I've found myself reading old anthropology texts, nearly 100 years old, as a friend pointed out, ones which I'm told marked the beginning of a change in the attitudes of anthropologists who studied contemporary African and other native tribes. Previously, these academics had seen the communities and nations they studied as inferior, primitive, superstitious and irrational in their beliefs about life and the natural world. But beginning in the early 20th Century, in part with the book I'm reading now, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, that began to change. The author, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, an Oxford-trained anthropologist, lived for almost 2 years, in the late 1920s, with the Azande, of what is today the new and troubled country of South Sudan. Back then it was part of the Republic of Sudan, under the colonial rule of the British, in cooperation with their protectorate, Egypt.
In writing about the integral role witchcraft played in the lives of the Zande people, Evans-Pritchard made no judgements. He described, explained, worked to give context and perspective. His answer to those in the West who might think it was absurd for the Zande to believe that every death was the result, not only of a natural cause, but always, in addition to that, witchcraft, was to quote a Zande friend: "Perhaps in their country people are not murdered by witches, but here they are."
Anyway, all this is to introduce a passage I ran across, not from E.E. Evans-Pritchard, but from Norman Brown's Life Against Death, that, though written later, echoes those earlier, condescending attitudes of anthropologists and that, full of dated jargon as it is, amazes me in its opacity, although I admit that I have not come to terms (by negation) with my own pregenital impulses. But I am trying.
Archaic man is preoccupied with the castration complex, the incest taboo and the desexualisation of the penis, that is, the transference of the genital impulses into that aim-inhibited libido which sustains the kinship systems in which archaic life is embedded. The low degree of sublimation, corresponding to the low level of technology, means by our previous definitions, a weaker ego, an ego which has not yet come to terms (by negation) with its own pregenital impulses. The result is that all the fantastic wishes of infantile narcissism express themselves in unsublimated form so that archaic man retains the magic body of infancy.
My assessment differs from that of the author of this piece with regard to his mastery of the impulses. He seems in fact to have negated the pregenital impulses to such an extent that a narcissism, if you will, arises manifesting the opposite tone yet echoing the acute magical imagining of the infant. As for the negation of the author's genital impulses, this scribe may offer no comment.
ReplyDeleteI dunno. The fantastic impulses of narcissism, infantile and otherwise, seem to be alive and well in modern man, though sublimated in cars, smartphones, and countless other lifeless objects. Is that what Brown means by "low level of technology"? Back then there were no fancy toys to play with, only the ancient pee-pee? Whoever inscribed the above comment, a certain Anonymous, is obviously a genius. And I am jealous of the awesome phrase, "the magic body of infancy" which also, I believe, carries a certain poignancy.
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