The Serpent’s Children:
Semiotics of Cultural Genesis
in Arawak and Trobriand Myth
(Originally published in American Ethnologist, edited and revised)
Lee Drummond
Center for Peripheral Studies
www.peripheralstudies.org
The people came out and shed their anaconda skins.
— Irving Goldman, Cubeo origin myth
While functionalist accounts of myth have generally yielded to structural
analyses since the appearance of Lévi-Strauss’s classic essay, “The Structural Study of
Myth,” the relationship between myth and that analytical entity called “culture” is still
unclear. The difficulty can be traced to an unfinished anthropological dialogue about
what culture is or what cultures are, and how it / they can best be described. My central
thesis is that anthropologists have tended to regard their subject matter — culture — as a
received object of study and that they have been mistaken in this tendency. The essay
proposes to regard “a culture” as generated and perpetually shifting meaning, a
motivated affirmation of a system of differences. Establishing the semiotic form of two
Arawak and Trobriand origin myths helps to show how anthropological theories are
themselves composed. A textual criticism of one theory of myth — Malinowski’s — is
combined with an analysis of two bona fide “primitive” myths. The comparison
indicates that the myths provide better theory about the dynamics of cultural identity
than does the theory of myth,
Anthropologists have written a great deal about myth, and this paper is intended
in part to add yet a few more pages to that voluminous literature. But it also has a second
purpose, one seldom developed in treatises on comparative mythology: I hope to
demonstrate how a myth can contribute directly to anthropological theory. I want to
claim that just as anthropological studies of myth have advanced our understanding of
that phenomenon, so certain myths can provide insights into the anthropological
perspective that informs theory. The thesis I develop in this essay is consequently that
the myth-making mind and the anthropology-making mind have much in common at
the level of fundamental symbolic processes.
The myth I examine is one told by the Arawak of northwestern Guyana about the
origin of their neighbors and traditional enemies, the Carib. The Arawak say that the
Carib are descended from a bestial union involving an Arawak woman and a camudi
(anaconda) serpent. In analyzing the myth, I identify what I take to be statements of
elemental dilemmas that issue from conflicting principles of kinship and ethnicity,
filiation and alliance, inclusiveness and exclusiveness. My argument is that the
Arawak, like people everywhere, would gladly be rid of the practical and conceptual
embarrassment represented by an alien adversary, whose very presence contravenes
their own cherished order of things, but for the simple, bitter truth that they cannot say
what they are without pointing at what they are not. The dilemma is that the Arawak
are at once a people apart from others and a people implicated in the most intimate
fashion with the origin and present situation of the Carib. The dilemma is really the
problem of cultural identity.
The essay thus focuses on formative and problematic aspects of culture.
Indeed, I would stress with Wagner (1975) and Basso (1979) that culture is first of all
a process of creation, a series of innovations in understanding. The principal creation
or object of understanding, moreover, is the idea of a culture as a system of
distinctive human characteristics that is set apart from other distinctive systems, other
cultures. The Arawak myth of Carib origin speaks directly to theoretical concerns in
anthropology because it reveals how a particular cultural system is inextricably tied
to an evocation of the Other. The myth cannot be adequately interpreted as a
derivative gloss on “intergroup relations” that were somehow established prior to its
composition, since the whole problem is to know how to articulate the basic notion
of “group” in the first place. The following analysis seeks to demonstrate that the
concept of “a group” or “a culture” is the result of signifying processes and that those
processes operate in the phenomenon we call myth. Thus, myth is neither the relic of
a dead past nor the clever falsehood designed to conceal existing political
arrangements;1 it is primarily a part of an ongoing process that continuously creates
culture by formulating images of human identity. A semiotic of myth, initiated by
Lévi-Strauss, is inevitably a semiotic of cultural genesis.
2
If the theoretical orientation of the article owes much to Lévi-Strauss, so
does its analytical program. To approach myth as a meaningful cultural production
commits one to taking it seriously, interrogating particular myths in detail and always
with respect to their actual content. The Arawak myth presented below raises two
kinds of questions, one quite specific and the other very general. The specific
question might be posed thusly: Is there something about Arawak-Carib relations,
both historical and contemporary, that makes the Arawak story of Carib origin a
particularly revealing narrative? That is, does the myth have ideological significance
or is it just a fanciful diversion? The general question is a topic in comparative
mythology: What accounts for the prominence of serpents in the origin myths of
many, often historically unrelated peoples? Without attempting an exhaustive piece
of comparative analysis, I do try to situate the Arawak myth in a comparative
framework and, more importantly, to argue that metaphors of generativity identified
in that myth also operate in the serpent lore of widely separated societies. Since the
myth and its metaphors provide the foundation for my theoretical arguments
concerning the similarity between myth and the anthropology of myth, the first
sections of the essay introduce and analyze “The Serpent’s Children” in its topical
and comparative aspects.
The Myth
A number of myths from the northwest Amazon and the Guianas assign to the
serpent a critical role in human or tribal origins (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971: 24-33;
Goldman 1963: 107-112; Fock 1963: 42-45; Roth 1915: 143-144; Brett 1868: 388393; Taylor 1977: 116-117). In each case the serpent is the water boa constrictor, or
anaconda (Eunectes murinus). Amazonian myths represent the anaconda as a
demiurge which emanates from chthonic waters and carries within itself the ancestors
of future tribes, who are vomited forth to occupy the earth. In contrast, Guianese
myths introduce the anaconda to a world already occupied by people and give it the
character of sexual aggressor and destroyer of a tentative moral order. It disrupts and
redefines a primordial human presence in the world.
The variants I have recorded among Arawak of the Pomeroon River, Guyana,
are all very much part of the Guianas complex. The version I present here, however,
is richer in detail and embraces a wider range of events than any published by Brett,
Roth, Fock, or Taylor.2 And this is true despite the fact that, except for brief passages
in Arawak, the myth was told to me in Guyanese Creole English, the language of
choice for nearly all Guyanese Arawak. In reproducing the narrative here, I have
attempted to preserve the Creole text while altering verb tense markers and pronouns
to conform with standard English usage. Thus, “she kept on with her waywardness” in
the edited text is “she keep on with she own waywardness” in the original narration.
3
The Serpent’s Children
There was an Arawak man, having children —sons and daughters.
One of the daughters, the youngest daughter, was very unruly. So the
father always talked to her, saying, “You musn’t do that You’re
disgracing my home.” But she wouldn’t hear. She wouldn’t listen to her
father or take his advice. She kept on with her waywardness.
Then her brothers spoke to her, saying, “Look, you are our youngest
sister and we love you. But the things you are doing, the waywardness
you are going on with, we don’t agree with. You are bringing disgrace
upon our father’s home.”
When her brothers spoke to her in that way she got vexed. She said,
“Alright, I’m going to leave home —before I spoil you all with my
wickedness.” And she did leave, and built herself a little place tucked
away in a clearing. She’s left home now.
Time went by. One day the brothers were hunting in the forest and
happened to see their sister. They watched her, not going out where she
could see them. They saw their sister go to the edge of a pond, where she
began to sing: burututu cambureru, burututu cambureru, burututu
cambureru (Come out, snake). A camudi (anaconda) came out of the
water and began to have sex with the woman. In those days Indian people
talked like that —animals turned to human beings. They (the serpent and
the woman) had their time, then the camudi went back into the water.
“So!” the brothers said, “You are doing this! Well, you are a dirty
woman. We’re going to teach you a good lesson.” They went back home
and told their father what happened. They told him they were going back
to punish their sister because she was still in the forest with that nastiness.
And they left. After a day the brothers arrived back at the forest pond.
They sang the song to call the snake. The camudi surfaced by the bank,
and when it appeared one of the brothers chopped off its head. The body
of the camudi sank back into the pond.
Later the woman returned to the pond. She started to sing her song, but
the camudi couldn’t come! She sang again! She sang three times but
nothing happened. So she began to think something was wrong, that her
lover was sick. Then she saw its head lying on the bank. She said, “Well!
Must be my brothers that did this to me.” Her family found out her
secret again.
She pulled this thing up now, fought with this camudi to pull it onto
the land. She won’t let it rot in that pond, for it is just there that she is
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drinking the water, too. It’s a water pond. So she pulled up the camudi
and she picked all kinds of leaves and covered its carcass with them.
That’s the reason why today the herbs are the best thing you can get to
do good medicine. Every herb has its own use. So when anything is
wrong —internal or external—you drink them. And so the herbs have
come to have their power, because they were used by that woman.
Then after a while isayuhu (worms) began to grow in the rotting
camudi meat. At first there were many, but all but two died. And the two
that survived changed as they grew, until they turned into people.
So then there were two that lived. And that woman, she did not think of
her brothers and sisters or of her parents. She didn’t keep them in mind.
She just said, “Well. You’re growing to be men. And from the meat.”
They turned into young men right away, and spent much of their time
practicing with bow and arrow. And as their skill improved, the woman
instilled in them the idea that they had one purpose in life: to kill.
She told them, “You two have to take revenge on your grandparents,
because they are very bad people. It is because of them that we have to
live in this deep forest, in this one little clearing.”
And they replied, “But yes.” They practiced with bow and arrow
constantly then and became real marksmen. And that is the reason these
Carib like to fight, you know? They like to fight.
But then one of the Carib went and married an Arawak girl. He came out
of that forest and married an Arawak girl. And an Arawak boy then married a
Carib girl.3
Well, these families then started fighting. The Arawak man killed the
Carib girl and the Carib man killed the Arawak girl. And so the bad feelings
between Arawak and Carib came about.
The trouble that started there led to a big war. The fighting was going on,
but the Arawak were doing badly. The Arawak are not a warlike people, you
know? They are not warlike at all. But the Carib, they are a warlike people.
And they were plentiful, many more than the Arawak. The Arawak have
always been a scant people. So they went to two other nations for help — the
Akawaio and Warrau. These three nations said, “We’re going to finish those
Carib.” Akawaio, Warrau, and Arawak. The three nations against the Carib.
For all that, the Carib were still going ahead, flogging the others. And the
others started to worry, saying “Well, we’re going to lose this thing, They’re
going to kill us off.”
Then the Akawaio man said, “Well, I’m going to turn kenaima. Yes, and
the kenaima can bear a lot of privation. They can travel in the night and a lot of
5
other things. They know a lot of science. They can turn to anything! Bat,
cockroach, lizard, monkey, deer, tiger (jaguar). Tiger is the main secret thing
they can do. And these kenaima have their own weapon. They can push out
your belly. But they have to bear privation, to bear hunger. They have to eat
raw meat, rotten wood, anything, they have to learn that. You can chop a
kenaima [with a machete], but he’s not going to cry out, you know? Only
whistle. Wheeeeeee. Yes, but he can’t cry out. That is the vow they make —
no matter what happens, you can’t cry out.
So the kenaima start to fight the Carib now. And the kenaima were going
far into the deep forest where the Carib lived. You know, those old-time
people used to live all about in the forest. Far, not like today! Today
everybody lives on the riverside and the back-dam and so on. The kenaima
found where the Carib were living and poisoned their water pond with haiari
(a fish poison). Dropped the haiari poison in the water. That killed a lot of
them. And the kenaima also turned tiger against the Carib. Turned tiger and
broke their necks, found them in their gardens and killed them. So the
kenaima did. Kenaima is different from the Arawak and Warrau!
The kenaima were really pushing the Carib back now. Pushing them up into
the riverhead. then back down another river. The Arawak and kenaima were
pushing the Carib back.
And the war is hot now, you know? The Carib retreat, but though they
retreat they can’t stop what’s happening to them. It looks like they’re going
to be wiped out entirely. And it went on like that until there were only two
Carib left alive, a boy and a girl. And they were two, a brother and a sister.
Just like how it began!
Some Arawak people took the boy and his sister in and raised them. But
after they got big they still remembered the war and what happened to their
own people. So one night they ran away. Nobody knows where they went.
They went and lived far from the Arawak.
Today, then, it is not from the worm as before that the Carib derive, but
from a sister and brother tribe! A sister and brother married each other.
And the Carib are still more plentiful than the Arawak.
…………………………………………………….
Ethnographic Context
The first myth I heard in the Arawak village that was to become my home for
more than a year was a variant of “The Serpent’s Children.” And, curiously, the last
myth I put on tape during my residence there is the version presented above, an
unsolicited narration that unfolded in the midst of a final visit with the three best
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storytellers in the village. I do not mention these facts to evoke a sense of nostalgia or
bathe my discussion of the myth in the warm glow of subjective experience. Rather, I
think it important to indicate something about the circumstances of “data
collection,” for the fact that particular data were presented at a particular time and
in a particular way —and that they were perceived as data at all —is often the most
revealing feature of ethnographic research. 4
I was clearly predisposed to hear a living Arawak narrate “The Serpent’s
Children.” Perhaps because of that, the actual telling came as an exciting surprise. I
had only been in the village a few days and had just that evening been introduced to the
“old head” who was the acknowledged local expert on traditional lore. Sitting in his
home as the light quickly dwindled outside, rapport did not come. We spoke,
haltingly, of incidentals. Before I could make my exit, however, a young East Indian
teacher from the coastlands arrived. He was a lodger in the old man’s home and had
returned for the night. The two of us fell into a more lively conversation about his
school and the community. We were discussing the behavior of Arawak and Carib
schoolchildren and the latter’s absenteeism when the old man, who had been listening
quietly, spoke up. “Ah, the Carib. We Arawak call them ‘the worm people’. They
got a story about that.” And he gave us a brief version of “The Serpent’s
Children.”
Pomeroon Arawak are hardly a stereotypically indigenous people; they
sometimes travel by motorboat and dance to Charley Pride and reggae music. Yet as
the weeks and months of fieldwork passed, I found people saying and doing things
that reminded me again and again of the story the old man told. For Arawak are
extremely ambivalent about Carib, and the tension that runs through the narrative also
exerts its force on daily life. The Carib are at once feared and despised: feared
because they were once seafaring marauders who relentlessly hunted and, so the story
goes, cannibalized the weak and sedentary Arawak; and despised because from the
beginning of the colonial era the Carib retreated to the bush where they acquired their
present stereotype of backward, unmotivated “bucks.”5 An Arawak midwife once
remarked to me that Carib women “drop their babies in the bush like animals.” The
bush conceals both their lives and their numbers: “Nobody knows where the Carib
come from. They just grow in the bush.” There are unkind remarks about the
scandalous (to the Arawak) closeness of Carib kinship and marriage, paralleling
exactly the account of incestuous origin in “The Serpent’s Children.”
Yet, these aspersions seem to derive their force from the intimacy of Arawak
involvement with Carib. The Arawak, materially and sexually exploited by coastal
Creoles, visit similar afflictions on the Carib. Arawak men supervise Carib workmen
in timber camps located in the Carib reserve upriver. During the several weeks stay on
the upper river, they sometimes abuse the hospitality of Carib families in the area. A
7
perennial theme in Arawak joking is the respectable Arawak family man who gets
involved with a Carib girl in the bush. Even the Carib have been known to take up
the joke. An older Carib man, in a relaxed moment before sleep as we settled into our
hammocks, teased my Arawak companion about his reputed involvement with a
married Carib girl who had recently given birth: “The girl’s husband make the baby’s
head, but is you who make the foot!” This kind of thing has gone on for generations, at
least since William Brett began missionizing the Pomeroon in the 1840s and persuaded
some Arawak and Carib families to live alongside one another at his new settlement
of Kabakaburi. Both rejecting and desiring the Carib and what they represent, the
Arawak have helped to fashion a population that is at once tribally segregated and
mixed. Arawak and Carib are distinct peoples and must dwell apart, yet neither
group would be what it is without its long history of involvement with the other.
This is the contemporary dilemma that resonates in the story of “The Serpent’s
Children” and that makes that story alive and worth telling today.
Theoretical Implications
It is possible to generalize about the myth in its ethnographic context, for the
dual problems of cultural genesis and cultural identity it confronts are not merely
aspects of a particular “acculturation” process.6 “The Serpent’s Children” describes
a culture whose members are deeply concerned with their difference from another
people and, correspondingly, with their own identity. Consequently, an interpretation
of the myth cannot be based exclusively on its degree of consistency or inconsistency
with existing cultural patterns, including norms and conventional behavior, for the
effect of the myth is precisely to constitute or construct an idea of “a culture” out of
conflicting circumstances. It is a piece of cultural genesis. The classical
Malinowskian view of myth as a “retrospective” account of a culture (Malinowski
1948:144) is therefore untenable. “The Serpent’s Children” cannot be explained as a
“reflection” of Arawak culture, for the culture is neither logically nor temporally prior
to the myth. Interwoven notions of identity and difference in the myth crosscut and
call attention to a conceptual boundary separating Arawak from Carib. It follows that
culture is not a received object, not a given in a universe of other similarly given
cultures. There are only virtual cultures. Stated radically, cultures do not exist but are
always in process of formation.
If myth is not about culture in the sense that it reflects a preexisting social order,
then what is it about? My answer is that it is the residue or trace of human thought
becoming aware of the monumental problems involved in making human existence
intelligible, in specifying the nature of human identity. Working from the structuralist
notion that symbolization is a system of transformations based on the opposition
identity/difference, I want to argue that that system developed because the first objects of
8
thought were enormous puzzles, contradictions, knots, or elemental dilemmas, as I called
them earlier. Again stated radically, symbolization processes and the cultural systems
growing out of them developed only because from the beginning of time things did not
make sense. Unlike the usual Marxian view of contradiction as the product of social
antagonisms, the perspective outlined here sees contradiction as the source of culture and,
therefore, of the social antagonisms that accompany it. Lévi-Strauss’s (1966) notion of
the “poverty of religious thought” has affinities with the idea of intrinsic contradiction
presented here.
The substance of contradictions is much less important than the
fact that they exist.. . . Now, the form contradictions take varies very
much less than their empirical content. The poverty of religious thought
can never be overestimated. It accounts for the fact that men have so
often had recourse to the same means for solving problems whose
concrete elements may be very different but which share the feature of
all belonging to “structures of contradiction.” (Lévi-Strauss 1966:95)
Mythic thought operates on the opposition identity/difference to produce
culture defined always as intersystems (Drummond 1980) or intertextualities (Kristeva
1969) in which the principles of kinship and ethnicity are perpetually at odds. Descent
and reproduction are allied but mutually antagonistic features of human societies, for
they simultaneously affirm and deny the reality of a group’s boundary. The intersystemic
or intertextual quality of culture consists in this derived nature of boundaries: they are
produced by conceptual thought. Elemental dilemmas originate because the questions
“Who are we?” and “How did we come to be?” can only be answered in contradictory
terms. In “The Serpent’s Children” the dilemma takes the following characteristic form:
1) We are Arawak and are a people apart from others.
2) But there are also the Carib, who are utterly unlike us.
3) Therefore, either:
a) We and the first Carib originated in entirely separate acts of creation; or
b) We and the Carib had some type of common origin.
But if (a), then the intimate coexistence of the two groups from prehistoric times
to the present is made to seem merely fortuitous. “The Serpent’s Children” recognizes that
the Arawak would not be the people they are without their history of continuous
intimacy and conflict with the Carib.7 Moreover, if Arawak and Carib originated
separately and each perpetuated its group inviolate from the other, then it would have to
follow that contemporary Arawak as well as Carib issue from incestuous unions between
their first ancestors. An ethnic Other is required even to perpetuate the group, to insure
that Arawak have not sprung from that excess of kinship which incest represents. And if
9
(b), then the fact of common origin means that the Carib, with all their antithetical and
despised qualities are fundamentally one with the Arawak. And if the two were once an
undifferentiated unit, then the source of their difference must again lie, paradoxically, in
incest. In fact, the myth can be read as a transformation of implicit into explicit
incest. The “waywardness” of the daughter and the “disgrace” she brings upon her
father’s home are not defined, but they convey a strong sense of sexual impropriety.
And in the absence of other actors in the story, the implication is that the daughter’s
flagrant conduct is directed at her brothers or father. In any case, a wanton among the
traditionally matrilineal Arawak represented a basic threat to the social order. That
threat was carried out when she rejected conventional sexuality and its normal issue —
Arawak children —in favor of a bestial union with the camudi. The adventure ends
when an actual sister and brother—who are now Carib—commit incest to perpetuate
their group.
The alternatives in the third term of the syllogism exhaust the possibilities that
can be explored by the myth. And either alternative leads to an insoluble problem.
The Arawak cannot deny their intimacy with the Carib without turning away from a
vital source of their own identity. The myth, therefore, explores the proposition that,
at the most basic level of all, the Carib are actually Arawak. The Arawak are what
they are not.
Serpent and Worm as Metaphors of Generativity
In considering the possibility of a common origin, “The Serpent’s Children”
summons up an image of a degraded social order — a life of isolation, bestiality, and
barbarism. The chaotic generativity of the camudi gives way to the more effective
distancing devices of exogamy and intertribal warfare as the myth moves from
“Carib” to “Arawak” conceptualizations. The theoretical implications outlined in the
preceding section all point toward one conclusion: the idea of group, of a cultural
We, is not somehow given, not provided by our heritage as social animals, not, as
Derrida (1967) would say, present, but is constructed through a tremendous effort of
will from the puzzling and conflicting facts of human sexuality, reproduction, and
social relations. How did we come by a notion of group identity in the first place?
What is the symbolization process through which social hominids developed
communicable images of We and Other, kinship and ethnicity? It is important to bear
in mind that the idea of group could not have been a simple, “natural” outcome of
social life among early Pleistocene hominids. If recent primate studies (Reynolds 1976)
can be used as an analogy, membership in hominid bands was probably a shifting
affair; and, more significantly, functional differentiation within the band (nursing
mothers together, juvenile males together) meant that there was seldom a “group” in
the sense of a fixed number of individuals in eye contact with one another. It follows
10
that the simplest expression of group membership is already a complex conceptual
act.
The core of the difficulty, as I have suggested in a previous work (Drummond
1977b), is that the principles of kinship and ethnicity are reciprocal and pose a mutual
contradiction. Perpetuating one’s own group requires the recruitment of new
members of the same substance as oneself, which is specified by an ideology of
descent operating in every cultural system. But descent is itself predicated on a
principle of alliance —births occur in conjunction with marriages—which, however
extensive endogamous unions may be in particular societies (India, for example), at
some point requires the introduction of persons of unlike substance into the descent
system. Unlikes are required to perpetuate likes; otherwise, there would be no
fundamental accounting even for internal differentiation in a society. Incest, which
figures prominently in myths of origin, is horrible partly because it conflicts with the
fundamentally intersystemic nature of the human group. Competition and exchange,
rather than hermetic isolation, characterize the normal state of things, so that an
indigenous theory of cultural genesis cannot dwell solely on the illusion (gratifyingly
consistent though it is) of spontaneous origin and monogenetic descent. Instead, it
must confront the eternal presence of strangers of different substance who become
intimately involved in the process of forming a cultural identity.
“The Serpent’s Children” takes on the simultaneous problems of establishing
the human distinctiveness of Arawak and accounting for their perpetual intimacy and
hostility with Carib. It provides solutions to these interlinked problems by utilizing
metaphorical devices which enable human thought to formulate a notion of cultural
identity in the context of intergroup differences. Those metaphorical devices are
camudi (serpent) and isayuhu (worm).8 The myth employs these metaphors to
explore possibilities of sexuality and reproduction that subvert the human order of
kinship and ethnicity.
The first Carib appear spontaneously as isayuhu in the rotting flesh of the
camudi, a form of asexual reproduction that avoids, or forestalls, recognizing that an
Arawak woman (and the Arawak were traditionally matrilineal) was the mother of the
first Carib. Spontaneous generation is closely associated with ideas about incest
(Drummond 1977b:849), for it is a generative process that results in the actual birth
of individuals but that rejects the intergroup alliances normally required before such
births can occur—the society “rots” because social life is essentially a system of
communication between discrete social units. The association between incest,
rottenness, and transformation is documented for other areas of tropical America.
Harner (1973:177) notes that Jivaro call the members of an incestuous union
“worms” (though he does not identify the type of worm), while Maybury-Lewis
(1967:75-76) states that Shavante employ the same word for “incest” and
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“metamorphosis from human to animal,” or vice versa. The distribution of this
association indicates that it is part of a larger picture in which metaphors of reproductive processes are deployed in myth in an effort to identify the sources of human
generativity and fix the conceptual boundaries of the group. Worms and incest
represent a virtual culture that solves the paradox of descent by postulating a
something-from-nothing world in which a particular human group is monogenetically
derived and hence answerable only to itself.
If the image of isayuhu evades a cultural order constructed from continual
intergroup exchange, what significance is one to attribute to the image of camudi?
The meaning of the serpent as a symbol that human thought has devised to explicate its
own origins is an issue of critical importance in comparative mythology, and it
demands separate and detailed treatment. Here I can only survey fragments of a
vast literature, but I think the material suggests that the serpent, or reptilian life
generally, provides images that surface in humanity’s most fundamental and
probably earliest conceptualizations of itself.
An impressive number of the world’s religions associate the serpent with
beginnings. Its intervention brings to an end the primeval chaos which precedes the
reign of gods, laws, and humanity. For the ancient Egyptians the serpent was one
manifestation of Atum, First Being and divider of the primeval waters. The Pyramid
Texts (ca. 2500 B.C.) clearly identify the serpent with the positive creative force that
brings identity and meaning:
I am the outflow of the Primeval Flood,
he who emerged from the waters.
I am the “Provider of Attributes” serpent with its many coils.
I am the Scribe of the Divine Book
which says what has been and effects what is yet to be
— (Clark 1959:50).
The cosmological orientation of Egyptian religion addressed the problem of
creation in its purest terms: How has a world of multiplicity arisen from a formless
void? The solution to this elemental dilemma was found in the metaphor of the
serpent, which itself lacked differentiation and, enfolding itself, could create by
masturbation. In the Coffin Texts (ca 2250 B.C.) the serpent speaks again:
I extended everywhere, in accordance with what was to come into existence.
I knew, as the One, alone, majestic, the Indwelling Soul,
the most potent of the gods.
He [the Indwelling Soul] it was who made the universe
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in that he copulated with his fist and took the pleasure of emission.
I bent right around myself, I was encircled in my coils,
one who made a place for himself in the midst of his coils.
His utterance was what came forth from his own mouth
— (Clark 1959:51).
When there is only One, creation by masturbation is a logical theory of
origin. Like the worm, the masturbatory serpent provides an image of the somethingfrom-nothing process which must have occurred for the world to begin. But unlike
the worm, the serpent introduces an element of sexuality which dispels the life-is-death
world of spontaneous generation in rotting matter.
If the serpent presages the end of primeval chaos and the rule of men, it also
negates and threatens their authority. It is both creative and degenerative; arising from
the Abyss it remains a creature of those dark waters and threatens to engulf the world
of light and order which it enfolds. Thus the allusion, common at the time of the
Coffin Texts, to “that great surviving serpent, when all mankind has reverted to the
slime” (Clark 1959:52). Atum as serpent threatens the Creation, and can represent the
world of light only by assuming a manifestation that destroys serpents:
There are later representations of Atum as a mongoose, a snakedestroying animal. This can only make sense if Atum in a new form as
mongoose became the killer of his earlier form The uproar in
Hermopolis must mean the old age of confusion, the time of the
Primeval Waters. Atum put an end to the time of the serpent and
instituted a new age. Hermopolis is here the original state of the world
rather than the actual city in Middle Egypt. (Clark 1959:53)
It is fitting that the world’s first religious texts should present a solution to the
problem of origins which is restated in many later traditions: the serpent is responsible
for Creation and for that reason is to be feared and killed.
In Ancient Hebraic religion the serpent is again responsible for the origin of
culture. Its invitation to Eve to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil is, as Leach (1961) notes, the source of our knowledge of sexual difference and of
logical categories.
Representations of sexuality and mortality are definitive
characteristics of any culture, and so it is not surprising that the Hebraic origin myth
begins with a world of primordial continuity in which men and women were
nonsexual and did not die. The knowledge of difference or, more precisely, the
ability to represent difference, is only to be acquired by overcoming or overthrowing a
world of unchanging sameness. Adam and Eve come to know one another (in both the
13
Greek and Hebraic sense) and lose their immortality only because the serpent intervenes. And while God walks in the Garden (Genesis 3:8), it is the androgynous and
immortal serpent that dwells there.9
The theme of the serpent as creator and destroyer, as gift and loss, which
figures in Egyptian and Hebraic religions also appears in Greek myth. The Oracle at
Delphi was Pythian before it became Apollonian, for Apollo killed and usurped the
more ancient oracular demiurge, Python (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1974:69). The
serpent Python was the offspring of Gaea, Earth, and lived in the caves of Mt.
Parnassus. The Egyptian drama of Atum-snake and Atum-mongoose is repeated here in
the overthrow of a chthonic wisdom by a heavenly one. Mt. Parnassus remained the
site of a prestigious oracle, but its polarity was reversed so that it spoke as the god of
light and reason rather than of darkness and chaos.
It would be a simple matter to extend these examples of the metaphorical use of
the serpent in historical religions, but it should be evident from the preceding that an
important cosmological principle is involved. The origin of culture is synonymous
with the origin of symbolization, and with that comes the very question of origins:
How has all this arisen from nothing? As a chthonic, seemingly immortal and selffecundating being, the serpent provides a concrete form on which to build
metaphorical assertions. The world-encircling serpent of the Coffin Texts is also the
self-devouring Ouroboros of Greek and Gnostic myth. Ouroboros is l’incréé
primordial (Gheerbrant 1974a: 181-198), that primordial continuity which yet
contains the germ of all the multiplicity of creation (see Figure 1).
14
The serpent metaphor is not confined to historical religions and should not be
interpreted solely in terms of the abstract categories of being and becoming which
form the basis of literate cosmologies. For serpents are also prominent in the origin
myths of non-literate peoples, and their role there is not obscured by elaborate
etiological texts. Their metaphoric power of generativity is explored in the concrete
terms of sexuality, reproduction, and social conflict. For example, the Australian
corpus, which features a python demiurge or Rainbow Serpent, explicitly connects
the serpent’s world-forming powers with primordial human incest. In the Murngin
version of "The Wawilak Women" (Warner 1958: 250-259), the gigantic python
Yurlunggur emerges from subterranean waters beneath the major totemic well of
Mirrimina and swallows, regurgitates, and re-swallows the incestuous Wawilak
women. Yurlunggur and the women, both Dreamtime creators of the present world,
15
are also clan brother and sister (Warner 1958: 253). The giant python emerges to
swallow the women because one of them has polluted its pool with her menstrual
blood. Elements of "The Serpent’s Children" are present here: localized descent
groups; migration of incestuous women; the serpent in its pool; sexual arousal and
possession (eating or copulating). A cosmological account unfolds alongside a tale
of cultural genesis.10
Finally, the Americas have produced a considerable literature on the serpent as
agent of primordial creation. Without discussing the numerous North American
examples of serpents being pitted against various celestial beings, let me go
directly to a Meso-American case which is very like "The Serpent’s Children.”
The goddess Cihuacohuatl, or “serpent woman,” was said to have
borne twins at the beginning of the fourth world-age, from whom the
earth was peopled. Hence twins were called “snakes.” She was also
called Tonantzin, “our mother,” and was represented with a great male
serpent beside her (MacCulloch 1951: 399-401)
Egyptian, Hebraic, and Greek accounts, each in its own way, avoid emphasizing
the connection between serpents, human origins, and incest that is a distinguishing
feature of Meso-American and South American texts. For the former group, the
serpent assumes the characteristics of a cosmological or moral principle, while for the
latter the serpent is humanity. It gestates, bears, and copulates with humans, and
thereby creates a lasting and intimate place for itself in human society. The Cubeo
myth quoted at the beginning of the essay makes the point most succinctly, but another
northwest Amazon group, the Desana, possess a close variant for which there is a
more detailed and literate text (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971: 24-33). In the Desana myth
an immense anaconda spirit emerges from chthonic waters and swims up the Vaupes
River, where it disgorges the ancestors of contemporary Vaupes tribal groups. Thus
the serpent is implicated in the origin of tribal differences (the theme of the Arawak
myth) as well as the actual first appearance of humanity.
Cultural and Sexual Generativity
Anthropological studies of meaning systems (hence, anthropological semiotics)
are prey to two kinds of fallacy. One is to pursue the logic of a set of categories
through a complex array of binary oppositions and myth texts until the reader is left
dazzled but unconvinced. The other is to “nail down” the “cause” of a rich and
multivocal cultural production in a deterministically empiricist fashion, so that what
is truly mysterious is made to seem transparent. The former is the basis of a familiar
criticism of anthropological semiotics, for the people and societies studied by
16
ethnographers seem to get lost in a cerebral play of categories. Were I to confine my
analysis of “The Serpent’s Children” to its parallels in the cosmogenesis stories of
other cultures, that sense of disorientation would be difficult to dispel. But neither
does the empiricist approach to the material on serpent symbolism offer a solution, for
it succeeds only in avoiding the real complexity of cultural productions centered on
the serpent. I have already criticized Douglas’s (1966) work in this regard, but a more
egregious offender is Mundkur (1976), who has produced the only comprehensive anthropological study of serpent lore I have been able to find. While Douglas opts for the
serpent’s “mode of propulsion” as the source of its religious interest to the ancient
Hebrews, Mundkur (1976:451) finds that the relevant empirical feature is its venom:
“The serpent, in my view, has provoked veneration primarily through the power of its
venom.” In making this generalization, he apparently forgets the numerous
examples of venerated but non-venomous serpents (i.e., boas and pythons) cited in his
useful survey of the “serpent cult.” Indeed, it would be difficult to make sense of
“The Serpent’s Children” and other Amazonian anaconda myths in an ethnographic
context where the extremely venomous fer-de-lance and bushmaster are an everyday
threat to life.
Structuralist and empiricist approaches are inadequate because neither pays
sufficient attention to the interrelationship of cultural identity and an elemental
sexual or personal identity. In Turner’s (1967:28) sense, symbolization of the serpent
involves a very considerable “polarization of meaning,” for it is both an abstract idea
— a First Cause — and a representation of physiological acts — copulation,
masturbation, birth. Consequently, the serpent evokes both rational and emotional
responses, which in turn are worked into conceptual schemes of the Creation as well
as into powerful sentiments about sexual activity and human reproduction. The
structuralist failure in desexualizing and demoralizing myth is nicely described by
Spiro (1979:7) in a polemic against Lévi-Strauss’s handling of the Bororo myth which
serves as a linchpin for his entire Mythologiques. Whether or not one accepts LéviStrauss’s familiar argument (see, for example, Lévi-Strauss 1971: 596-598) that the
distinction between reason and emotion is specious, it is difficult to deny Spiro’s
claim that human sexuality and aggression are given too little attention in his
structuralist studies of myth. The human body and its reproductive processes are
somehow left out of the account. Paradoxically, Lévi-Strauss’s intricate treatise on the
logic of sensory categories (the “fugue of the five senses”), which constitutes the
major project of Mythologiques, ends by explaining everything but the life of the
senses.11
Yet Lévi-Strauss’s general claim is sound. The ability not only to think but to
symbolize is clearly associated with the acquisition of culture and must have
developed by establishing discontinuous relationships among observed objects and
17
events. Following this principle, it is necessary to identify the sets of discontinuities
formulated by an elementary humanity. On this subject Lévi-Strauss has given
particular attention to categories of perception (such as raw/cooked, bitter/sweet,
hard/soft, loud/quiet). In addition to these, however, a fundamental discontinuity and
consequent source of first symbols must be the (proto) human body itself, and
specifically its reproductive, alimentary, and excretive processes. Early humanity was
faced with the unique problem not only of acting on perceived differences between
edible and inedible matter, oral and anal functions, male and female organs, but of
representing those differences in a cultural system.
To formulate those first representations it was necessary to identify beings in
the world whose activities or characteristics illuminated perceived discontinuities.
The serpent is such a being, for its form and habits deny the limitations that
physiology places on humankind and thereby serve to make those very limitations
defining criteria of a symbolically constituted humanity. As the authors of the
Pyramid Texts recognized, the serpent appears capable of fertilizing itself. Men and
women, however, are arranged in such a way that a pair is required for that purpose.12
Human sexuality is, therefore, conceptualized or symbolized by fixing on the concept
of an androgynous being. Difference, which here consists of sexual identity, is a
discontinuity that requires from symbolic thought the image of a continuity, an
original state from which the more complex and presumably later state evolved. The
serpent supplies that image of undifferentiated sexual ability, as well as the
complementary aspect of unregulated and unobservable generativity. As Ouroboros,
the serpent is at once phallus and vagina, coiled back into itself — a perfect and
naturally occurring image of androgyny. As a chthonic creature, the serpent partakes
of the original, random creative power of the earth itself — it emerges from its
underwater or underground habitat just as plants germinate and grow from the soil.
The creature’s direct access to the source of generativity is complemented by its
immunity to the afflictions of sexual beings. The serpent is immortal; it sloughs its
skin but does not die. Sexual differentiation and mortality are inseparably linked.
Reproductively the serpent appears to be complete in itself; it is androgynous,
seemingly immortal, and its generativity — the fact that it is there in the first place —
is allied with the fecundity of the Earth. The great boas and pythons (Boidae)
confound the established, differentiated order in another respect: while eating and
defecating are perhaps the most fundamentally unambiguous physiological
processes, the great serpents when disturbed often regurgitate their prey after
having killed and swallowed it, whereupon they may cover it with a fresh coat of
saliva and re-swallow it. They return to their vomit, a rottenness which defies
identification with food and therefore defines food as a category of symbolic thought.
The actions of eating, vomiting, and re-eating establish a reversible bridge across the
18
otherwise irreversible process, food —> feces, and help to explain that transformation
in terms of a pre-cultural order in which it did not operate with its present
necessity.
Alimentary processes are an essential part of the serpent’s metaphoric
domain. The myths insist on this, for if serpents do not swallow and disgorge people,
then they penetrate and often make their homes in women’s wombs, sometimes exiting
to secure food for their human host. Again, it would be too simple to dismiss the food
—> feces transformation as a structuralist mystification. Or, at another extreme, it
would be incorrect to insist on a psychoanalytic interpretation of the serpent, whereby
it signified only the phallus. The serpent stands for more than one physical attribute. It
is primary in that it presents an image of the human body and its alimentation stripped
of multiple appendages and superfluous flesh. Some of the myths put us inside the
serpent; but in an almost literal sense, it is inside us: the serpent is the guts of our
being. Within the persona of the thinking subject, concealed from the social roles and
cultural principles that make the subject human, lies a meaningless yet functioning
physicality.
[When another speaks] one must believe that there was someone over
there. But where? Not in that overstrained voice, not in that face lined
like any well-worn object. Certainly not behind that setup: I know quite
well that back there there is only “darkness crammed with organs.”
(Merleau-Ponty 1973: 133-134; emphasis in the original)
But that crammed darkness cannot be dismissed. The serpent appears in myth
partly so that we might know and represent our own organic darkness.
“The Serpent’s Children” is simply one instance of a vast scheme of mythic
thought which metaphorizes sexuality and reproduction. While worms and spontaneous
generation represent an asocial and pre-cultural chaos that holds no place for the
distinctively human principles of kinship and ethnicity, the serpent represents a
tentative step or approximation toward a cultural order in which sexuality and
mortality prevail. The serpent at once affirms and denies the primordial continuity,
for it is complete in itself and yet possesses differentiated body parts — a head and a
tail, a face and an ass. The serpent’s appearance in the void signifies the end of a
changeless state and the beginning of a world dominated henceforth by
transformational processes. The serpent is hermaphroditic, but it is also sexual and
generative. Its appearance in the Arawak myth means that reproductive forces must
either be controlled — by cultural principles — or rottenness and alienation will
prevail. “The Serpent’s Children” provides vivid imagery of the latter eventuality:
the Carib are both the consequence of a degenerated social order (a wanton living with
19
her camudi lover in the forest) and its continuation (the Carib still reside in the forest,
keep to themselves, and form alarmingly close conjugal unions).
The camudi addresses Arawak sensibilities at the most basic level, where their
thought confronts the elemental dilemma of being a changeless, incestuous isolate or
a by-product, a function of ongoing interaction with the once feared and now scorned
enemy. The impossible choice is presented with stark clarity: permit the chaotic
generativity of the camudi to disrupt the matrilineal order and issue in a world of
rottenness and randomness, or admit that Arawak sexuality is excited by Carib
savagery and normlessness. The camudi, as a chthonic being that couples with a woman
to produce anomalous offspring, bridges the physical and conceptual gap between
primordial continuity and historical conflict — between man and woman, Arawak and
Carib, riverian village and forest camp. Into a world dominated by secure authority
and an established identity, the camudi brings rebellion and love.13
Cultural genesis proceeds alongside the genesis of the human body and its
physiological processes. The utility of the serpent in symbolization consists of its
ability to confound discontinuities necessarily perceived as problems in our efforts to
fix notions of group and personal identity. Establishing a conceptual world of
symbolized types (whether “a culture” or “a person”) first requires a confrontation
with questions directed at the existence of types: What was it like when there were no
differences? When men and women were alike? When We were alone and there was
no Other? When people were not born but simply appeared? When the face and the
ass, eating and defecating, were the same? Again, despite their fascination with
dichotomy, Lévi-Strauss and other structuralists have given little attention to human
physiology as a source of the contradictions they find at the root of culture, perhaps
declining to intrude on what they perceived as the territory of psychology. One
cannot attribute similar reservations to myth-making humanity, however, and on
reflection it seems inconceivable that a formative intelligence would proceed with the
classification of animal and plant species without first directing its symbolizing
abilities toward its own bodily processes.
The task of returning the human body to the science of humanity has fallen,
rather predictably, to a poet. In a profound work ignored by anthropologists, Octavio
Paz (1974) argues that the most concrete aspects of human existence are meshed with
the most abstract; that the human face and ass constitute the basic metaphors for the
religious duality of body and spirit or, as he further generalizes, body and non-body.
There is a woodcut by Posada that shows a figure in a circus — a dwarf
seen from the back, but with his face turned toward the spectator, and
shown with another face down by his buttocks. Quevedo is no less
explicit, and one of his juvenile works bears the title . . . Graces and
20
Disgraces of the Eye of the Ass. It is a long comparison between an ass
and a face. (Paz 1974:3)
The fact that sex has no face is the source of all the metaphors that I
have mentioned, and also the source of our unhappiness. The sex
organs and the face are separated, one below and one above; moreover,
the former are hidden by clothes and the latter is uncovered. . . . This
separation, which has made us human beings, condemns us to labor, to
history, and to the construction of tombs. It also condemns us to invent
metaphors to do away with this separation. The sex organs and all their
images — from the most complex down to jokes in a barroom — remind
us that there was a time when our face was down close to the ground and
to our genitals. There were no individuals and all human creatures were
a part of the whole. The face finds this memory unbearable, and
therefore it laughs — or vomits . (Paz 1974:20)
Two important ideas spring from this lucid presentation. The first directs our
attention to the symbolism of the human body. The body is both the ultimate ritual
and the ultimate mythic object. Society acts upon it in life crisis rituals to produce
irreversible status change in the individual and lasting redefinition of the group. And
through myth human thought reflects on the body to create elementary representations
of humanness. The body and its processes are not a pre-symbolic order on which
cultural systems were once grafted; it is itself called into being through representations
that distinguish cultural from non-cultural beings. The second idea, which Paz does
not develop and which Lévi-Strauss leaves aside, is that the first objects of thought
leading to mythic representation are not “objects” at all, but processes — series of
events whose only reality is their changefulness. Living, dying, copulating, giving
birth, eating, defecating, vomiting are not so much terms of binary oppositions as
transformations of experience that can be realized only through being named. It is the
mysterious transition from one state to another that impels the mind to formulate
symbols and thereby bring into being a conceptual order that did not exist
previously. What Paz (1974: 35-36) refers to as the “dialogue between oscillation
and immobility” is indeed “what gives a culture life and life form,” for it is the
ability to conceptualize and communicate change, process, or transformation that
distinguishes elementary human thought as embodied in myth from simple objectnaming sign systems. And the body continually engineers transformations: food is
eaten, excreted, vomited; the sexual organs swell, convulse, and grow slack; the
vulva disgorges a child. These operations on the world of matter and experience
carry no “natural” signification, they are not ostensively defined objects but
21
symbolized becomings. Only through these operations does the thinking subject
attain conceptual knowledge of the dimensions and potential of its body.
“The Serpent’s Children” accounts for the origin of two kinds of differences.
First, in its story or plot it describes the origin of cultural differences — the Arawak
primal family is split by conflict and the Carib originate as a result. Second, through
its metaphoric imagery the myth confronts the problems of sexual identity and
reproduction. The discreteness of face and ass, phallus and vagina, is established by
fixing on an image, the serpent, which combines primordial oneness and cultural
separateness. Personal and cultural identity are primary, interrelated features of a
cultural system and were necessarily major accomplishments of protocultural systems
of signification, the ever-so permeable boundaries erected by the very first human
minds. The Arawak myth intermeshes the two themes, utilizing the imagery of
sexual identity to develop a theory of cultural genesis.
The Presence of the Native and the Idea of Culture
Having observed how myth articulates cultural identity and, in a sense,
translated a particular myth into the language of cultural analysis, I return now to the
task proposed at the beginning of the article: to use myth as a critique of
anthropological theory. “The Serpent’s Children” may be read as an attempt to
resolve the distinctive features of what anthropologists refer to as “a culture.” In this
sense the text of the myth is more than an object of analysis; it is a methodological
program, a piece of cultural analysis itself. “Doing myth” and “doing anthropology”
are thus intimately related, for in taking up the study of culture as an abstraction,
anthropologists involve themselves in the very processes through which human groups
articulate their identity. Moreover, I would argue that myth can offer a valuable
lesson to anthropological theory, since it is generally more willing to entertain the
possibility that cultural identity is not concretely fixed. In “The Serpent’s Children”
Arawak and Carib identities are parts of a dialectical argument. They are filled with
mutual tension and contradiction, and hence maintain one another to the extent that
they can only be separated artificially.
The text to be critiqued is Malinowski’s (1948) well-known essay, “Myth in
Primitive Psychology.” My reasons for this selection are twofold. First,
Malinowski’s essay is characteristic of much more than an outmoded functionalist
approach to culture. I will argue that it accurately reflects a way of thinking about
culture that is very much alive in contemporary debate. Second, the essay purports to
explain Trobriand origin myths, and so its arguments could easily be extended to
cover “The Serpent’s Children.” I will demonstrate, however, that the Arawak myth
itself is a better interpreter of Trobriand myth than are the functional and historicist
explanations Malinowski offers. The two myth complexes, quite independent of their
22
presumed social utility, will be shown to operate as expressions of a unitary semiotic
of cultural genesis.
My critique of “Myth in Primitive Psychology” has been strongly influenced
by works of Barthes (1974) and Derrida (1967,1972). Very briefly, the two literary
semioticians appear to agree that modern literature is in the process of
“deconstructing” language by breaking down conventional rules of prose style.
While a writer of the last century would attempt to organize description in an orderly,
flowing discourse, a contemporary writer aims to interrupt or subvert that progression
in order to call the reader’s attention to the presumptions of orderliness he makes
while reading. This, at least, is the general point Barthes makes in his systematic
exegesis or “deconstruction” of Balzac’s story, Sarrasine. Barthes maintains that the
story exemplifies a “readerly” prose neatly molded to the reader’s preconceived view
of the world. In deconstructing Sarrasine, Barthes produces a “writerly” text which
continually brings the reader’s attention to Balzac’s techniques for establishing and
reinforcing an everyday reality.
I propose a modest exercise of this kind with Malinowski’s essay, for reasons
that are traceable to Derrida as much as to Barthes. Derrida (1967) claims that
Western thought rests on what he calls “logocentrism” or the “metaphysics of
presence,” the unquestioned doctrine that entities exist at one place and time and
thereby maintain their being. He challenges that grand assumption, arguing that the
concept of difference (or, more exactly, the two concepts of difference and
differance)14 breaks down the seemingly straightforward distinction of
presence/absence. Objects, people, and meanings are not simply there; they derive
their entire significance from sets of relationships linking them with other objects,
other people, other meanings.
To the traditional philosophical topics which Derrida discusses in connection
with the metaphysics of presence, I want to add the concept of culture. Early in the
analysis of “The Serpent’s Children” I argued that “Arawak” and “Carib” are not
received identities, but are elements of a dialectical system. Because the opposition
Arawak / Carib cannot be dissolved without distorting the meaning of being Arawak
or Carib, it follows that the individual terms operate within that opposition as what I
termed virtual cultures. People construct virtual cultures of “Arawak” and “Carib”
and in the process create meaning in social situations. Virtual cultures are
intersystems or, again, after Kristeva (1969), intertexts: constructions that depend for
their meaning on other constructions and that create reflexively the network of
signification which binds together all the elements. The meaning or nature of a
culture or a literary text is the use to which it is put in other, seemingly extraneous,
cultures or texts.15 This way of thinking about culture is quite different from the
usual development of the idea in anthropological theory, where the metaphysics of
23
presence is as active today as it was during Malinowski’s time. For that reason, a
“deconstruction” of Malinowski’s text opens a path to a general rethinking of the
concept of culture.
Questioning the assumptions of culture theory is simply a means of asking
what culture is all about. At the risk of some simplification, I think it is fair to say
that anthropologists tend to regard cultures as constituted objects of study. Although
the idea of a culture as an integrated system has received a bad press from several
decades of social change studies, it is still probably true that, even if we doubt it is
integrated, we continue to believe it is bounded. A culture may not be harmonious,
but it is still a whole. That is the perspective I want to question here: Are cultures
wholes? Or, phrased in the operational terms of ethnography, what does it mean when
a fieldworker says that he has gone off to study a particular culture? As a pioneer of
the ethnographic tradition and a master of the technique, Malinowski has probably
done more than any other anthropologist to give form to our operational definition
of culture.
In “Myth in Primitive Psychology,” as in all his better works, Malinowski
evades the inconvenient complications of theory by replacing it with method. The
ethnographic technique itself becomes a device for generating correct interpretations
of native life, while theoretical musings are exposed for the unproductive activities they
are, the idle work of armchair thinkers. The sweat and toil of fieldwork, the close
attention to minutiae of community life, the intimacy or supposed int imacy of the
ethnographer and his people, are combined to render the native as a Derridaian
presence — an unimpeachable, concrete source of inspiration and truth that sets
anthropology apart from other, bookish disciplines. Consider, for example, how
Malinowski (1948: 99-100) evokes this image of the native’s presence as
foregrounding to his essay.
If I have conveyed an impression of chaos and confusion [among
theorists], if I have inspired a sinking feeling towards the incredible
mythological controversy with all the dust and din which it raises, I
have achieved exactly what I wanted. For I shall invite my readers to
step outside the closed study of the theorist into the open air of the
anthropological field, and to follow me in my mental flight back to the
years which I spent among a Melanesian tribe of New Guinea. There,
paddling on the lagoon, watching the natives under the blazing sun at
their garden work, following them through the patches of jungle, and
on the winding beaches and reefs, we shall learn about their life. And
again, observing their ceremonies in the cool of the afternoon or in the
24
shadows of the evening, sharing their meals round their fires, we shall
be able to listen to their stories.
The anthropological prose of one generation is the tourist literature of the
next. Malinowski renounces theory in favor of a constituted empirical reality, only
failing to see the enormous contradiction he creates in the process. The vitality of the
native issues from his exotic status; his deeds are the final authority because he as a
person is cut off, excluded from the modern world. Malinowski can invoke native
experience only by distancing himself and all modernity from the world in which
that experience has meaning. The concept of the native as employed by Malinowski
and built into the whole fieldwork procedure is an ideal distancing device: the more
verisimilitude the alien being acquires, the further it recedes from our own lives and
concerns.
Malinowski’s evocation of the native’s presence is perfectly comprehensible
when viewed from the perspective of semiotics. More than any other discipline
anthropology is committed to the description and analysis of human differences. We
journey to the ends of the earth to find those who are most different from ourselves,
then we settle down to the interminable task of making their lives intelligible. By
insisting on the native’s presence, Malinowski reveals his own tendency to engage in
the conceptual processes that semiotics regards as distinctive of any cultural text: a
fascination with boundaries and a compulsion to give form to the Other. To
paraphrase Lévi-Strauss’s remark about barbarians, a native is someone who believes in
natives. With his supreme belief in natives, Malinowski makes his life and work ideal
subjects for an emerging anthropological semiotics. 16 An intensive analysis of his
works should disclose how Trobriand culture is constituted through the intrusive
operations of the anthropologist. Old theories don’t die, they just become new data.
The textual analysis of classical works makes sense for anthropology only if it is
possible to establish an integral connection between them and the cultural processes
they attempt to describe. Rather than emphasize the importance of textual
interpretation per se, I want to argue that what anthropologists like Malinowski write
is important because it is a specific development of a general human proclivity.
Anthropology has taken the direction it has because it is conducted by humans upon
humans, and therefore is itself a part of the entity it seeks to describe.
“Myth in Primitive Psychology” is an intriguing and complex essay, not
merely a functionalist anachronism to be rejected out of hand. Malinowski’s classic
is a curious mixture of the vital and moribund. While it contains the often criticized
view that myth “serves principally to establish a sociological charter, or a
retrospective moral pattern of behavior” (Malinowski 1948: 144), the essay also offers
the surprisingly contemporary exhortation to put aside the myth as text in favor of “the
25
functional, cultural, and pragmatic aspect of any native tale [which] is manifested as
much in its enactment, embodiment, and contextual relations as in the text” (1948:
111). Reinforcing the latter line of argument, it is possible to interpret Malinowski’s
(1948: 100) famous dictum — ”Myth as it exists in a savage community, that is, in its
living primitive form, is not merely a story told but a reality lived” — as a prophetic
call for the kind of performance-oriented studies now being conducted (see, e.g.,
Bauman 1975 and Hymes 1975).
Yet Malinowski’s tendency to describe myth as a living force must be viewed
in the context of his insistence on using the Native as a distancing device, as a
spokesman of some remote and primitive past. Myth is a “reality lived” only because
the native who lives it is impossibly distant from modern life and thought. Witness
the following disclaimer, set forth a few lines after the eulogy to living myth.
It is necessary to go back to primitive mythology in order to
learn the secret of its life in the study of a myth which is still alive —
before, mummified in priestly wisdom, it has been enshrined in the indestructible but lifeless repository of dead religions (Malinowski
1948: 101).
Note the persistent distancing devices: “go back”; “still alive”; “before”;
“mummified”; “has been enshrined.” Primitive mythology and modern religion
belong to separate conceptual orders, so that the scientific investigator cannot reason
within the context of contemporary thought — cannot approach the present as myth —
but must look outside himself, whereupon he discovers primitive man. Ethnography
masquerades as theory. But Malinowski nowhere explains why a myth handed down
through uncounted generations of narrators should be any more “lived” than a
religious text such as (to choose pertinent examples) the Book of Genesis or the
Pyramid Texts. Even at the time Malinowski worked among them, the Trobrianders’
myths may well have been as out of touch with their everyday lives as the origin
stories of Western religions are with the lives of urbanite North Americans and
Europeans.
The closer one reads the essay, the more apparent it becomes that Malinowski
separates primitive and modern, myth and science, prehistory and history for reasons
that are not manifest in the Trobriand material he examines. He calls the Native into
presence by performing a radical operation of cultural genesis himself, saying, in
effect, that the world of humanity is divided into (historically) interconnected but
separate and sealed-off types of people. “Primitive” vs. “modern,” and “Carib” vs.
“Arawak,” are both sets of distinctions which arise from the fundamentally human
concern to formulate principles of difference in a symbol system. Establishing the
26
native’s presence is done with textual or ideological constructions, which then become
the “raw data” of anthropological semiotics.
Between Malinowski’s cultural genesis and that of the Arawak myth, however,
there is the crucial difference that the former is unwilling to dwell on a world of
primordial continuity or to confront the possibility that myth and the modern
discipline of history may be fundamentally alike. Yet “The Serpent’s Children” takes
up the theme of an original chaos of random generativity and reasons from there to
the formation of distinct social groups, admitting in the process that those distinct
groups possess an identical substance. While the Arawak myth grapples with
elemental dilemmas about the association of incest and cultural distinctiveness,
Malinowski similarly wrestles with theoretical dilemmas in establishing the
discreteness of a Trobriand cultural system. Characteristic of this dilemma is his
attempt to hold onto both “retrospective” and “performative” interpretations of
myth; to claim that myth is both charter, which can be understood by both
ethnographer and native, and experience, of which the native has privileged
knowledge. Trobriand origin myths are interconnected, but their meaningfulness can
be discovered only through direct observation of everyday life: “Each of them
[origin myths] is only a part. . . of a much bigger story, which cannot be read except
from native life” (Malinowski 1948: 116). The dilemma here is to assert that myth is
embedded in an experience that has already been defined as qualitatively different
from that of the mythologist.
Malinowski involves himself in contradictions much like those that inspire the
myths he attempts to explain, with the result that he also finds a mythic resolution.
One solution to the dialectic of kinship and ethnicity is to hypothesize a world
populated through spontaneous generation. Literally, things just happen — people
sprout out of the ground and there they are. Malinowski implicitly adopts this line of
argument (and thereby a metaphysics of presence) by claiming that what a theory of
myth should explain — the fundamental principles of cultural organization — is
already somehow given, a preordained or received truth.
It [the story in origin myth] conveys, expresses, and strengthens the
fundamental fact of the local unity and of the kinship unity of the group
of people descendent from a common ancestress. Combined with the
conviction that only common descent and emergence from the soil give
full rights to it, the story of origin literally contains the legal charter
of the people. (Malinowski 1948:116)
Trobriand clans emerge from the earth, as apparently does Malinowski’s
“fundamental fact” of descent and residential solidarity. Yet that is precisely the
27
fundamental puzzle, problem, or dilemma that is articulated and partially resolved in
myth: Where did people come from? How did an original uniformity give rise to
contemporary diversity? Culture does not begin with established principles of descent
and alliance, since those are among the products of a cultural or symbolic system.
Symbolization processes operate on social behavior to produce conceptualizations of
group autonomy and principles of recruitment. Those are then arranged in an
(inevitably frustrated) effort to achieve consistency.
In Malinowski’s tribute to the native’s presence, myth is not the creative
product of an intelligence striving to give form to itself, but a passive statement of how
things are. One explains myth by accounting for the historical and sociological
conditions that produced it. This is how Malinowski handles the Trobriand myth of
clan origin. The four clans are descended from four chthonic beings that emerged
from the underworld near the village of Laba’i. The first and last of those beings,
Iguana and what is variously reported as Crocodile, Snake, or Opossum, are
associated with subclans of low rank, and Malinowski (1948: 122-123) dismisses them
in two paragraphs, preferring to concentrate on the intermediate Dog and Pig ancestors
and clans that are prominent in political and ceremonial organization. In disregarding
portions of the origin myth he finds sociologically unimportant, Malinowski
abandons the opportunity to explore the internal cultural logic of the myth. Yet the
analysis of “The Serpent’s Children” immediately raises the interesting question of the
prominence of reptilian imagery in the Trobriand account, in which the cultural order
of Dog and Pig is bracketed or encompassed by the chaotic generativity of reptilian
figures. The maxim about myth being a “reality lived” here works to suppress the
content of a principal myth: if Iguana and Crocodile/Snake/Opossum clans are not
prominent in Trobriand daily life, then they can safely be disregarded in an analysis of
Trobriand myth.
Myth follows along or drags behind independently constituted sources of
meaning in Malinowski’s scheme. One such source is history. Cultural diversity, the
fundamental principle of human difference, is explained by an appeal to an
objectifiable past that involved the migration of different “cultures.”
When we come to the historical interpretation of these myths a
fundamental question meets us at the outset: must we regard the
subclans which figure in legend and myth as representing merely the
local branches of a homogeneous culture, or can we ascribe to them a
more ambitious significance and regard them as standing for
representatives of various cultures, that is, as units of different
migration waves. If the first alternative is accepted then all the myths,
historical data, and sociological facts refer simply to small internal
28
movements and changes, and there is nothing to be added to them except
what we have said.
In support of the more ambitious hypothesis, however, it might be
urged that the main legend of emergence places the origins of the four
clans in a very suggestive spot. Laba’i lies on the northwestern beach,
the only place open to sailors who would have come from the
direction of the prevailing monsoon winds. (Malinowski 1948: 123)
This appeal to separate origins simply postpones facing the crucial
questions: If Trobriand myth and cultural differentiation are to be explained by the
migration of “representatives of various cultures,” then what is to explain the
distinctive traditions and social organizations of those groups? How did they originally
acquire a presence? Where and how did culture itself originate? How is the problem of
cultural genesis even handled in myth? Malinowski does not raise these questions
because, when forced to consider problematic and conflicting aspects of Trobriand
culture, he posits other, earlier “cultures” that were already formed and in a position
to influence through diffusion a formative Trobriand culture. An ideology of ranked
subclans is not a product of the dynamics of a cultural system, but a simple, physical
accretion of “migration waves.” For Malinowski, culture is an established entity, a
named thing, a presence that can be described but not questioned. By resorting to a
historical explanation, he effectively closes off the possibility of developing a
semiotic analysis of how people construct notions of cultural identity. History, the
textual material on the cultural origins of scientific humanity, receives a privileged
place with respect to myth, which is seen as the product of an intrinsically different,
pre-scientific humanity. But if myth is in the service of history, what has constituted
history? Malinowski as theoretician thus becomes Malinowski as ethnographic
subject, for his uncritical attitude prevents his asking this basic question of himself and
of the anthropological perspective from which he writes.
The consequences of his metaphysics of presence may be seen in his actual
treatment of the Trobriand corpus. Apart from its retrospective function, what does
the telling of myth accomplish? How are various mythic themes fitted together? How
does myth work? Again, the masterful ethnographer is unable to incorporate his
concrete accounts into a convincing theoretical framework. “Myth in Primitive
Psychology” approaches its subject in catalogue fashion: there are myths of origin;
myths of death and rejuvenation; and myths of magic. One purpose of myth is to
rationalize unpleasant aspects of life, such as decrepitude, disease, and death
(Malinowski 1948: 136), by trivializing their cause (immortality is lost through a silly
accident). Ultimately, myth merely repeats what is already known.
29
The subjects developed in these myths are clear enough in themselves;
there is no need to “explain” them, and the myth does not even partially
perform this function (1948: 137).
The function of myth, briefly, is to strengthen tradition and endow it
with a greater value and prestige by tracing it back to a higher, better,
more supernatural reality of initial events (1948: 146).
Myth adds nothing, explains nothing, changes nothing. Tradition, or cultural
identity, is already in place when myth appears, an ornamental addition to a symbolic
repertoire acquired by some undisclosed means. In sharp contrast to this view,
anthropological semiotics problematizes “tradition” and deconstructs the native’s
presence. It regards myth as identifying and attempting to resolve elemental dilemmas
encountered by the (proto)human mind on its way to creating a cultural and personal
reality. Themes in myth are consequently related through their general orientation
to the origin of culture and the nature of the human body, so that they compose a
significative complex rather than a catalogue.
A Semiotic of Cultural Genesis
It is useful to examine Trobriand myth from the semiotic perspective developed
here and to compare it with themes already identified in “The Serpent’s Children.”
We have seen that Malinowski accounts for the Trobriand origin myth by referring to
possible migrations at a formative stage in Trobriand cultural evolution. He does not,
however, identify the logical succession that transforms existence from an unknowable
sameness to contemporary, known differentiation. The ancestors originally dwelled
underground, where they carried on something akin to a conventional social life.
After the emergence of the four clan ancestors, brother-sister pairs emerged from the
major “holes” to found existing subclans. At that time people were immortal. Life on
earth brought conflict over rank and loss of immortality, both associated with the
break between chthonic and terrestrial worlds (status is traced to events that occurred
immediately after emergence and loss of immortality to a woman’s refusal to shed her
skin like the “creatures of the below”).
“The Serpent’s Children,” while it does not account for the appearance of the
Arawak on earth, is strikingly like the Trobriand origin tale in its organization of
ideas about human reproduction, descent, and alliance. At the beginning of the
story the primal family is already in place, living as a self-contained whole. The
disobedient daughter’s union with the camudi, a chthonic creature, results in its being
chopped to pieces by her brothers. A pair of worms appear in the rotting flesh of the
serpent, which become the original Carib brother-sister pair. The appearance of the
30
Carib signals the beginning of an era of intergroup marriage and genocidal warfare.
Both myths begin with an attractive fiction: once life was just as it is now, only there
was no conflict and death. But this harmonious version of primal culture cannot
account for contemporary life, in which difference and change are manifest. The two
eras thus embody an awesome disjunction; a revolutionary change had to occur in
passing from one to the other. In both Trobriand and Arawak accounts, that change
consists in the transition from a primordial continuity based on asexual reproduction
to a contemporary discontinuity based on sexual reproduction (see Figure 2). The
contrast between protoculture and culture is nothing less than the contrast between
identity and difference. Cultural genesis brings into being a heterogeneous order,
which yet retains something of a preceding homogeneity. The elemental dilemma that
Trobriand and Arawak myth confront is how to represent this simultaneous
conjunction and disjunction: a kinship-based We is impregnated by an ethnicitybased Other; descent and co-residence require alliance and the admission of strangers
into the group.
In both cases myth provides detailed imagery to represent the break between
continuity and discontinuity. I have argued that the Arawak myth accomplishes this
by utilizing the image of the serpent as a presentational symbol which collapses
differences between life and death, male and female, food and excrement. The entire
account of Carib spontaneous generation and persistent incest intermeshes a world of
intergroup difference and exchange with a world of hermetically sealed, unique, and
(by definition) incestuous groups. Is there a comparable device in Trobriand myth?
Here it is intriguing that Trobriand eschatology and magical beliefs assign a
prominent place to the serpent or reptile. The social order is bracketed by the
chthonic generativity of the first ancestor. Iguana, and the last, Crocodile / Snake /
31
Opossum. The shades of the dead return to the underworld through a sacred hole on
the island of Tuma (Malinowski 1948: 127), where they live immortally by shedding
their skins like snakes. Malignant spirits (tauva’u), which originated the practice of
witchcraft, assume the form of reptiles and occasionally mate with female witches
(1948: 131-132).
All these reptilian images lie at the extremities of culture; none figures directly
in an account of cultural genesis. Does Trobriand myth furnish a metaphor to explain
the fundamental break between a world of sameness and one of difference? I want to
suggest that the myth of the origin of love magic, which Malinowski only mentions in
passing,17 fulfills that vital role. Furthermore, since it deals directly with the origin of
difference and change, it can be expected to be a transformational variant of the
Arawak myth. Malinowski’s (1948: 142) summary suffices to identify most points of
comparison between the two myths:
All sexual attraction and all power of seduction are believed to reside
in the magic of love. This magic the natives regard as founded in a
dramatic occurrence of the past, told in a strange, tragic myth of
brother and sister incest. . . . The two young people lived in a village
with their mother, and by an accident the girl inhaled a strong love
decoction, prepared by her brother for someone else. Mad with
passion, she chased him and seduced him on a lonely beach.
Overcome by shame and remorse, they forsook food and drink, and
died together in a grotto. An aromatic herb grew through their inlaced
skeletons, and this herb forms the most powerful ingredient in the
substances compounded together and used in love magic.
The brother and sister pair here carry the same signification as the serpent in the
Arawak myth: both destroy the tension produced by an impossible closeness and
thereby set in motion a series of events leading to contemporary, differentiated social
organization.
Trobriand and Arawak accounts of cultural genesis correspond, not because of
their similarities, but because of their differences (Lévi-Strauss 1963b: 77). Both
formulate theories of the disjunction or break between protoculture and culture, but
each begins and ends at radically different points. Figure 3 identifies the substance
and progression of this dual transformational series. Essentially, the Trobriand myth
explains that kinship ties must be repudiated for normal society, based on sexual love,
to exist. It begins by portraying a world in which kinship is everything; the
protocultural order of immortal brother and sister pairs who emerged from the sacred
holes. Once brother and sister lose their immortality, incest is the unavoidable
32
consequence if the group is to be perpetuated. Incest is itself a compromise between
asexual and sexual reproduction, for it is a sexual act which merely replicates an
original substance. This something-from-nothing world is an impossibility; it is
overripe and “rots.” The intertwined skeletons of brother and sister are an
androgynous image as effective as that of the serpent. From this androgynous
remainder, the plant used in love magic grows; it is collected and prepared by a man
who has dreamed of the episode and it becomes synonymous with love, or desire for
the Other. The Arawak myth proposes just the opposite beginning and end. A
daughter repudiates her kinship ties and begins an affair with an impossibly alien
being. Her brothers find the relationship loathsome and attack and kill the lover. The
use of plants in curing magic originates when the woman places bits of herbs on her
lover’s mutilated remains. Performing this magic, which is employed when an enemy
has brought sickness, results in the birth of an enemy — the Carib. The appearance of
the Carib signals the beginning of intergroup hostilities. An impossible intergroup
alliance (woman and serpent) results in the origin of war.
The thesis of this essay, that cultural identity or the notion of group is a
creative synthesis of conflicting principles of kinship and ethnicity, can now be
demonstrated using the transformations identified in Trobriand and Arawak myth (see
Figure 4). The initial state in the Trobriand myth reveals the consequences of
overemphasizing kinship: sibling ties become the sole basis for social / sexual
33
relationships. The initial state in the Arawak myth represents an overemphasis of
ethnicity: sibling ties are repudiated to the extent that an alliance is formed with a
monstrous alien. Both initial states decay, resulting in reversed final states. In the
Trobriand myth the origin of love magic affirms the necessity of forming alliances
with non-kin. In the Arawak myth the appearance of the Carib signals the beginning
of continuous intergroup aggression. Sexual love and war, like incest and bestiality,
are opposites that bear an uncommon resemblance to one another. Among the
Trobrianders, love is acted out against a background of complex sentiments of clan
rank and prerogative; the magic of love exists to overcome the veiled aggression of
clan and subclan rivalry. For the Arawak, as “The Serpent’s Children” makes clear,
bitter enemies may also be fantasized sexual partners. Intergroup conflict occurs in
conjunction with intergroup exchange of spouses. The conclusion of one myth leads
to the introduction of the other. The threat of intergroup aggression necessitates an
ideology of intragroup solidarity, which has its logical extreme in incest. The
fulfillment of sexual love requires the formation of intergroup alliances, which has its
logical extreme in bestiality. Being Arawak or being Trobriand thus involves the play
of oscillating polarities — a dialectic of kinship and ethnicity — and it is only through
this dynamism that the concept of “culture” or “group” becomes meaningful.
34
Concluding Remarks
Accepting even portions of the above interpretation of Arawak and Trobriand
myth requires more than a thorough overhaul of Malinowski’s theory of myth. I have
argued that it is not just a particular theory — some worn-out version of functionalism
— on trial here as much as it is a general perspective characteristic of most
anthropological writing. That perspective consists of viewing the object of
ethnographic research — the culture of a particular social group — as an empirically
given fact. I have claimed that this perspective, if commonsense, is not as sound as it
appears, and I have suggested that a semiotic model be developed that regards culture
as a continuous synthesis of ideas, a creative process. Cultural genesis as set forth in
origin myths is thus not a kind of rationalization for existing social ties and patterns of
conduct, but a dialectic that attempts to resolve elemental dilemmas in the human
condition. The principal dilemma centers on the notion of “group”: How is it that
one belongs to a distinctive social unit which yet exists alongside of and intermarries
with other such units? Kinship and ethnicity are parts of the conceptual foundation of
culture, and the fact that those principles cannot be reconciled in any determinate
fashion means that culture itself is not a discrete, bounded entity.
The perspective that views culture as received fact derives from a metaphysics
of presence. It is an ostensive theory of culture, while the semiotic model I have
argued for here is a representational theory. As uncritical assumption, the ostensive
theory is as old as human thought, for the Trobrianders and Arawak no less than
Malinowski seek to invest social groups with discrete, bounded identities and thus
avoid the contradiction and ambivalence present in their myths and theories of myth.
It was Durkheim (1961 [1912], 1964 [1895]) who first developed the ostensive
perspective on culture into a theory of culture. The epistemological status of cultural
phenomena is a prominent issue in his work and unites the otherwise dissimilar Rules
and Elementary Forms as moods of a single argument. In the former he proposes a
science of society based on the positivistic notion that “social facts are things.”
Primitive Classification and Elementary Forms address the complexities that issue
from this seemingly clear-cut manifesto. If social facts are things, what are the ideas
that people have about things — such as categories of time, space, number, causation?
Moreover, if a society is a collection of individual thing-like facts, is the society itself
a thing? This quandary led Durkheim to his famous observation that religion
developed from primitive man’s attempt to formulate symbolic expressions of his
35
group membership; it provided a means of pointing at society. This is a long way
from the positivistic formulations of Rules, but the theory presented in Elementary
Forms is still an ostensive one. Human thought gives conceptual form to an entity
that exists already; it names a thing. And because Durkheim incorporated the
problem of conceptualization or symbolization in an impressive theoretical
framework, it has seemed natural for later anthropologists to get on with the business
of studying how people give form to that thing called “group” or “culture.”18
The Durkheimian view of a pre-constituted group whose members set out in
search of symbols of their group-ness is dismayingly like Augustine’s (1948 [circa
389] ) theory of meaning, according to which conceptualization follows on the
perception of a well-defined thing.19 Both theories are inadequate to explain why, in
the first case, diffused networks of social behaviors should lead to the formation of a
concept of a distinct, bounded group; or why, in the second case, a welter of sense
data should inspire a process of naming things. Augustine’s ostensive theory of
language and its successors have been repeatedly and, I think, successfully challenged
(see, for example, Silverstein 1976), but less headway has been made in rejecting an
ostensive theory of culture, which insists on viewing some type of social formation —
whether it be called “society,” “group,” “class,” etc. — as already in place and the
object of symbols generated post hoc around it. From Durkheim through Malinowski
and Marx, and even into the present when Cohen (1974) attempts to reconcile
symbolism and power by positing a “dialectic” which faithfully produces “symbols”
that operate as “strategies” for “interest groups” sprung full-blown from some
undisclosed source of culture, anthropologists have avoided the fact that the
productions of their own ethnographic subjects treat cultural identity as problematic
and shot through with contradiction. A semiotic of culture must turn to the mythic
productions of societies (primitive and modern) to discover the conceptual processes
through which people attempt (and inevitably fail) to make life intelligible. In this
search, a prominent issue is the conceptualization of human origins, sexuality, and
reproduction.
36
Notes
Acknowledgments. An earlier version of this essay was presented in the
symposium, “Periphery as Center: Studies of Cultural Genesis in Interethnic
Systems,” at the 1978 annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association
in Los Angeles. Discussions with John Galaty, Philip Salzman, and Gregory Mahnke
have helped to transform disconnected passages into something resembling academic
prose, and I am grateful for their ideas and patience.
1
Which is the role Marxian analysis assigns to ideology.
2
Earlier writers labored under moral or religious sanctions that detracted from their
scholarship. Roth, writing for the official Bureau of American Ethnology, was
required to render key passages of “The Serpent’s Children” into Latin. Brett
(1868: 393) followed his own canons of censorship, leaving us in no doubt as to
who — scholar or native —was the better folklorist:
I have been obliged to omit certain portions of the above legend. They
contained nothing of importance to the real story, but were merely foul
excrescences, which had been gradually added by the grossness of their
minds. My informant would by no means suppress them when
requested, saying that the whole tale must be repeated just as it had
been handed down to him.
3
4
Note the inconsistency over the gender of the original Carib pair. Initially
described as warrior brothers, the pair turns out to be a brother and sister. When
questioned about this the narrator could provide no ready explanation — he
certainly was not prepared to retract a part of his story.
One might
speculate that here, as with the episode of Cain’s wife in Genesis, a genetrix is
introduced from nowhere to meet the requirements of the narrative.
MacCannell (1979) makes a strong case for an “ethnosemiotics” that examines
how we examine societies. But the point of my essay is rather different from that
developed in recent monographs which MacCannell cites as examples of an
emerging ethnosemiotic anthropology. Rabinow (1977) and Dumont (1978)
provide insightful accounts of how the description of a culture is put together
through the process of interaction between ethnographer and host. While these
studies are welcome modifications of the Malinowskian perspective, they do not
37
5
6
7
8
9
really address the crucial questions of how such a dialogue is possible or why it
matters. My argument here is that cultural genesis is not a process that
begins with the arrival of the ethnographer in the village; what natives tell him by
way of constituting their culture for his benefit (as well as their own) is simply a
variant or transformation of what they have been doing for themselves all along.
The problem of cultural identity is as old as human thought, and attempts to
resolve it — to establish definitive characteristics and boundaries for a group of
people — were made long before systems of writing or, especially, ethnographic
monographs appeared on the scene. A consistent ethnosemiotics cannot confine
itself to one new and relatively unimportant class of human encounters, but
must embrace the notion of an intersystem (Drummond 1980), a conceptualized
system of identity / difference relations which tie We to Other, as a fundamental
attribute of culture.
These ethnic stereotypes are discussed in some detail in Drummond 1977a.
A next-to-worthless concept, since it presumes that human groups once existed as
aboriginal isolates until, at one point in time, an alien culture intervened. That
group interaction and self-definition have always occurred is ignored by the
hopelessly topical, sociological concept of “acculturation.” Culture, I am arguing,
is acculturation.
The intersystemic nature of Arawak culture is not a historical oddity, but a general
characteristic of culture. Classic “peoples” in the anthropological literature are in
fact much like the Arawak, for their image of themselves derives from extensive
interaction — and interthinking — with others. Recent discussion concerning
whether the “Nuer are Dinka” (Glickman 1972; Southall 1976) highlights
the intersystemic basis of those two classic “primitive worlds.”
It is a striking fact that contemporary Arawak, Creolized as they are, still point out
connotations of the isayuhu image. Isayuhu is the human tapeworm, and Arawak
distinguish it from at least two other groups of worm — common earthworms and
parasitic roundworms. The tapeworm is both an intimate, bedeviling companion
and a seemingly spontaneously generated creature that can live in rotten matter
(i.e., human excrement)
Incidentally, Douglas’ (1966) well-known analysis of Hebraic food taboos is too
narrow in its explanation of why the serpent is an abomination: “Since the main
animal categories are defined by their typical movement, ‘swarming’ which is not
a mode of propulsion proper to any particular element, cuts across the basic
classification” (Douglas 1966: 56). This empirical argument, by singling out one
aspect of a classification system based on “mode of propulsion,” fails to consider
the multiple associations — the metaphoric power — of serpents. Because it is
simplistic and rational, Douglas’ proposed solution does not touch the level of real
38
10
11
12
13
14
15
loathing that snakes inspire in people. She might have considered the possibility
that snakes are not abominable because they “swarm,” but that “swarming” is
abominable because snakes do it. An author who communicates our intrinsic
antipathy for the snake much better than Douglas is Ambrose Bierce (1960).
The Rainbow Serpent of West Africa (MacCulloch 1951: 400) is remarkably like
that of Australia. Once again, it is impossible to overstate the importance of the
association of the serpent with human origins.
While Spiro correctly perceives that sexuality and aggression drop out of the
picture in Lévi-Strauss’s intricate analysis, he apparently misses the important
point that Lévi-Strauss is striving for a principled description of sensory
experience. Spiro (1979: 7) finds that his handling of the Bororo “Bird-nester”
myth reduces emotional events to “social structural relationships,” which seems an
unfounded criticism since Lévi-Strauss deduces that the myth is about the origin
of rain and of cooked food, not aspects of social organization.
Or at least used to be. Biotechnological developments such as artificial
insemination, “test-tube babies,” and cloning are rapidly creating a situation in
which humanity’s symbolic constitution of itself will have to be dramatically
reworked. Perhaps the most critical aspect of that reworking will be the loss of a
clear distinction between human reproduction and production, or the subject and
object of culture. Mahnke (1981) advances these ideas in an original analysis
of’the most radical biotechnological artifact — the human clone.
A term oddly missing from anthropological writing, although Schneider (1968) and
Friedrich (1978) provide welcome exceptions.
Friedrich’s discussion of
Aphrodite is particularly helpful, since he brings together structuralist and
psychological approaches to myth. In claiming that “myth is basically about
emotion” (Friedrich 1978: 7), he strikes a fine balance between Lévi-Strauss and
Spiro, who are respectively too reluctant and too eager to relate emotion and myth.
The distinction, though elusive, holds great significance for anthropology as a
discipline which will fulfill itself only by becoming the science of différance. A
concise discussion of the concept is found in Derrida (1972).
My point about virtual cultures is not simply a literary conceit; far from
representing another capitulation by social science to French structuralist
mystification, the idea is closely tied to models developed in quantum
chromodynamics to explain the properties of quarks (Hooft 1980: 104-138,
particularly p. 135). It appears that elementary particles are not found in
isolation, but are always surrounded by clouds of “virtual particles.” The virtual
particles of quarks — virtual quarks, virtual antiquarks, and virtual gluons — are
responsible for the properties of quarks as observed in elementary particle
interactions. Of such exotic stuff are the “building blocks” of matter composed.
39
16
17
18
19
Correspondingly, the operation of virtual cultures is what makes possible that
complex of action and belief which we are accustomed to call “a culture.”
Again, what MacCannell (1979) calls “ethnosemiotics.”
The text of this myth is found in Malinowski (1960: 126-129).
Galaty (1979) provides an excellent critique of this trend in symbolic
anthropology which has extended from Durkheim to Douglas.
Augustine (1948 [circa 389]: 388) offers a classic argument for believing that the
world is an ordered universe of discrete things which impress themselves on our
passive consciousness and hence require names:
But when “caput” was repeated over and over, as I observed and
noticed when it was said, I found it to be the word of a thing which was
already well known to me by sight. Before I discovered this the word
was only a sound to me, and I learned that it is a sign when I found of
what thing it is a sign; which thing, indeed, I had learned, as I said
above, not through its signification but by the sight of it. Therefore
that the sign is learned after the thing is cognized is rather more the
case than that the thing itself is learned after the sign is given.
This is acceptable provided that one believes in a world of disembodied heads.
40
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