Abstract
The chapter explores what I deem a “tolerance for ambiguity” in the San’s world view and mindset, at its most fundamental level, of ontology, that is, of being, being-in-the-word and species identity. The discussion here revolves around two basic phenomenological questions, couched in epistemological and conceptual terms, as well as existential and moral ones: How do people whose cosmology posits human-animal relationality and connectedness in whose experience human identity at times merges with that of animals deal with the matter of monsters, the prototypal embodiment of which is held—by Westerners—to be a being that confounds ontological categories? And, how do they deal with what is perhaps the profoundest of existential issues for humans, the basic contradiction, conundrum and moral dilemma, over eating the flesh of animal-persons?
The Porcupine said: “People do not live with that man, he is alone; because people cannot hand him food, for his tongue is like fire. He burns people’s hands with it. You need not think that we can hand food to him, for we shall have to dodge away to the sheep opposite. The pots will be swallowed with the soup in it. Those sheep will be swallowed up in the same way, for yonder Man always does so. He does not often travel because he feels the weight of his stomach which is heavy. See, I, the Porcupine live with you, although he is my real father; because I think he might devour me”.
( Bleek 1923 : 35)
But he was not willing to let men kill game, therefore, he beat the things as he felt that he could not let man kill things. He therefore beat the game to frighten it. … As my grandfather !Xugen di told me, it was on account of “Chaser-of-Food’s” doing that we now have to lay in wait for anything as we must not let the things see us. For we used to handle the game. “Chaser-of-Food’s” doings are the reason we hide well waiting for anything we want. The things must not see us for they tremble whenever they think of the things “Chaser-of-Food” did to them. He still does these things and his beating reminds them of it. Thus they still have fear, by beating it has become instilled into them.
Diä!kwain (L.V. – 19: 573–77) (For full text and annotations see Guenther ( 1989 : 160–61) )
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Notes
- 1.
An abbreviation, perhaps, of “Mischling”, the German term for a hybrid?
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
The cited passages are from /Hanǂkasso’s account of //Kkhwai-hem’ visit to his daughter’s people (VII. – 22: 7812–16, 7906–56).
- 5.
Skotnes’s point was reiterated some years later by Neil Bennum—“transformation was not the exclusive province of the trancing healer”—in a discussion of two hallmarks of /Xam symbolic culture, “a perception of the liminal nature of things and a readiness to accept the possibility of transformation” (2004: 358).
- 6.
See Vol. I, Chaps. 5–7.
- 7.
- 8.
Direct translation: “animal killing scruple’cism”. The term was coined by the German psychoanalyst, ethologist and paleoanthropologist Rudolf Bilz. Qua psychoanalyst Bilz speculated that a man’s depression suffered over his wife’s miscarriage or his child’s serious illness may derive from primordial guilt over hunters’ killing of animals (Peters 2003: 62).
- 9.
This technique is elaborated extensively among Siberian hunters, such as the Yukaghirs (Willerslev 2007: 100–5).
- 10.
Albeit a guilt not generally shared by Western sport and trophy hunters, whose method of hunting—scoped rifle 300 yards distant from the quarry—obviates any sympathy encounter between hunter and prey, or up from the sky from helicopter. Killing the hunted game here is “an immediate pleasure, free of remorse or guilt … as the human killer can no more afford to be sorry for the game than a cat can for its intended victim” (Cartmill 1993: 299; see also Foster 2016: 154–60; Carmine 2010: 242–44; Gieser 2018). The references are a small sampling drawn from an extensive literature on Western hunting, from subsistence and trophy hunting, with rifle or modern, high-power bow and arrow, to “primitive hunting” with an aura of “neo-animist mysticism” (Carmine ibid.: 243), primarily by men but also by women, even feminist ones (Merskin 2010). For an overview of hunting in Western history see Cartmill (1993); for a multi-disciplinary anthology on contemporary Western hunting see Kowalsky (2010). The German hunter-anthropologist Thorsten Gieser maintains an active and informative website on his field of research (http://hunter-anthropologist.de).
- 11.
For a feminist deconstruction of “male phantasies” on the “erotics of hunting”—that is, its “complicated relationship” to the objectification and (dis)regard of women—written by a Western woman who is herself a hunter/ress see Debra Merskin’s “The New Artemis? Women Who Hunt” (2010).
- 12.
See Vol. I, Chap. 5.
- 13.
A publication of the full text, with annotative and exegetical commentary, is forthcoming.
- 14.
An identical rationalization is used by the Siberian Yukaghirs, who, as noted by Rane Willerslev, “have not found an absolute solution to the moral dilemma posed by killing and eating prey. Rather, what makes animals edible from their viewpoint is the fact that, although they are seen to have their own minds and thoughts, just like humans, they are at the same time conceived of as ‘other’” (2007: 78). This is a variant of one of the dichotomizing “ploys” described by Descola (also in the context of Siberian hunters): “taking the line that subjectivity [of the eaten animal] is unaffected by the eating, so the integrity of the animal person survives as long as its interiority does” (2013: 286).
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Guenther, M. (2020). Monsters and Carnivory: Tolerance of Ontological Ambiguity. In: Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume II. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21186-8_3
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