Life on other worlds, or other ways of knowing?

Life on other worlds, or other ways of knowing?

Ryan Schram
ANTH 6916: The social in justice
October 23, 2024

Slides available at http://anthro.rschram.org/6916/12

Main reading: Blaser and Cadena (2018); Strathern (2018)

An example of “ritual conflict”

This is a passage from a paper by Marie Reay (1959), cited by Marilyn Strathern (2018):

“Dancing with spears occurs in the climactic rites of the Pig Ceremonial and also in the harvest festival called wubalt, a ritual presentation of nuts and other foodstuffs by one clan to another. All the spear dances are essentially the same. The one I shall describe here takes place as part of the geru bugu ceremony held in honour of the Guardian of Pigs towards the end of the Pig Ceremonial.

“About forty men dance towards the ceremonial ground. They wear headdresses of red and black bird-of-paradise plumes, and they twirl their spears horizontally above their shoulders, ready to strike. They advance with stylized movements, kicking their legs up behind them. Suddenly they squat on their haunches and stay motionless for a few moments before advancing again. They repeat this action many times, dashing forward with mincing steps, retreating to squat motionless, then again moving forward. They dance round the house of the Red Spirit a dozen times. The dance ends when other men, who have been following the spearsmen and performing symbolic actions in honour of the Red Spirit, hurl pieces of pork to the crowd.

“The spear dance dramatizes readiness for conflict rather than conflict itself. The spearsmen’s antagonists, the traditional enemies of the clan, are not present ; nor are they impersonated in the dance. The rite acts out the strength of the clan, which is symbolized by going to war. It expresses the unity of the clan and the value placed on warfare.” (Reay 1959, 291)

Another example

This is another passage from Reay (1959):

“This ritual conflict is known as ‘the nettle game’ (nonts nin-maag), though the actors discarded their nettles early in the game I witnessed in 1955: they preferred to throw ash and mud from a relatively safe distance where they could not be brushed by nettles. The game I saw varied from the traditional pattern in a significant respect. During previous Pig Ceremonials, I was told, used to wait until the men were asleep ; then they would creep towar where many men were sleeping and attack the inmates, brushing them with and covering them with ash and mud. The men would grab ash from the fire and chase the women. Thus the traditional game began with the women attacking men, whereas the present-day game is an equal tournament between the equally armed with nettles and neither with any advantage over the men themselves organized the game I witnessed as part of the ritual pro the end of the Pig Ceremonial. Everyone entered the game in a spirit of jest, but the men staged it during daylight in order that the opposing sides might be visible and unable to throw stones or other dangerous objects.” (Reay 1959, 292)

A statement about atiku

A quotation by Mario Blaser (2016) of a researcher also working on Innu’s people’s relationships with caribou.

“One day, while I was in the Innu Nation office, a very experienced hunter who had been recently charged with illegal hunting came to the office where I was working and told me, “they found a Red Wine [a herd then protected for more than fifteen years] collar close to Lake Kamistastin; see, atıku wants to go there.” Lake Kamistastin is located about four hundred kilometers north of Sheshatshiu, very far from the Red Wine Herd range, and right in the migration area of the George River Herd. This information, as he and other Innu argue, shows that the Red Wine woodland herd and the George River migratory herd intermingle. Therefore, there is no point in declaring the hunt illegal on the basis of the assumption upheld by government scientists that the herds are different: for the Innu there is only atıˆku. Furthermore, the words of this hunter obliquely indicate differences in how the collar information is used. The government uses it to obtain the information the scientists need to learn about caribou behavior, such as their whereabouts, while the Innu use this information to know what atıku wants. In other words, while the government administer the collars to satisfy their will to know, the Innu use it to know the will of atıku. Like human beings, atıku has will.” (Blaser 2016, 556)

References and further reading

Blaser, Mario. 2016. “Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible?” Cultural Anthropology 31 (4): 545–70. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.05.

Blaser, Mario, and Marisol de la Cadena. 2018. “Pluriverse: Proposals for a World of Many Worlds.” In A World of Many Worlds, edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, 1–22. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Reay, Marie. 1959. “Two Kinds of Ritual Conflict.” Oceania 29 (4): 290–96. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40329173.

Strathern, Marilyn. 2018. “Opening up Relations.” In A World of Many Worlds, edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, 23–52. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.