two paragraphs say a lot about what kingship was and why it endured:

Cross-cultural comparison suggests that only five elements were required for a Maya court: 

1. a monad (a human pivot to which others defer); 
2. others that seek contact with, and control over, the monad (courtiers and servitors); 
3. the resources, symbolic and real, to make this striving worthwhile and to support such extravagance; 
4. an acute understanding of hierarchy—of how to behave in socially asymmetrical encounters that characterize courts; and 
5. a physical setting for such encounters. 

A vast literature documents these elements, allowing the possibility of broad generalizations about courtly behavior and its recurrent patterns (e.g., Adamson 1999; Brown and Elliott 1980; Costa Gomes 2003; Elias 1983; Geertz 1977, 1980; Howes 2003; Ladurie 2001; Steane 1993, including models from Mesoamerica, Inomata and Houston 2001). For example, as a concept, “court” blurs the distinction, rarely evident in most societies, between bureaucrats and courtiers, administrative duties and the person and spiritual role of the ruler (Inomata 2001:31; Vale 2001:298-299). And it makes clear that, without the monad—the ruler—the system must wither until another monad is found. Against this is a demonstrable predisposition: the physical mass of the court and the many needs it serves create an impetus to maintain the court system and its many practices (Webster 2001:131-132). Logically, a system sustains itself if participants “buy into” its predicates. A firm blow must occur, as it did during the so-called Maya “collapse,” to neutralize such a node of joint self-interest.

The “human pivot” of Maya courts is the “holy lord,” k’uhul ajaw or, rarely, the “lady holy lord,” ix k’uhul ajaw (Houston and Stuart 2001:59-61). Around that pivot operate: family members, near, far, even fictive; courtiers, including “favorites”; servants and those generally in attendance; slaves and purveyors of goods and services; allies of varying fidelity; and, in replications across the landscape, the smaller courts of magnates and lesser nobility (Miller and Martin 2004:23-27, passim; see Waterfield 2003:10-12; Woolgar 1999:8-29). Whatever its scale, the court contains many features of a household, a place of procreation, production, pleasure, and consumption (Fowden 2004:64-84). Among the Classic Maya, scholars now know, some goods and services came from tribute (Houston et al. 2006:244-248), but other economic underpinnings remain unclear: did rulers rely on personal estates for their foodstuffs or on plantations of exportable plants such as cacao and tobacco? The answer to this question is not easily resolved, but courts did at least embody the good life, indulging whim yet allowing displays of exemplary piety (Brown and Elliot 1980:193-199).

Ethel Lindgren on Cultural Appropriation

The NY Times has produced one of their "overlooked no more" obituaries for Ethel Lindgren (1905-1988), an American/British anthropologists who did fieldwork with the reindeer-herding Evenki people of northern Manchuria.

Her experience there led her to this:

Peace, Lindgren wrote in a letter, could be achieved through a “blending of cultures.” The easy coexistence of Cossacks, a Slavic people, and Evenki was ready evidence that “the interchange of cultural traits is a very important background for intergroup friendships.”

The Ikom Monoliths

In the Cross River State of Nigeria, among a people now called the Ejagham, are 295 stone monoliths between 1 and 2 meters tall. They are carved of a basalt that is variously described as "hard" or "moderately hard," and while they resemble each other, each is unique. 

Most are arranged in circles, one circle to a village, and these circles are considered spiritually important places; in a book published in 1926, a colonial administrator described the "enormous veneration" accorded to the monliths. 

And that, right there, exhausts all certain knowledge about them.

These are not obscure; there are thousands of photographs online, and outsiders have been asking local people about them and writing down what they said for more than a century. That just hasn't led to much certain information, or even agreement about probabilities.

While the stones are quite important to the people in these villages, the locals do not agree on what they represent. "Oral traditions," the British Museum tells us,

associate numerous meanings with the stones. For example, stone circles are used as places of sacrifice and community meeting places. They were created as memorials of departed heroes or beloved family members and represent powerful ancestral spirits to whom offerings are still made. In addition local community leaders also ascribed religious significance of the stones whereby particular stone are dedicated to the god of harvest, the god of fertility and the god of war.

Via the magic of JSTOR – don't we live in an age of wonders? –I found an interesting 2015 paper by Sandy Onor, a Nigerian historian, published in the Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, which notes that in one village the people say the monoliths represent past chiefs and can tell you the name of each chief.

Incidentally the most common word for these in Ejagham is Akwasnshi, which means "dead people in the ground." But there is no evidence that they are grave markers.

Just as with the Pictish symbol stones in Scotland, there is a strong suspicion that the various shapes carved on the stones are symbols, possibly a form of "symbolic communiciation," i.e., writing. But, if so, nobody has any idea what they mean.

How old are they? Nobody knows. The main point of the Nigerian paper I just mentioned was to try to date them by comparing the various possible methods and seeing if they could be lined up. The only archaeology the author could find was a single study that involved digging one trench, finding one hearth, and getting one radiocarbon date, which came out around 200 AD. Which is fine, so far as it goes, but there isn't any particular reason to think that hearth was associated with these stones, I mean, people often set up their stones in places that have long been considered spiritually potent. (e.g., Stonehenge)

Since people in one of the villages insist that their stones represent chiefs, he tried using lists of rulers as a chronology, using a figure of 13 +/- 5 years for the average reign that he says is widely used in west Africa. That got him to around 1500 to 1600 AD.

Then he tried using genealogies, which are particularly good for the Ejagham since they count by both mothers and fathers, giving two generation counts for each person. Those get you back to around 1800, and, he says, there is other evidence that the Ejagham people migrated to the Cross River region between 1740 and 1820. (The intense period of the Atlantic slave trade in the 1700s badly shook up west Africa, leading to many migrations.)

So, you know, good luck sorting that out. One possibility, which nobody I have found seems to have considered, would be that the Ejagham didn't make these at all, but found them in place when they came to this region. Certainly nobody ever observed an Ejagham man making one of these, so their manufacture had ceased by 1900.

In many of the online photographs, the stones are painted; it took me hours to find a reference explaining that this is done for the annual yam festival.

Like this.

Anyway, what a fascinating thing, a collection of marvelous stone statues still venerated, but by people who may not have made them and do not agree with each other about how old they are, what they represent, or what the symbols on them mean.

Siberian Shamanism and the Perm Animal Style

Reconstructions made from detailed drawings

of a now lost archaeological collection from Perm

I wrote back in 2011 about the strange Elk Men of Perm, based on the artifact descriptions at the Hermitage Museum web site.

Today, trying to trace this amazing belt buckle back to its source, I discovered a weird and wonderful Russian web site with a lot more material on what its creators call the Perm Animal Style. With the help of Google translate, which seems to have gotten a little better at Russian lately (because of the war?), we can delve more deeply into what these objects mean.

Perm Animal Style (PZS) is the name of a style of cast bronze artifacts from the 6th-12th centuries AD created by the medieval civilization of the Urals. In the center of Eurasia, three roads to Siberia from Europe and Central Asia intersected: the Byzantine, Iranian and Scandinavian routes. At the gates of Siberia, at the intersection of roads in the Upper Kama region, a civilization with a special culture arose, leaving us its pantheon of gods and spirits, embodied in metal. Scientists call this civilization the Lomatov and Nevolin culture. The pre-literate culture of hunters was combined in the Kama region with a developed religious and magical system, born of the Ural civilization in dialogue with the great cultures of the world. 

The location of the modern Perm district, from which many of these finds come.

Medieval Norse sources mention a place they call Bjarmaland. From the narrative of Ohthere (c. 890) to the sixteenth century, various sources placed Bjarmaland either near the White Sea or much farther south, somewhere beyond Novgorod. A few words of Bjarmic that appear in the sagas appear to come from Finnish; Vikings traded there for furs. Most western authorities are skeptical about this wandering Finnish kingdom and think the stories about it are either garbled or just made up. 

But Russian archaeologists have taken over the name and applied it to the Perm culture, which they sometimes call Bjarmic. (The name has also been taken over by Russian artisans who make reconstructions of Perm artifacts, and by the makers of at least one Alternate European History game, which you can play as Bjarmaland.) It seems weird to this western archaeologist to use a name from Norse literature to describe an archaeological culture in central Russia. I suppose they wanted a name for their imagined cultural construct that would be distinct from terms describing the well known archaeological finds. What they have been doing, which I find so fascinating, is using the myths of Siberian cultures documented in the 1800s and early 1900s to analyze the iconography of Perm, calling the results Bjarmic myth. 

Hundreds of artifacts in this style are known, found either in burials or ritual deposits like this one:

This artifact was found in 1957 together with three other amulets depicting the goddess and fragments of a bronze cauldron. [That seems to be the factual part. But the text goes on.]  Perhaps this treasure was the result of the Sacrifice of the Seven Cauldrons. Seven cauldrons with amulets and other gifts were buried in the ground in a circle as an offering to the Goddess of the Earth. This circle blocked the opening to the Lower World, from which illnesses and other misfortunes came. The ritual was preserved by the Khanty.

Here is an example of this interpretation, a continuation of the paragraph above, describing this object:

The goddess stands on spiders, weaving a web, along which the souls of the dead must pass over a boiling resin river. We see the waves of this river at the bottom of the composition. People pray to the goddess, they are in trouble. The goddess with wings is the first ancestor of the family (the mask on the chest) and the intercessor for people before the supreme deity. An amulet of special power, this would have been invoked only when misfortune (epidemic, invasion) threatened the whole people. 

I love this. Shamanistic lore often emphasized the peril of the bridge to the other lands, which might be described as a giant sword blade or a thin rope, but I have never seen it described as a spider web.

The motif of standing on animals represents being carried by them. Which is wonderfully shamanistic; Siberian shamans often described themselves riding on magical animals in their otherwordly journeys.

Notice the circles drawn on the foreheads of these triple goddesses. Our authors interpret this as a sun sign, because the Khanty had a sun ritual in which they drew such circles on the foreheads of the participants, using the blood of the sacrificial animal.

Then there is the figure known as "the deity surrounded by elk." (Or moose, same word in Russian.)

These are interpreted as depictions of a boy hero found in the myths of several Siberian peoples:

This god had many names. The Mansi called this deity the Bright Boy, the Khantyn Alvi, the Tarpyg, As-tyi-iki. As-tyi-iki was revered in the form of seven babies; the Khanty of the 19th century believed that his native land was somewhere beyond the Urals.

Alvi from childhood was distinguished by his extraordinary intelligence and strength, first he broke a wooden, then a copper and iron cradle. He gave smart advice to his father, the heavenly god. As soon as he got out of the cradle, he performed feats, caught up and killed a six-legged elk, cutting off a pair of its legs. He nailed the skin to the sky, creating the constellation Elk (our Big Dipper).

These family scenes are thought to depict Alvi with his parents. 

Birds are common in this art, either in natural forms or in human-bird hybrids. Many stories describe the gods transforming into birds. Which is another shamanistic thing to do.

And this is (no, seriously) the Lame Owl God.

This one they could not connect to any surviving myth, but both lameness and bird suits have been associated with shamans for thousands of years, so it must represent a god or hero on some kind of shamanistic adventure.

Discovering all of this made my weekend.