Book Review: The Shark God by Charles Montgomery

I bought this book – it must have been June, because I'd decided to buy myself a book for my birthday, and after I'd picked something out from the highly unsatisfactory collection of Patrick O'Brian novels, I wandered back into the history and travel section. This is always a bad idea for me. I have a terrible weakness for good history and travel memoirs. So when I saw The Shark God on the shelf – memoir, travelogue, and Melanesian syncretism – what was I supposed to do?

The Shark God is the story of Charles Montgomery's search for adventure, magic and family history in the chaos of culture, religion and politics that is Melanesia. His grandfather had been a Protestant missionary there in the late 19th century, and as a boy Montgomery had invented great stories about his grandfather's exploits, risking life and limb to bring Christianity to the poor, brown natives of these islands. As an adult, Montgomery knows that his childhood imaginings are probably unrealistic and definitely more than a little bit racist – and he's left Christianity in the meantime – but he feels a connection to the place and wants to learn more. So, as a travel writer, he does the only reasonable thing: he gets a contract to write a book.

Montgomery admits that the thing that intrigues him most about Melanesia is the apparent paradox of Christianity and native belief still existing side by side. Although almost all Melanesians are Christians of some stripe, a number of pre-Christian traditions and beliefs still have a great deal of influence on peoples' daily lives. They believe in witches and curses, in magic stones and dances, in ancestor spirits and shark gods.

I think my favorite thing about this book was that Montgomery never really seems to get it. He has a genuine interest in the religious situation, and he does his best to empathize with the people and understand what's going on. He learns that his English Protestantism is far from the only valid form of Christianity, and he really believes in at least some of the magic that he meets. But he never gets syncretism, never seems to be able to move beyond “but that's not how Christianity works” and “but that can't really be real,” even though he obviously really, really wants to. The epilogue tries to come to some kind of conclusion, but it's patently false and too much like a moral.

There are no morals through the rest of the book, just stories that mean something. Like the Anglican Bishop who lives in a house with a constantly shifting population of locals who refuse to let him live alone, because that's no kind of life at all. The priests who use the magic of Christianity to fight the magic of evil sorcerers and exploitative criminals alike. The spectacular moment when, having talked a group of rebellious young men to take him to see the famous thunder stones on an isolated island, Montgomery makes it rain.

Overall, I think what makes The Shark God a success is that (excepting that awful epilogue) it's a book written with compassion, respect, and a genuine attempt at understanding. Montgomery knows that he doesn't know better than the people he's talking to – or the people he's writing to – and while he's looking for answers that makes sense to him, he doesn't discount the answers that seem to make sense to everyone else.

Please, not that again

I'm trying to read Tim Ward's new book, Savage Breast. (I even got my library to buy a copy!) It sounded fascinating when I heard of it: a man with a personal history of mysticism and religious seeking tries to unpack the problems with his relationships with women through attempting to understand the Feminine Divine. And as far as that part of the book goes, it's great. Unfortunately, he's using as a basis of the book something that's driving me insane. Let me try to explain it without sounding like an anthro term paper.

Although Ward does admit that the actual evidence for ancient matriarchies -- that's societies ruled by women, not egalitarian ones or ones where women bestow lineage -- is scant to nonexistant, he nonetheless uses this theory as the dominant paradigm throughout the book. (Of course, he is focusing on the Hellenic pantheon, which is a great example of goddesses being shoved aside in favor of gods at a later date -- but that's not evidence of a matriarchy, just evidence of more patriarchy.)

What always annoys me about the matriarchy hypothesis, though, is that it feels like giving in. I mean -- rule by women is not inherently better than rule by men. (Look at Margaret Thatcher.) Matriarchy is just patriarchy in reverse; you're still keeping somebody down. Assuming that there must have been a matriarchy before there was a patriarchy, to somehow "balance things out," is dualistic and wrong-headed, and it sounds to me like a theory made up by people who can't think of any other reason for the patriarchy to exist: either men really are better than women, they seem to think, or there had to be a matriarchy first. Why else do all societies that exist today or that we have any evidence of at all tend to privelige men above women? (They do, unfortunately. Even in societies where there are practically no stable status differences, men have higher status than women as a general rule. Sad but true.)

Okay, so how does that make sense, if no one is inherently better than anyone and it's not a matter of men banding together to overthrow a vast feminine monopoly of power? Well, how about this -- In waaaay ancient times (possibly, based on recent evidence, going back as far as Neanderthals and early Homo erectus), there's no such thing as permanent status. If you're good at one thing, you become the Important Person for that one thing, say you're a good singer so you always lead prayers and dances and things. Doesn't make you a priest, just means you're the best at it so that's what you do. Similarly, there's no difference between men and women, so far as status; everyone does what they're best at.

Probably the women take care of childcare. After all, a child definitely belongs to its mother, but only maybe (or probably, if you're monogamous) belongs to its father, and besides, the bottle and formula hasn't been invented yet and Mom has a better shot at breastfeeding the kid. So women are handling the children. And one of the fundamental tasks in a society like this is to gather food; you need to eat. You're probably omnivores, you eat lots of plants and nuts and growing things but also some game. Gathering growing things, that's safe, predictable work, not necessarily physically easy, but not hugely dangerous either. Hunting, on the other hand, is high-stress, high-danger, relatively low-yield work -- it can involve staying away from camp for a long time, and you run the risk of being attacked by whatever you're hunting (or whatever else is hunting it). It makes sense for the women to gather plant food, which they can do while taking care of the children who depend on them, and for men to do the more dangerous stuff; after all, the men are slightly more expendable. Of course, some women might have been hunters because they were good at it, and some men might have been gatherers because they were good at that. But as a general rule.

But then, as the society grows more complex (for whatever reason, environmental change, population growth, charismatic leadership, there's a whole body of literature on the subject of why complexity happens) status becomes more sticky -- instead of just being the Important Person for what it is you do well, doing something well causes you to become an Important Person. And as previously mentioned, gathering work is predictable, varying little from one instance to another -- it has to be, otherwise you'll deplete all the resources and starve to death. So while one person might be better at gathering than another, there'll never be a huge difference between them. One hunter, though, might come back with a squirrel while another kills a mastodon that'll feed the clan through the whole winter. A hunter might kill a dangerous predator and save dozens of lives. The potential status differential in hunting is huge.

And over time, since the majority of hunters are men, the few high-status female hunters lose their importance, and then finally the direction status flows switches again: instead of men being high-status individuals because they're good hunters, hunting becomes a high-status job because men do it (and gathering becomes low-status because women do it). Ta-da! Patriarchy -- and we haven't even gotten to agricultural societies yet.

This status-flow switching, the change between what just is high-status and what bestows high status, isn't necessarily hugely logical -- but it is how our brains work. Language evolves in exactly the same way; we see a pattern and we continue it, and we don't much care whether we're extending it in the right direction or not. (Yargh, now I can't find the citation for the book I recently read that made this point. I'll get back to you on it.)

So patriarchy isn't about fairness, or about who's "better" than who; it's about uncertain parentage and who's more likely to get stepped on by a mastodon. I'm not necessarily attacking Ward specifically for espousing the ancient matriarchy theory, because it's been pretty popular, with everyone from Victorians fond of trying to prove that society is constantly improving to modern-day feminists who are more interested in politics than evidence. (I have nothing against feminism! I am a feminist! But like all other movements, some of its adherents are silly.) I do think that the ancient matriarchy theory is damaging, because it skews our view of both history and the future. Does one gender really have to rule over another? Is the only way we can manage rights for women to put them in charge of everything? Status, remember, is not a finite resource: you don't have to be stepping on someone else's neck to have status and power. If we're going to idealize any ancient practice (that may or may not have existed), let's go back to the free-floating status model, not one that's just what we have now only backwards.

Bridget Cleary part two: The Insult of Belief

Part one is here.

In writing about Bridget Cleary's death, Angela Bourke is obviously working at least partially within an anthropological tradition which tries to establish the validity of all the beliefs involved in a situation, while explaining why they were incompatible, which makes each side seem irrational to the other. To Michael Cleary, who had gone to the physician and the priest to look for help for his sick wife, and been basically turned away by each of them, an older tradition of healing would have been the only sensible option left; to the police and the magistrate, holding a sick woman over the fire and forcing her to drink medicines of herbs boiled in milk would have only looked like torture. Unfortunately, Bourke doesn't quite manage to be as even-handed as she might have liked: while she is generous towards the fairy beliefs of the townspeople, she doesn't seem to be sympathetic to it, and in fact gives the impression that she doesn't think they really believed in fairies at all.

It's a problem I had with plenty of my anthro classes (though not, to her credit, with the professor teaching them), that while we were expected to treat all beliefs fairly and with as much objectivity as possible, there was always this undercurrent of "but we know their magic doesn't really work; we know they're just justifying it to themselves when it doesn't; we know better, because we are the scientists." Bourke's book is particularly blatant about this, especially when discussing why people might participate in fairy exorcisms even if they don't believe in fairies (she actually states early on that she isn't sure that anyone ever truly believed in fairies or the supernatural, which is pretty drastic even for a skeptic to claim). She talks about how such rituals are acts of social condemnation, reinforcing ideas of conformity and "keeping in one's place;" and while it's true that lots of communal rituals and beliefs, particularly those dealing with creatures or people who live on the boundaries of things, do serve a social function like that, it's stretching it quite a bit to say that anyone was acting out these rituals with only that in mind -- putting an uppity woman in her place -- while not really believing in any of the supernatural elements.

There's a passage toward the end of the book where Bourke talks about how the case was discussed in official police documents, and how the word "superstition" was thrown around. When used between equals, she says, "superstition" can explain away personal quirks and beliefs we don't necessarily share with one another, but when used from a person with power against someone without, it's an insult, and frequently dehumanizing -- "they're so stupid they don't even know that fairies don't exist; obviously we shouldn't let them govern themselves." In her eagerness to disassociate herself from this position, though, Bourke seems to go too far in the other direction, as though she thinks that saying they believed in fairies would be an insult, when of course it's the attitude one takes towards their belief in fairies that makes it insulting or not.

As to Bridget Cleary's death, Bourke eventually says that she doesn't believe that it was malicious, that Michael Cleary merely snapped under the strain of his wife's illness and the attitude of the villagers toward them (they were not well integrated into the local society, for a number of reasons I've glossed over in order to not make this any insanely longer than it already is) and fell back on an older pattern of belief. Even with just the evidence prevented in this book, and apparently this is a case that has been written on extensively, I can't agree. Firstly, I find it interesting that Bridget's death actually occurred after the ritual of the exorcism was over, when Bridget's health was improving and everyone else who had been participating was getting back to normal. Also, as Bourke points out through the book, of all the people involved Michael Cleary was the most modern, the most literate, the least likely to retain what was considered an old-fashioned and dangerous form of belief. It looks to me much more like a man taking the opportunity presented to him by others, particularly the fairy doctor who seems to have been the first to suggest a changeling, to find an excuse to murder his wife.

Reading this book gave me one of what I call my "worldview instances:" moments in time when I realize just how differently I look at the world than whoever I'm talking with or reading from. Not so much involving the murder case itself -- although I did disagree with Bourke's reading of the evidence -- but in her general assumptions about mystical belief. Bourke really does seem to feel that saying that these people took action on a real person because they believed in fairies, an Otherworld, and in changelings would be insulting and demeaning to them. She comes, really, from the same basic assumptions as the colonial administrators who thought that belief in fairies showed signs of a childish mind: belief in magic is childish, but these people were rational adults, therefore they could not have believed in magic, her train of thought seems to go. I'd like to say this train of thought is unusual in anthropology, but I think it's just more blatant here than elsewhere. It's one of the reasons I find myself reluctant to look at graduate schools in anthropology. I'm pretty sure searching for a department based on "is not atheist to the point of religious intolerance" would be more than a little difficult.

Book Review: The Burning of Bridget Cleary

I've finally started to get to work on my amazingly long to-read list, and yesterday morning I finished up The Burning of Bridget Cleary, an immensely complicated book by Angela Bourke about an immensely complicated situation in an immensely complicated time. (Please, don't let that sound as if it's hard to read: it's delightful, particularly if you like social history. But there are a lot of threads going through this narrative, and it hasn't got easy answers.)

Even the original story itself isn't all that straightforward, partially because of the layers of interpretation that get built into it. At the turn of the twentieth century, in Co. Tipperary in Ireland, a young woman named Bridget Cleary fell ill, possibly with pneumonia, and suffered for about a week and a half before her husband, who had become convinced that the dying woman in his house was not his wife but a fairy changeling left in her place, organized a ritual to drive the changeling out. Almost a dozen people were involved, including a fairy doctor from the region and friends and relations of the couple, and most of those people seem to have participated in questioning the woman (she was asked to swear her identity three times, on two separate occasions) and in holding her over the grate of the fire to drive out the fairy. The next day she seemed to be improving, got out of bed and dressed herself for the first time in over a week, but after an argument with her husband, with most of the previous days' participants still in the house, he became enraged, threw her down on the floor and threatened her with a burning stick from the fireplace, and finally threw paraffin oil on her and burned her alive. He buried the body in a bog nearby and told his friends that he would be waiting at the fairy hill with a black-handled knife to cut his wife's bonds and bring her back from the fairies. He served fifteen years with hard labor for murder, and most of the others served somewhat shorter sentences as accessories to.

Bourke takes this incident and ties it into the changing cultural landscape that was Ireland at the time -- one of a long series of Home Rule bills moving through Parliament; tensions between laborers, tenant farmers and landlords still high after the recent Land War; colonial and Victorian rationalist rhetoric in opposition to the local and Catholic ideals of much of the population; and, of course, the long, slow death of the pre-literate Irish oral culture that the fairy belief seems to have come from. (One problem, of course, with discussing the origin of these beliefs is the simultaneous Irish Renaissance, in which Yeats and Lady Gregory were making fairies popular again. The oral culture which does still exist has assimilated a lot of the later material, too, and it's almost impossible to tell what is genuinely ancient or pre-literate and what comes from a later, more romanticized origin.)

The first thing that struck me about this was its similarity to an exorcism case in Wisconsin we discussed in one of my anthro classes when it happened -- an 8-year-old autistic boy named Terrence Cottrell died during an attempt led by a local minister and some of the parishioners and his family to drive the demons out of him. And I have to admit, I found it easier to consider Bridget Cleary's death in a more sympathetic way, a function of my own biases. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that deaths caused by religious practices shouldn't be prosecuted as murder -- only that the fundamental difference in worldview between the religious practitioners and the law is important, and ought to be looked at.

The second thing this reminded me of was the fate of the attempted regicide Damiens in 1757. (No, wait, there's a connection, I swear.) Foucault gives a rather grotesque description of the punishment for regicide in the decades just before the French Revolution; I'll spare you the gory details (though they're in Discipline and Punish if you really want them), but basically, he was drawn and quartered, badly; pulled with pincers; hacked to pieces; and finally burned. It was an insane amount of overkill, even for people who wanted to make an example. And that was what they were doing, of course: no one had been drawn and quartered in decades, possibly centuries, because a more modern form of law-enforcement made it easier to punish more criminals more leniently than a few criminals more strictly, as used to be done. But the possibility that someone might try to kill the king was so frightening that the establishment reacted by reaching into their past for the most socially condemning punishment they could find, even if they didn't quite know how to go about it. Even in the days when people were drawn and quartered, Damiens' death would have been considered grotesque.

Bourke tells us that, although changeling belief has been recorded in Ireland since such records were kept, very few deaths were ever recorded as consequences of trying to get rid of changelings, and Bridget Cleary is the only adult ever recorded to have died from a fairy exorcism. Bourke doesn't make much of this point, but I think it's key to her entire argument. When the old order runs up against the new, something has to happen, and it's usually when worldviews are dying out that they become their most damaging. When a belief is common, it doesn't need to be reinforced in order to be effective: it stands on its own. When a belief is dying out (like a belief in changelings, or a belief in the moral necessity and superiority of a king) it needs that extra power of blood and death in order to really stick. To say that Bridget Cleary's death is a result of fairy belief isn't an insult to people who believe in fairies, it just shows how beliefs were changing at the time and to what degree they were coming under stress from Victorian rationalism.

For all her attempts to treat the fairy beliefs with respect, Bourke ultimately comes down against them, more often implying that no one actually believed that they were driving a changeling out of Bridget Cleary's place. But this stance seems to me to be even more disrespectful: while I can understand (if not condone) torturing a changeling to force it to reveal itself, I have a harder time with the idea that nearly a dozen people tortured a woman in order to impress social conformity upon her.

And now this post is getting ridiculously long, so it will conclude (with more of the meat of the point I wanted to make) tomorrow.

Devotion 3.5: Stealing and Borrowing

(I wrote this post during my blogging hiatus, and found it whilst trying to find something to distract me from NaNoWriMo. I'm sure there was something other than my own writing that set me off on this topic, but I'm afraid I can no longer remember what it was.)

I've been tangenting from the Devotion series for quite a while, so actually, this tangent is slightly more on-topic than I've generally been recently, so actually this tangent is not really much of a tangent at all, but it still isn't actually the last real post in the Devotion series, so I'll keep on calling it a tangent until the word tangent has lost all real meaning. Tangent.

Anyway, the last real post in the series is going to cover a number of ideas and practices I have tried, and since I do tend to like my religious practices to have some sort of weight of history behind them, they're all practices I've borrowed stolen from other religions, ones with actual traditions, as opposed to my own seven-year-old eclecticism.

First, a note on terminology. I've noticed that my online vocabulary doesn't really go over quite as well in what we so egotistically call the real world, so in my defense: I find that sticking to a moderately offensive vocabulary keeps me mindful of exactly what I'm doing. Borrowing is a fairly benign thing to do. Stealing, not so much. Rather than feel better about myself with the nicer term, I'll stick with the harsher one -- but I don't really mean it as an insult. Everybody steals from everybody else all the time, but calling it stealing helps to remind us why some people get so pissed off about it sometimes.

Paganism is all about stealing from everybody else. Early Gardnerian rituals are stolen from the Golden Dawn are stolen from Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism, never mind from each other. Voodoo and Santeria steal from both African religions and Catholicism. More recently, stealing from Native American and Aboriginal Australian traditions has come into vogue. Even Reconstructionists aren't originally members of the culture they are reconstructing, so that's a kind of stealing, too.

Now, you could argue that what I'm calling stealing could also be called the natural progression of cultural development and exchange, and you'd be right. Change happens to everyone, all the time, no matter how "primitive" or "untouched" some groups may seem. (More on that later. Oh, have I got a rant on that.) You could almost say that modern Paganism, which has probably stolen from everyone in history to become what it is today, is the only natural result of a shrinking multicultural world.

If only it were that easy. After all, religion is a very sensitive and personal subject, and of all the bits of culture you could steal from someone, the religious aspects are probably going to annoy them the most. In addition, many modern Pagans feel a kinship with the still extant aboriginal religions -- but the reverse is often not true. At the very least, we ought to be respectful while we go about stealing bits of other people's religions.

Exactly how that respect should be expressed is another matter. We hashed this out a bit in my anthropology classes, actually -- where we were mandated to be respectful by federal law. In our museum, we had a number of Native American ceremonial pipes (I want to say they were Hochunk, but I could be wrong) which were kept in a cabinet in the basement of the museum and were not allowed to be viewed or handled by menstruating women. Of course, the museum put up with these restrictions because otherwise the pipes would have been returned to the tribe they originated with. Without the threat of the loss of research material, the respect paid to that particular tradition would have been nominal at best -- and probably not even that, given the vocally feminist nature of our campus. Of course, I was part of that vocally feminist majority, and I can't say I disagree with them: but then, I never particularly wanted anything to do with the pipes, either.

As we as Pagans are stealing religious bits and pieces to use as religious bits and pieces, though, I think we should be held to a higher standard than the federally-mandated anthropological tolerance. I don't think we ought to be required to agree with every aspect of a practice before using it -- after all, if you were willing to do that you'd just convert (although that can be a kind of stealing, too). I do thing we ought to be required to understand every aspect of a practice, or at least as much of it as possible, before stealing it for our own practice. And, because I'm an anthropologist and context is everything, that includes the history of the practice and its variations, not just its spiritual significance. And if what I said earlier is true, that modern Paganism is stolen from just about everybody, then that goes for every aspect of our practice, including the things we already think we understand.

The fact that you understand something about the thing you're stealing isn't necessarily going to mollify the person you're stealing from, of course. It might, however, stop you from looking like an idiot and a complete jackass about it. Cultures and religions steal stuff from one another all the time; it's how they survive in a changing world, and while that doesn't mean the people being stolen from don't have a right to be upset about it, it does mean that it's not something to be thoroughly ashamed of, especially if you put enough thought into the process to understand what you're doing and to try to be as inoffensive about it as possible.

(Does it make a difference who you steal from? Absolutely. While I do believe that everyone and all cultures deserve respect, I also think it makes sense to be a little more cautious about stealing from cultures which are used to being kicked by others than those which are used to doing the kicking. (The kickers might scream more, but they'll be hurt less.))

A more respectful stealing has a multitude of benefits for Paganism; it helps flesh out our practices and theology, it helps us know where we've come from (to better figure out where we're going), and it makes us a little more popular in the wider world. If anything, modern Paganism's sin has been in ignoring its own history more than anyone else's, so I'm not sure how offensive we tend to be (as opposed to ridiculous), but it's certainly not a subject to be ignored.