Morna Finnegan
The Politics of Eros - Lecture & Discussions
How Hunter-Gatherer Women Assert Solidarity and Power
Talk given to the Radical Anthropology Group at Daryll Forde Seminar Room, Anthropology Building, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW on 5 June 2018. Morna Finnegan discusses corporeal morality among African hunter-gatherers.
Further reading:
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The Politics Of Eros: Ritual Dialogue And Egalitarianism In Three Central African Hunter-Gatherer Societies (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19, 697-715, 2013)
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Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology, edited by Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan and Hilary Callan, Berghahn, New York/Oxford, 2016
Lecture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vrD1sBWqm8
This started out as an attempt to think about morality in in the context of. The ethnography that I'm familiar with on egalitarian hunter-gatherers, and the reason I'm thinking about morality, is that in September. Camel and I have organized an as a panel on. Laughter, bodies and the evolution of morality. So it's kind of in the air and. But it. Also, a really good opportunity to go back and look at the the politics of various paper. Because it written a long time ago as part of my thesis. And once it was published, it kind of just went off and I moved on to other. Things, but I have been realizing that really what the politics of it is talking about is. Another kind of moral community that is coming from within the collective body as opposed to being imposed upon it. And so this is really a work in progress. It's an attempt to start to bring in some of the interest in how that male community is. Established and shared with the work, specifically in women's coalitions. And I'd like to talk a little bit about the the politics of various people. Again, just to reiterate, the main importance there and then move on to talking more about. These two substances in the Emanuelians junta world that are Aquila and Nam. The two polycamic terms that refer to whole corpus of. Of physical and cultural and cosmological elements. But they're both very strongly located in the body, and specifically in the kind of solar plexus area of the body.
So I'm going to start by asking what connects cognitive and emotional intelligence. Because there's a there's a an in between there that isn't often discussed. We know all about cognitive intelligence. It's kind of it's a big a big. Point of discussion at the moment and we're hearing a little bit more about emotional intelligence, but I I want to begin to open up the idea of physical morality. That sits between the cognitive and emotional and and cannabis is the foundation for everything else. And I want to ask what drives the extraordinary human interest in sharing and caring and so hurting freezes it? Using the AMBANGEL engine to return tequila and non respectively, I'm going to propose that morality is fundamentally a corporeal element. It has to be viscerally experienced in order to remain alive. I want to suggest that morality, therefore, is intrinsically revolutionary. This means that in order to survive, moral systems have to remain in flux. I have to remain in motion the moment they settle. Take an idea of divine. All of the secular state, they tend to assume a fixed quality with redefined walls and laws and this punitive. Social and later emotional economy. So moral systems that get static. Plan to become inheritant antisocial, ironically and anti freedom, the primary function being to privatise and administer power as opposed to diffuse power out through the community Aquila nun. Their physical accountability physical. You're not talking here about obedience. You're not talking about unimposed moral accountability. This is organic, home grown, localized accountability. Because it's rooted in the body of each individual within the community from birth onwards. So before going any further, I want to look at the theory of social contract as developed by Thomas Hobbs because. Hobbs was. Very important thinker in developing. This idea of the possibilities as either fundamentally violent and miserable primitive society. With man padded against man, or with sophisticated state societies where you have these rational self interested individuals who agree to surrender their independence in the interests of peace and security. And by mutual consent, appoint a kind of supreme ruler. The Wheeler began to collective defense on their personal security and in return made a bear his laws and given complete obedience. So this is essentially a morally justified agreement made among individuals that brings formal society into existence. And it's important because it's often used to demonstrate the value of government and the grounds for political. Dominion, obligation and authority. And move away from the insecurity of the stateless society. Citizens are apparently agreeing to respect and bear a new state order in exchange for stability and security. The Stability and security in Hobbs argued only a system of political rule could prevail. So the the social contract phase of Hobbs and locks start from the concept of man and primitive state without political authority or formal checks, and the behavior of individuals going beyond that. Into a developed social and political life. Guided by principle of natural. A natural law theory held that there were immutable principles of law that existed as part of the natural world, that would define what's right just and good for man. These principles were discoverable by use of reason. And all people were subject to their laws. And I'm very interested in this kind of rational paternity authority figure. That appears almost OK anywhere that we're talking about political agency, power structure or security. To my Ibis figure is essentially 1 face of the good cop, bad cop, split personality of the alpha male. It's the other side of a form of submission to authority. What I think of as the the. And command mentality. Against it, you have something else entirely with collective self that we were discussing this morning in Viver, which is absolutely fitting with its contemporary movement. It's the continuing movement of its constituent parts. And which bulk certainly with obedience. The kind of self that Backtone was writing about so beautifully. World and that the way in his world. So there are two big assumptions here which have travelled a long way deep into the recesses of modern political theory, as well as into areas of political organization and society. And the first is that human communities, without any discernible hierarchy, no government, no. Leaders. No bosses are inherently unstable and threatening to their members at best, simple and at worst destructive. The second big assumption is that state society that can self protective contract whereby we relinquish personal power to government in exchange for security is a good thing. So hunter gatherers and social. Sexual agalita are nism tends to take a simple, undeveloped, potentially threatening the the life that Hobbes described as solitary prayer. Nasty British. Short and unanimous, that's something the Leichhardt. But I'm talking about to kind of models for everywhere in which people are able to organize and experience power. I'd like to develop another kind of picture, another kind of moral collective. And it's a picture that has extended out of the. On the politics of areas and this picture takes the idea of a virtually collectivized body, in this case the collective female body, as the origin of other moral inclinations and observances. Before getting to what Nam and Akila have to do with this other kind of moral community, I want to digress to that paper because I think it's relevant as the other side of Hobbes primitive man with his need for delegated power and paternal state. And I was proposing in that article that by examining the language of the body in Yakka or BT. And Angela, ritual dialogue. We could start to develop an alternative understanding of the person, one in which biology and sex were not inherently problematic because we moved to deconstruct the body is based on that assumption and could in fact be a source of great cultural power and also. An unorganizing force, the elaboration performative nature of sex, was arguing in that paper. An expansion rather than construction. So you have this deprivatizing of the body. And its ability to reunite into cultural fields and. Ship power pendulum, which moving constantly in the society. The stress was. That article was on their discursive potential of the collective body, and I was using the term the politics of Aeros to refer to a whole kind of creative ritual. That stresses the power of sex. Procreation. Laughter. Dance. This world of blood and breath over the possibility of hierarchy closure, so biology was. Always becoming. And gender was what coalesced in the ritual tension between the sexes. What Victor Turner described as a player of forces working out continually. Going back to the politics of Arist, after a long time, there's this sense of the injection and contraction of power through that paper. Oscillation between the sexes and between individual desire and group equilibrium. And I argue that in order to produce that piston like motion polls were required. But. Using bacteria writing on the collective body and the culture of laughter. It was not the individual life of the body, it was the. It wasn't the, as he says, the drama of an individual body or private material way of life. It was the great generic body of the people. And that points crucial in thinking through the move from sex to gender. So we weren't talking about a private biological body severed by a long history of political religious repression from its own language. And Jackson had backed that up by by with his work on the power of dance and music in. Ritual dialogue meeting that the movement and music and and dance of collective ritual bodies were what promoted a sense of levity and openness, both in body and mind, which verbal and cognitive forms, he says ordinarily inhibit.
So, there was in that paper a strong interest in the kind of transformative effects of dance. On community politics and the way in which people like Van Benjelle or. The the beauty or the yakka or or the June twent? Are using these kind of transcendent moments these, these, this, this really heightened emotional state and favored element to to manage political fields in a way that is quite. Extraordinary because whenever you have the entire community involved in these big back and forth dialogues. You there's there's no longer. Any need for the big boss? You have people containing and acting out power continually. So Dad says a defaming quality here. And I argue that these and other mukundi masana. Like in Goku? Genghi want additional to political life in the absence of hierarchy, but with central egalitarian forces. And. I believe that in that paper, one of the central part of it was bringing out what women are doing in their collective public dances, and this very graphic rival language that's used during woman's dances where they clear the camp. And storm through. Ostensibly beautified and. The attractive and doing these very sensual dances, but at the same time completely inviolable, marked off as inviolable. And able to capitalize on that to really. Bring home their their temporary ritual authority. And I had begun with the attempt to describe an alternative kind of body politics. And the idea with the idea of non coercive power. A power defined as being for relationship, self possession, joy, social equilibrium, and connected it to the to these big collective dances. Using the term in that paper, the politics of as was part of an attempt to stay fearful to this culture of the body that draws in the bigger rituals and the the pendulum between male and female ritual coalitions. And then that low level balls of Soong and dance and motion that kept going in any community. And. With the constant focus on the interchange between the sexes. And I think that that issue of sexual tension that Colin Turnbay brought out so well, and his writing on in Beauty is really. Elephant in the room. In gender studies. And often in social sciences generally it's it's something that. We tend not to discuss as much in its cultural. To form once things move into culture, we talk about gender and the sex, the biology, the, the body, the reproductivity, that whole kind of earthy sense of physical power tends to be. Pushed to their periphery. So the body that we were finding in these big licentious yacht dancers was a a realised writing. Cancer to the abilassian person, it was an open, ambivalent body whose jokes were, as as bactine says, particles of an immense hole of the popular carnivorous spit of the world that laughs. I argued that the body, Normans normatively at work, in yak ethnography. Had a kinship with the body that in me occasionally breaks through the memorial of hierarchical culture. Were aboard you emphasizes that. Domination tends to restrict woman's verbal consciousness. The discourse is dominated by the male values of reality. Any reference to specifically female sexual interests is excluded. You had here this very clearly unrestricted verbal consciousness of. Evangelical or byaca woman's physical presence. And that collective female body, with its contradictory signaling power, was vibrantly, publicly pushing back at every opportunity with its own physical, visceral language to deal with contact and reproductive solidarity and sensuality. And that I. To the conclusion that this was the language. Of a kind of love that we don't often get to see in our public culture anymore. Dominated as it is by romantic dyad. And you know by the the focus on. The the priorities that are to do really with the male collective body territory, reality, conquest. This kind of big and angelic body was speaking to me about a corresponding principle his age was to be a go for clues on the other. As long as the two groups. Remained in dialogue, violence was maintained. So I don't know if that's clear. What I what I was trying to bring out is that. In cultures where the male body has a strong collective presence, and I think so much really does come at origin out of the the out of the the early kind of deep history of of. The body that without. Our corresponding female collective asserting the priorities of that collective female body. You have an immediate loss of balance and an immediate kind of freezing of the power pendulum. It it's. I'm focusing here on woman's collective. Expressions of power, of course, among the Benjamin. Collective coalition reverse they're continually asserting as well. But you need both an order for the moral community to remain plain and in order for power to be able to circulate through the entire society, you just have to have both. In strong collective bodies, and that comes out really. In. Stratheren's work on the Melanesian NEO collective body, asserting dominance continually over. Over individual women. And. So what I was trying to assemble using the work of Colin Turnbull, Michelle Kislyak and Julian Lewis, is wonderful ethnography on the end. Was the speaking body at the pivot of his power pendulum. This was the. It had to be repressed by orders. Where hierarchy is the dominant principle. But as bacteria had argued, if you take away the static ideology of hierarchy. It's like lifting a wedge out of something that's been blocked, yeah. The body kind of starts to laugh and things start to get interesting. The pendulum starts to move back and forth again. And what's striking? Reading back teens writing on the world of carnival, and this laughing body animated by strings of abuse and body jokes. As the parallel with so much of the data on Hunter gatherer ritual life, so I find his work then and I still find it very important in thinking through the political nature of Yaka woman's social collectives with the spotlights on procreative sex and corporal Power Gener. And it's important, too, that teens work is quite important in setting into our political terms the repercussions of the loss of that collective maternal body from the cultural field. The body that once offered such. A kind of joyful counter to. To mill dominance. The the iOS paper was describing this literal and metaphorical dance. This this politics rooted in motion. And I argued that public virtual performances among the Angela Davis were operating as a powerful body statement on behalf of egalitarian reality. These exchanges were means of creating society. They weren't 1 of societies tools. Weren't just a nice. Offshoot of something else? The conversation magnited between the sexes was the structure of social life itself, which suggests that antagonism is explored as part of a cultural conversation. Necessary and positive. So we kind of would have would have tension. Being continually juggled as a creative force. In obedience oriented cultures. It's normal to attempt to resolve social antagonism from an ethical moral stance formed in the belief about journalism not as a conversation, but as a permanently closed door. But resolutions in such contexts is potentially. The point at which dialogic freezes notion stops and hierarchy floods the interpersonal field. So the politics of Aeros was trying to bring out that somatic conversation that was. Contained between the sexes and of course, the political implications of that way of managing power, the way that the power field was kept playing by the work of the sexes is enormous. So. Following on from that. I would like to read a wee bit about both the jintoire nominating substance norm and the endangered term Aquila to see what kind of body these might. .2 are elaborate alongside that collective virtual male and female. Coalitionary self and moving away from traditional ideas of morality as something planted in our heads. A set of concepts or rules or constraints agreed on and listed like the 10 Commandments to compel people to behave themselves. This is what I'm calling corporate morality. It's a whole other kind of accountability, and I'm going to just read directly from this fantastic. It's it's a follow up really to the work of the the two anthropologists involved here, Richard Katz and Megan. But it was designed to be accessible to to non specialists. So it's called healing. Our hearts happy. And here they are. About non his substance non that permeates all into our life, particularly that the the dancers, the healing dancers. Some anthropologists have translated numerous medicine, but it is more than just medicine. Normal energy, spiritual energy. There are many reference for non and the limits to these reference are purposely ambiguous things of. Caller, including things out of the ordinary, like herbal medicines, African sorcery, menstrual blood, the vapor trail of a jet, are among the contexts in which the word norm is used. We were constantly frustrated in any attempt to pen down its meaning. Jintoir people say none is a thing unto itself. What are, in whatever form or function, none is felt as strong and the word NUM itself carries the power of none. None is invisible. There can be seen and picked up by experienced heroes during this state of enhanced awareness. It's located only by its existence in a particular form, whether it be a person, a song. None isn't personalized nor personified. Nobody can possess it exclusively nor control it completely with primary force. Imaginative experience is out of strongest and healing damps. It resides in the dance fire. In the healing songs and most of all, in the bodies of the healers concentrated in the pit of their stomach and the base of their spines, the dance activates phenomenal healers. And their dance movements, they say heat up the men when it burns or vaporizes and rises up the spring. And they quote one of the their heroes are saying it hurts. It's like fire. It burns you as no one reaches the base of the hill or skull. Lay enter a state of transcendence. Once in the state, the dancer can heal. Often translated as tramps, it's actually a state of enhanced awareness. In which haloes can travel physical and psychical overgrowth distances. But laughter is never far away. The same strict western distinction between the sacred and profane doesn't exist for the gin toys. There, the dance is their most intensely spiritual event, but during it they exchange some of their spiciest jokes. And tease each other with friendly vigor about their dancing. It doesn't have an atmosphere of solemn piety. They have a sense of awe is profound. We do this, says Mesa. When our hearts. And you know, it's such a beautiful description. Could really go on and on. But essentially. This this force that is. Very strongly rooted in the the gut area of the body is. A kind of synergistic force. It's diffused out through the community and brought back into the bodies of the heroes continually. You can't control it. Can't own it? And nobody fully can sum it up. Or or even really fully understand it, because it's one of these. Slippery. Kind of elemental. And body concepts that that nobody can claim, they're they're located. Very strongly in. Actually in in the uterus area of your body. And it's interesting because. The regime twice said that women during the reproductive years have to curb their dancing because they're natural norm from puberty onwards is so. So, so hot, so powerful that if they were to dance as well, they might kind of overflow with this. This power was heat or visceral quality, and so they tended. In women healers who are a very, very much respected and do a lot of dancing and healing, women in their reproductive years tend to sing their their part in raising their hip to the norm is to contribute the same. At the singing is. As visceral and as as tangible as the norm is, they say it's like a it's like a physical quality when you can't touch the the song and you can't feel it in the air. The healer's canteen. So the the profoundly connected. So you can spoil your mom. By refusing to share it, or by trying to hold dances. That that's that's people say that that kind of will spoil a healer. He won't be able to work as effectively. People won't trust him in the same way. So you have on one hand this very powerful. Physical quality. Cater and the body that's being used through dances to heal the community. But on the other hand, you can't privatize. And it it took me long to thinking about Jerome Lewis writing on the evangelical term Aquila. And Jim has a brilliant paper on Michaela. Where he his he's talking about. How central it is to and then jealous thinking the world. And how physically it is. But again, how it's owned and shared by the entire community, it's not something that anybody can ever claim for themselves. So so now I'm going to just read a paragraph from from him on the Keyline. He says it defines how the body is vital, forces reproductive potential, productive activities and their products, moral and personal qualities and emotions. Should be shared to ensure. Members experience good health, unproblematic childbirth and child rearing, and successful hunting and gathering from an eminently perspective, these are the basic components of a good life. Whenever Killer contributes to the mechanics of a non explicit egalitarianism at its most fundamental level, it serves to organize gender roles by defining them as primordial, as bound to bodies, and bound to biological processes. Akila establishes hunting and childbirth as prototypical activities, defining people as men and women, and weaves these ways together in a complex set of interrelationships. The language of coughing and tying is used to elaborate this Aquila dress is cotton and its discourse on proper sharing and keeping things apart, but simultaneously achilla. Tile is many things together. Smells gender. Married couples sexual politics. Cosmology and Galilee Anism as a political, moral and economic orientation. So you can see in both of our data and then Jones writing the way in which in contrast to 3rd commitments and responsibilities, copoire morality is premised on contact. It's it's premised on in the non case literally of the the the contact of people during the healing down. Women, when they're singing to to to raise them just, you know, wrapped around each other like a like a loop and. And the singing comes out of that wave and daughter quality and and. The the the physical element of the healing is is primary. And with a. The the contact is being made between. Men and women activities, men and women's bodies. Men. Male and. Power game sports and menstrual blood. People are being connected by this kind of constantly moving polysemic term as it works down into into body. And the egalitarian habitus the the continuity of the person from birth onwards with this larger socio kinetic body, guarantees that fault morality. In which ones able to connect by having experienced the other, and that's that's what I'm arguing.
So. You know, I I think for a long time, I thought in morality as something. Having been raised an Irish Catholic. To dread, you know, just it was like. Yeah, it was a scary word because it was being imposed on me, and it was Puritan and oppressive, but my understanding of it is completely changing through understanding what. A live moral community is. Real morality is painful, and it's empowering at the same time. It's less about abstract rights and wrongs and issues of trust and respect. It's. Automatic it registers concretely. Affects the got. With stomach the lungs, the heart. I think when you're feeling for someone when you're caring about someone, it always registers immediately in the body. Not what you think you know. I'm so sad for her and so hurt for him. It's it's in your stomach. In your. It's it's a visceral experience of the other. This is what Sir heard, a biological anthropologist argues, was the great achievement of early modern. Ancestors of early modern humans with this kind of emotional modernity. This ability to be connected to other people and interest in how they're feeling. And I think that that kind of morality, what kind of moral responsibility? That's emotional and visceral, and contains this desire to be similarly known and felt for. As Heardy argues, would have underlined all subsequent cultural and linguistic. Developments. So when you put that beside the kind of Irish Catholic morality I grew up with. Static, disembodied Mor. It's the. Hierarchical. The static morality is dead. It's it's no longer within the experience of the body and so it has to be imposed from the outside and against the way it's it has lost its living quality because people aren't experiencing it and they're not passing it. To their kids. In the same way. Hunter Gatherer is likely and benjelly all through this striking contrast, and the privilege of motion. Overstock is sharing over privacy. Contact and physical. The physical contact. Over control and there's a huge emphasis on that from both on words that children are not only held by a huge amount of of different people, they also. Fed. So babies are being breast fed by whoever happens to have milk at any. Is the extending of the the baby and the child's body out to enter this collective body that isn't literal? It's not just metaphorical, it's physical. You know when you're sharing milk. You're sharing. When you're sharing the energetic labor of holding and saving other people's kids. The the. The whole possibilities for the body are extended away out beyond this little individual eagle. But we were very good at living us and never not so good at living us. So both the Ambientel and junkua refer to an embodied source of power or heat located in the gutter area, cultivated through these cultural and natural practices. This core power that's expressed through the community, through spirit or healing dances that flow out of and into the person. Simultaneously, a key line belong to individuals, but they're inseparable from the collective body, which brings to mind. Things like the Buddhist concept of the Hara or vital center, which is also located around where we got area a lot of cultures have that. Actually the the idea of this core. Kind of power a body power. That's that's not so developed there, but you can. You can find it. So to me this is called poor young morality. It's kind of like the biochemistry of of the community. It's. Its velocity is stored in individuals using the cultural containers of Aquila and non and you can feel in the data on non this immense power of. How to be generous? How you can be generous whenever the source of social and political power, not to mention spiritual power and energy, is located in the young body and cultivated in your body. From birth onwards. You have this idea of. Generosity as power and stinginess as weakness. As caring and sharing as having this powerful kind of gracefulness in it, we're holding and withholding the brittle small quality so that the scarcity mentality. That defines so much of. Modern society. Modern hierarch. Comes to seem very small beside this. It's generous quality that's cultivated through men and tequila, which comes back again to Aeros and the flow quality embedded in that concept is kind of a lesque and abandonedness or openness. That goes beyond the individual person. And seemed to be cultivating this personal poise or earth element hand in hand with dynamism and fluidity. The responsibility for controlling power is centered in the Gotham Solar Plexus area of every individual, so that people. Are able to experience the the wider kind of spillage of the that big spiritual power that Jean Tuis talk about when you talk about. You can only experience that by being. Rooted into the community. And that again is that comes back to the the idea of the politics of errors. So for me, hunter gatherers like the and Angela turn Cartesian dictates on their head by suggesting that it's the removal of the self to a small area around the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The rational analytical brain. Which leads to all subsequent dissociation and anime, and failure to manifest fully in the world. And in fact, there's a great. Writer on social trauma Vanderpool and who has a groundbreaking study of trauma and society called the. He keeps the score. And he suggests that it. It's new and often about the anthropological literature that it's only via a return to the sensory world. It's only via a return to body intelligence. And the reunification of things like the sympathetic nervous system with the emotional brain, with the center of self-awareness, the media prefrontal cortex. It's it's it's linking up all these parts of. The flow within. The. But we allow people to experience themselves as connected and alive, and and he uses a lot of. Things like dance, yoga as well as to try to bring people have been highly traumatised either as children or or later back down into the body. For him, it's all about rooting. In that vital center, which is exactly what people like the ambangelia recognising from birth, that to be a complete person you need to be able to access that. That that physical sexual. Ity that becomes the foundation for women coalitionary race. So these kinds of egalitarian social systems are offering a striking contrast to hierarchy and their privilege. Of this kind of sensuous tactile flu. And I've argued that the expertise is in virtual structure or social power shared by being continually circulated around. Community. And here we can see two powerful mechanisms for doing that in non and acula respectively. By keeping the experience of the body public. They're epitomized by teams, the great generic body of the people. With intensely political moving force. Sort of builds sociality. Egalitarian systems are striking in their physical respect for children, as I've said, and for the way in which infants or community community parented everything is pooled, and I was thinking about this. Thinking about the the. The literature on coalitionary literal and thinking about the the ethnography and the likes of. Benjelly with these qualities, these kind of smooth, slippery, deeper qualities of non manaquila that are the energy of egalitarianism. Really. And I was thinking about the relationship with children and the fact that, you know, just as we're moving, like our children, but. Us, just as their land contact from us or not, we learn from them. Their teach us how to touch, how to hold, how to nurture this vital life, energy and the human, how to be tender, how to be generous not only with resources and time and energy, but literally with our own bodies. And I also thought that children, whether cult, culturally central. And held at the crooks of that collective social body. A big force in teaching. And keeping going that the player element in how they loopy and irrelevant and jumpy and so many of the things that we as a culture stand our entire time trying to draw my different. So I thought is it any wonder? The kind of you know, siphoned off from the rest of society because they're dangerous to the new collective body. And isolation from its female counterparts. They're dangerous to the new collective body, separated from its paternal. It's it's it's paternal part in this dialogue that goes on between maternal paternal and children. And and. Among the and Gene twis. Previously, puberty held at the crux of the social body, young people are. Actually being encouraged to engage in practices that will cultivate the substance located in their solar plexus area and connected through all these web relationship, meaning and metaphor to the vitality of the larger body, they're encouraged. Of it, the rate of own moral capacity for fostering ritual and social connections to everything and everyone around them, so they're actively involved in the waving of their own bodies into this molecular system. What are we cultivating? What are they cultivating when they're cultivate, Aquila or non? What are we trying to cultivate when we talk about things like the Hara? It's basically responsibility to the community. Accountability to all the other bodies of which we are part and in which we depend. And I don't think it's a surprise that men, particularly, have been encouraged to ritually cultivate this quality. Aquila on. Like I said earlier, the Gen. twos are woman's norm automatically flows up the puberty and remains volatile for the rest of their cycling life. This is an element women automatically, by virtue of their cycling reproductive body, are believed to have access to. And. Uh. The focus for for Near Hill is in Nome or for in Bengali man who are really trying to build up strong. Aquila is in being able to. Share everything that you have with your community that that increases and strengthens your Achilles. Through your own physical conduct in the world. So not only are they offering access to a more universe, they're also a kind of constant cautioning that if you want this. This beautiful heat or energy that everyone cherishes, you need to be able to adhere to shared principles. Egalitarian principles. Using the insights of Sarah Hurdie into the emergence of emotional modernity among cooperative building. I suggested that what lies at the heart of this live molecular system? Isn't as a lot of recent writing on egalitarianism, the evolution of egalitarianism suggest warfare or intermail exchange networks are necessarily even sex. But. Babies and children and the coalition remains a lot evolved to protect them and to keep them culturally central. I. What connects cognitive and emotional? And the answer seems to be everywhere to do with this articulate, socially responsible and inherently joyful common body. By this measure, the kinds of hierarchical capitalist gerontocracies that we now see dominating globally. Based on male collective imperatives. Territory variety, quantity of equality. Working directly against the survival needs of children and the rest of us are fundamentally immoral. So anthropology is perfectly placed to examine and describe the egalitarian alternative, organic, corporeal morality.
Post-Lecture Discussion
Ingrid Lewis and Camilla Power join Morna Finnegan to discuss the politics of the body and hunter-gatherer morals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbxSC9yfgDw
Ingrid Lewis: That was brilliant. What I absolutely could not agree more with you and I could not agree more with what Camilla in her talks, what I take away as an absolute key sentence of what you said is 'egalitarianism evolved through babies, through collective caretaking'. My experience of living with Benjeli for three years and being initiated into the Benjeli woman's. Knowledge of Goku what it is to be a woman and how to conduct yourself as a woman is exactly that, women. Ritually and continuously and cyclically will hold up the mirror. And they hold up that mirror to mail the more collective body and to more society. Very, very, very explicitly by becoming this female collective. Women actually grouped together. They link arms, hands, legs and they stem together through the camp as one. So it's. Women dancing singingly but actually making lines and groups and boards like these. Real big boards and they run manically through the camp and they sing one particular song. Very loudly and that is. One woman, one penis. And that puzzled me to start with. What does that mean, right? They will explicitly enact male sexual behavior. They will explicitly insult male sexual behavior, but do. But in a very mocking way to enchant men back into a good type of behavior, what it is to really raise a Society of equals where babies the next generation is being cared for properly. So not one mail can come in and impregnate all these. It's one thing is where one woman or not one PTS with lots and lots of women.
Morna: Anti alpha male.
Ingrid: It really is anti-alpha male? So explicitly, so hilariously funny as. So when I ask the men, don't you find that insulting because they seem really? Quite insulting songs like the penis is like they call it the Dum dummy. I don't quite remember the word, but there is a Caterpillar that Caterpillar that works in the forest is blind and it's dumb. Bulls and bones into things. And they say that a male penis is just like this climb. Really. Pete, not Caterpillar. This blind millipede stumbling and collapses before it even gets in there. So really. And I sat with the men and I asked doesn't. Insult. And I said, yeah, yeah, I. Said. But why don't we do anything about, you know, why wouldn't you work? Because it's so nice. It is desirable, so at the basis of life, life, sexual reproduction, there is no life without sex and. Only write checks can really lead to right? So women bring morality as as as as a whole body. By all the time holding up that mirror and. And sharing their values very explicitly with men. In a way, it is like they Polly made men regularly, and especially also young boys with these ideas. What is permissible behavior and what is non permissible behavior? So just having attempted asylum on what is culture and how does culture shape our values and how do our values shape our culture and how is our culture now? Can we do in order to get out of the mess that we are in with this consumerism and? Capitalism and it really made me think very deeply. So it was at the basis of all of this, we think about handing down culture to the next generation every time, but we see generations often. We are as adults, however, you know. 20 somethings and then we see the next generation of adults. But before there is a next generation, there are babies. And unless we have a corporate corporation between. Males and females. That won't work, and the women reinforce that time and again, pollinating these ideas and sharing these ideas with men. It's not unusual that men straight after an Goku, which is this female corporate dance, will do. Show or we'll do another mail dance to also show them as to unity to show women how desirable that is and women love it. It's wonderful. And men love it to be insulted like that. But to be shown. This whole amazing, really desirable sexuality, because that's the the fabric of life. Is that sexual reproduction? And that can only be given a good life if that is shared really appropriately. I really love that comment of yours and how visceral it is, and that it’s not in the brain.
Morna: Not at all. Not at all.
Ingrid: No, it's not in the prefrontal neocortex. No.
Morna: Yes. Absolutely, it's it's a good it's an area. And what's really amazing is the fact that that's recognized so strongly through. You know your power is here. That's just really Earth and. Dying and teaching kids. But I I love this. This practice of weaving children and to this collective body, in a sense of themselves as collective being able to flow over. But also locating responsibility for that. And then you know, you're part of. You experience thrive moment, that you're responsible for it, and it's absolutely yours and that's human sociology, really kind of finest krispist form. And so it makes me mad when I come across references to simple egalitarianism. Versus complex hierarch. Yesterday, there's nothing simple here. Extraordinary complex.
Ingrid: No, the incredibly sophisticated.
Morna: It's thinking through the guts, thinking through the listener, but also exploring that out of that culture. You know, danced lived. Society. It's wonderful.
Ingrid: I mean, that's. It really society, everything is being shared through being. Right, so you can't in a in a sort of Agricultural Society, the mind is being. So you're being told this is not right and this is more behavior and that is how you have to do that is how whole society. You have to do it when you're that old. You have to do this when you're the Benji. Never ever dream of doing that to go to anybody and say this is wrong and this is right. Behavior. And this is how you do it. You to point to somebody that would be our agents. Who are you? But what you can do is to enchant people. Look how nice it is to be like that. Watch what women do they say. Look how nice we are. Aren't we sexy? We the beauty side of. So aren't we really, really, really incredibly desirable? And men go. Yes, yes, you are really, really, really desirable. Men do the same, so it's really. By enticing people into, isn't it nice to be just together and share properly rather than instructor? It isn't been preferential to can't wait for your talk next Tuesday Camilla to deconstruct that even further. Because they just embody that. It isn't that things can't be. There was a new song that popped up that I had never heard in over 22 years. Going and living with Angela, you know, in interviews. And that was a song about. A man whose wife had been pregnant and he went to. And be with another one. So it wasn't a song that. He was bad and this is bad. It was a song just to make everybody know there's a man his life is pregnant and he went to another woman and they sang it with such joy. Provoking art and continually up and down the country. Knew that's what he had done.
Ingrid: Yeah. So simply. And now it's up to you. You make of it. It's not a that was so bad in his life, right? You shouldn't. No, no, it's just that that's what happened.
Morna: Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely that's it.
Ingrid: That's that.
Morna: And everyone experienced with the shame and bullying and you know, you don't have to be lectured. Just.
Ingrid: Yes, you just seen it and I guess that is it at the basis of all of that is trust, Camilla says. They're very, very beautifully open to see about, you know, when did it become advantageous? That we could treat each other's eyes going somewhere. And in evolutionary times that we could really share intent and looking there, not for I'm looking then you shouldn't see that lovely banana. Now want to have. I want you to see what I'm seeing. How did that? You will talk about that on Tuesday.
Morna: Wonderful to I'll just shut up here.
Camilla: Sure. I just said it safely.
Unknown: Take this.
Unknown: If you haven't come up, make your own because it needs to be on there. If you're going to do it needs to be awake.
Unknown: Yeah.
Camilla: Yeah, yeah. I want to.
Unknown: Yes.
Unknown: Get it done.
Camilla: That's so big and yes.
Ingrid: And I assure you would love it too, if you would go to the. I mean, I have the experience not with the people that practice non but with a. You would feel. It's not something you do through your brain. It's something that.
Unknown: You really do through.
Ingrid: It makes you be different in the world. I. Experience.
Camilla: OK, this beautiful wise things being said here from Rena. Ingrid, the idea that in some sense babies are shaping and creating morality. Is everything. Wonderful idea that comes. It comes immediately out of Sara Heardys work. And this is, you know, you're you're you're making very. Making it very. Yeah, palpable is one way to say it. I'm also struck by the what you said of. The understanding among that women do not practice. Diving into. Fear and trance when they're in reproductive years with this notion that they have on anyway from their through their mental cycle and reproductive power. Men somehow need to be. Incalculated and educated in that, and it strikes me that there is a perspective on evolution that maybe I try and develop a bit more next week. That it is, as probably been said before, that fundamentally human mayors have been compared to great ape ancestry, have been really feminised. Feminised in terms of the ability to, well, feminised, in terms of inter subjectivity and. And being able to look another person who I understand what they're thinking about. And surely that starts with cooperative breeding, cooperative childcare coalitions within which men will become first, sort of orbiting and peripheral. They were drawn into by being born into those conditions is more children, of course. And actually brothers in relation. Ships may be very significant in. Developing in domestication in that sense. So there is a there is an aspect of. It's it's something which for most primates, female social capacities and MCS would be if we think of bonobos as would be. Air Force, the female social brain as such is is usually these days given priority. And men are being pulled into that. Through all kinds of mechanisms that Sarah had recorded in terms of hormone, hormone and magazines, excet tasting and so forth, yes, but this is also what you're suggesting here. Is that to actually really get to that depth of the empathy of the solar plexus, the feeling of what? Is another person. Sense. But all the the work of healing, all the work of the shaking and so forth, it's that's going on. On with the trance. This is something that the men are kind of being led to and being inculcated in. And it's as if, you know, women, women kind of have it anyway. And and it's been been drawn out and and and and raised in men. So it's it's as good as if it's a kind of feminization in some way.
Morna: That's I I was struck. Chris paper, where he describes the experience of. Trance, which is similar to this kind of feeling that it was really enlisted.
Unknown: Yeah.
Morna: On their physical qualities that I would have associated with labor. You know PM meets painters by legs are shaken.
Camilla: But pain here.
Morna: The sense of heat or fullness building here, something that needs to be expelled. And I just said that's just my labour, the whole discussion. But actually you heard it's like there are two layers to this.
Unknown: Hey.
Morna: There is the just the the peer experience of energy. That is accessible to everyone, and it's something that's been used for the community. And then there's also, I think that aspect of meals sharing and reproductivity physically experiencing, you know so much that's to do with labor and child growth. And that's where the power of the healing comes.
Unknown: Mm.
Morna: It's very exciting.
Ingrid: I've heard from an anthropologist of Venezuela anthropologists that again it's it's it's, you know, cultures shape our values that men very much share into this process.
Unknown: OK.
Ingrid: And it is just a common acceptance that men can have pregnancy symptoms when their wives are being pregnant, so they often suffer backache and other, you know.
Morna: Pregnancy symptoms because it's.
Ingrid: Accepted in their culture that that. All.
Morna: Yeah.
Ingrid: And so it is so. Very interesting.
Morna: So the Herdie says. So she she talks about the more men are holding babies.
Camilla: Changes the whole human. Yes, well.
Morna: Makeup of the father's changed, and so it's brilliant. The more you hold this beautiful kind of non privatized.
Camilla: Signature has.
Morna: The more your own body responds to, the more you're trying to them and to enjoy holding them. And it's just so much going on, even under the surface of what we can analyze or rationalize. And that's, I think, what makes this really visceral. You have to bring.
Unknown: Yes.
Morna: Quality and yes.
Unknown: Shall we open up a bit? That's anyone got questions.
Unknown: Yes.
Unknown: So contrivations.
Unknown: To make Chris.
Unknown: Just a quick question about you more. Can you tell us again the title of that, what you were reading from? Hello.
Morna: Human makes our hearts happy.
Unknown: Speaking basically, basically and.
Morna: I'll let your hats in. Hats, Saint Denis.
Camilla: So. Richard Katz is first author and business.
Morna: Thanks.
Unknown: For pointing. The greatest thing ever written on trampoline.
Camilla: Skills because they're killing. Low have a have they emphasise it's worth. Mentioning this here because. I'm thinking about timing and Moniz youthful use of bacteria theory. And of course, when you think of bacteria, it's. Good task. Which is his his watchword. But we are also talking about the beauty and the wear this morning as well with with Ellie and pH. D by the. All the beauty of the women and their senseless beauty in creating their mockery of the men and their their laughter. But what button? What the grotesque means is specifically, doesn't we have the idea that it's necessarily ugly, or necessarily, but actually it's about the it's about the ability to transform. It's about the it's not being fixed, it's about transform. It's about. Distant transformation and openness and flow. There are no boundaries. There's no fixity. So. That that idea of of what is actually happening in what's being called trance is a state of enhanced awareness that we're talking about the the men's experience with John Plassey and many other Bishop groups. It's about this show, this state of complete. Shaking men fixity, where people are re engaging with. The the state to call it this. What is it? Way of being like so-called first creation where there was timing here so returning it's chaos which is not static.
Ingrid: Inhales.
Camilla: Everything that money is. It's not static, but it is the reinvisiting and reconceptualizing of. Morality of order, that is a, that is. But it's not. It's not order been fixed. It's everything potentially changing. So the girl in her menstrual heart is changing to an animal and is changing to a hunter and and everybody must change with her. And if they don't? Then there will. Then there will be grave consequences. So transformation, the grotesque is this transformation and constant change and the lack of fixity. Which is what's happening.
Unknown: Buddies. Criticism, openings and things I say.
Unknown: Yes, that's.
Camilla: In that sense, it's not the no boundaries, yes.
Unknown: Go back. You know, if the body when it's open. All the different systems the body has is where it becomes the collective body and the laughing body. And of course laughter.
Camilla: That said, we afterwards outlined.
Unknown: The first the vagina is in the waves, and so the ****. 'S back in there.
Camilla: Yes.
Unknown: To show how the body. Speak through all the. Different bodies our bodies have.
Unknown: I.
Unknown: Sorry, right, that was Chris question, not yes.
Unknown: I was wondering. Because when you was talking about. The example with the man who was with one woman and then who went to another woman. Was running the in between the women though.
Unknown: I.
Unknown: Obviously this, I thought. Knew about this other woman or not. Do they kind of get? Do they go into conflict and then how do they resolve that in between themselves, not only in between?
Unknown: Like all other women.
Unknown: OK, you do also do like.
Camilla: Right.
Unknown: Sing me a way as they do me. Or is it a different dynamic of this movie amongst women? You should be.
Ingrid: There is very, very strong coalition amongst women and women don't go against women, but you know human characters all over the world as a saying. Yeah, I've got also.
Unknown: All sorts of.
Ingrid: You know. Open before and greedy people and India people are happy, good, lucky people and a conflict of course happens. Women will also shout at each other. Usually this is done. Again, in a in a very context. So. Say I feel you've made eyes at my husband. I might do a masambo in the morning masamba. Public speaking, so I will get. Really early in the morning and I've run across the. And I. Just tell everybody about what you do. I don't come and tell you. Blah blah blah, but obviously there will be food. Feeling it's a conflict and I express. That. And they will express it in more uncertain. They will just tell everybody about it because we are collective and then there will be comments out of. Heads are, well, leave it alone. Back to. Don't make so much noise. You. Just shut. Or rather, saying, Oh yeah, sometimes she's like that. It's it's, it's. It's out in the open. Can be. Once again, she said. Because I said, don't you tell anyone for whatever reason that was? I say I will share. Tomorrow will share some food or. But then he said, you can't ever hide. Some you can't tell Benji to hide something from other bencheri. If one Bencher knows all benjelleno, and this is so. This is so it's held by the community. So I'm like, morning, when when if a woman loses her husband, she might, you know, be a. She will scream and roll on the floor and cry. And it is allowed and it is allowed. Only should that become. For whatever reason, you know and she feels, you know, people might feel suicidal and grab a knife in type of frenzy. That is, when people will interfere only for the continuation of life. That's the only time that there is an interference and stopping something. Otherwise everything is allowed and shared, but collectively and not usually you know so much 1:00 to 1:00. Does that answer your question?
Unknown: And do they have? So you said they have like husbands and so do they.
Unknown: I I checked to that term myself.
Unknown: Don't collect the hidden.
Unknown: To the. Husband and wife when there's no weddings and contracts and things like. That I don't, I feel.
Unknown: There's no longer this. Rather than, they don't share each other like. Kind of.
Ingrid: Yeah, it's 111 penis and they call each other my. Wife but.
Unknown: OK.
Ingrid: She's.
Unknown: Can.
Unknown: You translate that to wife and I don't. I think it's quite dangerous because it it gives the impression that everybody in the world seems to have gathered.
Unknown: OK. Yeah.
Unknown: Their rates often contracts and women belongs no matter whatever.
Ingrid: Well, if a boy or a girl fall in.
Unknown: It's better to use them.
Ingrid: That. Experience in one camp, but I just heard a musical, the mother walking in Camden shouting and saying my daughters too young and. Is not good. And you know, what am I to do? And. And then what had? You know, when a boy and a girl fall in love, they will create a heart. Very quickly constructed and cover it in lovely leaves and then they sleep in it. Together.
Unknown: Can we also decide then one day not to be together and go with other people as well?
Ingrid: Yes, yes, they can decide to to go apart.
Unknown: Will be going to agree with marriage and if you just, you know, for a lovely relationship.
Unknown: Yes.
Unknown: The last but. Why on Earth would you? The state involved in the wedding when you're married.
Unknown: I mean I've.
Unknown: Never just worked at the point of it. Was, but I never. Tax advantages? Apparently, but I was being asked a little bit more about. I mean, you didn't mention it quite in this talk, but in your article about general you, you referred to communism. In sort of division by primitive communism, but you always quoted it, people, communism and. And I was wondering if you could elaborate on that because it's it might be interesting to people here what you meant by Communism in motion.
Morna: Thing we've been talking about, doesn't it tell? It's not just about. In a fixed sense, it's it's about the movement emotion created by showing. And it's important because. Traditional understandings of communism to me are kind of. But they've already kind of gone up into that web and. This, this, this Polemon is an emotion. It's kinetic. It's it's visceral, and it's constantly moving through people's bodies and through dance and through singing and through circulation of power and the community, so. It's it's like the original communism, really.
Unknown: And.
Morna: Well, I just. The politics of the areas was really. Another way of saying Communism in motion, I think.
Unknown: OK.
Unknown: I I feel I will try with one thing, which is that all the time in the back of my. Somewhere I'm I'm hearing. Voices from the very. Sexual stereotypical. You got masculine, feminine. You got this rigid gender identities and models. Nowadays, all progressive people have got the underlying. We don't find very long with the change that we make. Some agendas we, you know, we don't.
Unknown: The.
Unknown: Don't care about this. Female Rosie and Melrose on the left. So all this stuff from that sample is all a bit reactionary and I want some answers because I won't get you for answers because I get this. So let me. Time. I was sort of addressing my question to you.
Morna: OK.
Unknown: That's it.
Morna: I just my brain is going to sleep better.
Unknown: I think that's very easy because I mean you.
Morna: This morning.
Unknown: These discussions all the time. And gender in the supposed dissolution of traditional binaries is a way of adapting the ultimate flexible human for the area of all capitalism.
Unknown: It's.
Unknown: It's nothing to do with releasing the. The the the capacities human capacities including the. Motility of gender nothing for that.
Unknown: OK, my side corrected.
Unknown: And it's also neatly avoided the question of child care and. Like that. Yeah, it goes away from the subject. You know, just completely occurs, so you don't enter into that contradiction, you know.
Morna: Yeah, I think.
Unknown: Neat way of sidestepping everything. You know that you do all three of you talked about.
Unknown: It's just that my granddaughter really has an ounce and he doesn't want to be referred to as he or she and she wants to wear clothes which don't make a distinction between. And the pack is all raised. I mean, I knew it was all raised, but it's.
Camilla: Sophistication. And how to gather general practice, even in what we've been just talking about, because there's on the one hand both is kind of you mentioned the carting and the tying.
Morna: Cool.
Camilla: Opposite medicines is so important and so on the one hand, there's this. The men kind of being tied into the women. And becoming as some sense. But on the other hand, this is this cutting. Edge men are going to do shop and they're going. Be so invested and. Charge and that men can be. But on the other hand, they're hunting and killing a gay man. More is like pregnancy. So is this oppositions and these comings together?
Morna: And then yeah, that's just what I've never said.
Unknown: Done.
Morna: Know the stereotype in London, male and female. I was thinking exactly what. It's so much more sophisticated than that. We're talking about a sophisticated. Political and moral economy. That's what I would like to bring up more. You know, almost, almost moving away from the debate about, you know, has occurred from women, men, gender stereotyping and bring it out into. Political morals, you know, social. Communitarian. Concerns and oriented all the time because this is what takes it away from, you know, men and women being fixed categories is that constant cutting and Tang back and forth, slippery to and fro. At the center of which our children, the brilliance. The system. It's containing the children in a way that allows them to thrive, I think. And when you look at the kinds of systems we are now living in, everything about them is. Is to do with Mote containing the kids, not protecting the kids, not putting their needs first. You know, I mean people try individually and sometimes in little communities to do that, but I'm talking about the big public. Corporate capitalist hierarchical machine that prioritizes everything except children. Really.
Camilla: Or or. Let's say it parasitises on. The fact that parents and and the atomised kind of families will.
Unknown: Prioritize children enormously within their.
Unknown: You know little.
Camilla: Spaces and then on top of that Hut is the the hierarchy of the capitalist. Very much male dominated. Their children are just pushed into the edges, where they're going to be looked after by them in a private way. So it's parasitising on that for reproduction of society.
Morna: Yeah.
Camilla: And and and that will reproduce all this fixity agenda that, that people are battling against. Are rightly rebelling against. And I I'm not quite sure. I feel so dismissive about the the non binary challenge as as Robin would. Because I see it relating to what other hunter gatherers are talking about with first creation that you reenter that you work and work and work to reenter first creation together where everything.
Unknown: Becomes possible. This is the place. Where everything can be shaped because the world was stolen. I'm in part about transformation.
Camilla: Is that you can experience the other so. Can become the other so.
Morna: Select 510 says you're not talking about the private individual body. We're talking about the great generic body of the people. Not all the people. It's it's going well beyond binary sense and into a far more. Empowering way of.
Unknown: Two minutes if.
Unknown: We're going to.
Unknown: Start off. I mean we could.
Unknown: Go on, but I normally. Have. Stop and give you the pass anymore. How much does it?
Unknown: Start over. So.
Unknown: I.
Camilla: Just kind of this society system. Kids, you would.
Unknown: Work like the wolf.
Unknown: Just going.
Unknown: 5 implications does that mean? European Society, we don't have to work so hard.
Unknown: By contrast.
Morna: Items and for doing I think we work very hard in another way as I think we work very hard at. Staying here, you know at. Living our lives in this disassociated state takes a huge amount of energy, and that energy, like you said, is being fed directly into all the parasitic golden. Bodies and and forces that are thriving on. You know, but. I think we're not working hard in the way. They are. Because whenever you first look at the literature and the healing. I remember people years ago when I decided to start a hundred other senators lie around in mongongo, not some dancing. Unable to. It's such an easy life. Actually. I it reminded me 'cause. Read this book. Long time ago, coming back to it. I thought this is just incredible effort and work going on constantly, constantly, every day and you're working with your whole self to to kind of make your energy available to other people. To tap into the collective to make sure that things are staying equal, women are working constantly. This is like it's it's like any real revolutionary activity. It can't happen once it has to be. Constant. It has to be reiterated again and again and again and again. That's what's happening. So that's the work. And then you know, in some ways were very immortal. Learned to be obedient. We've learned to be passive because that's what's being inculcated from the very earliest moments. If you think about cots. And dummies and prams and you know all the ways that babies are clothed off, they're physically clothed. And there's that. Then later, when it moves into discipline, the sense of being obedient and obeying the authority, which becomes later essential authority. And Hobbs really brought that out. Everyone loves you. This idea. Not everyone, but it's a loved idea with social contract will come together and agree to their ruler. Put our fear in him and he'll protect us. That's. That really is that the obedience. And I just I think here you're seeing what can happen when humans are not being obedient when when power is located in the body and lived in that way. It seems to me like it's not at all land landing. It's daily labor.
Unknown: We have to remind us of the there's more and more.
Unknown: Hello.
Unknown: I mean, you get this.
Morna: Yes.
Unknown: Part of the contract.
Morna: Of course.
Unknown: And the.
Unknown: For sure, yeah.
Unknown: It's.
Morna: Whistles. Yeah.
Unknown: But we see that James says the contract is between us.
Morna: These were the later refinements of a test, but I think because you know people like.
Unknown: Let's it's getting more than the project.
Morna: Stephen Pinker, you know, put great faith in things starting with, you know that, that Hobbs notion of Hobosian notion. So I know of course it was refined and argued, but still it has informed a lot of our political. Philosophy.
Unknown: OK. I'm suggesting we stop 3 or 4 minutes but not hear the question or contribution.
Unknown: I mean anything that's that natural to me is to be human is sort of visceral body associated. Joy and confidence, these things which are so repressed in our society, has to come out somewhere. And I think what is it in our society?
Unknown: I.
Unknown: Comes out with this collective. Expression of enthusiasm with such high, very much with the body and the nearest thing apart from football like you think of, is actually war on that sense in which when countries go to war, although it's very different from, you know, the kind of carnivals and which was you?
Unknown: Oh.
Unknown: About in some ways there's kind. Some math, it certainly involved. Searching. There's this passions of war, no matter how old it is. Certainly the young men that I. With right. To have. Visualize these machinery. Machinery. Something. Something with their bodies and things in the world. And I don't know, there's something, but I kind of think this is what this is. One of those revolutions always go wrong is because they get misdirected into them. And I I don't know what answer for all that and I suppose any answers. If we do. Try to make a revolution in. Future we have to avoid war and we have. Go towards which one carnival? Secondly, stop.
Camilla: Sexier will be right now.
Unknown: So. So in some ways it's, I mean, as a woman, anthropologists are lining up there, you know, I mean, I've been agonising like some of us here about how, why revolution started in.
Unknown: The past and.
Unknown: How we can make them succeed in? Future and learn and the. Got the answers. You're you're beginning to come up with some choices. A.
Unknown: This life.
Unknown: Pass which give US 3 keys about how we can get things right the next time as we do have to build a society somehow. Revolution, as Chris says. The communism works unlike.
Morna: Right. So.
Ingrid: I think the collective problem happens every week onwards, everywhere in Hamilton and cloud employee women come together and quality and time. I mean, we have it on larger schedule only when we have the big carnivals, Notting Hill Carnival and.
Camilla: Thank you.
Unknown: Yes.
Unknown: If we could make.
Ingrid: This bigger than.
Unknown: I guess we would because that is rather than this, this, this sort of, you know aggressive male potential that is the dopamine need.
Camilla: No.
Ingrid: Read and that has nothing to do with oxytocin and trust that we are talking about here.
Unknown: And that is really coming out when men and women come together and party. If we could enlarge that then.
Unknown: We have a kind of culture, also a love.
Unknown: If you think about.
Unknown: The open borders and it.
Unknown: Needs to be more. Because it's so corporate, you know these.
Unknown: Yes, hurry up.
Unknown: If you.
Unknown: Want to go to a festival? You have to pay?
Ingrid: Hurry up.
Unknown: People here experience Liverpool on Friday nights.
Unknown: You're not very open to the party.
Unknown: I mean.
Camilla: Quite the New Castle and inferior.
Unknown: Great way up way up the way wolf up.
Camilla: Shortcuts and warpage.
Unknown: It's with a Shorty person. He will play Roto, turns just game for the last just game. Just go get it.
Unknown: I'm going to say that especially. If you are, you know, the San Asian or something like that. So I think if we say so. Yeah. We are really alienated from just about everything. You know, you can think of. And there's about 10 of solid 18 football, I say. But a. To do you know, with the sort of imperialistic parts you know, jingoism and what have you, any racist sort of behavior. That's not the kind of collective. I have in. Yeah, but on the other hand. In modern world, you know revolutions have gone wrong. But you really got. Defend your rights. You know, there comes a time when you have practice, let's say, on the nonviolence for a very long time. Some communities have practiced it for thousands of years, and it's never worked for them. You know, because it's a. Issue at the end of the day. I'm coming from.
Unknown: I.
Unknown: Let's say you know so, so low cost in India. For me to go and reach to them. Hey, look good without money and tactics. You know, I've been doing that for a hell of a long time.
Unknown: Hey.
Unknown: Yes.
Unknown: Didn't go wrong.
Unknown: I don't have the solution, but all all I say is you know that yes, you're right in the sense that you know. Hunter gatherers are. Not alienated. You know the sort of Marxist sense. Their whole they ought to be whole human beings, whereas we've lost it long time ago. Actually, in my own community we lost him.
Unknown: Mm.
Unknown: I had actually seen it being lost. Share everything you know. To do things for everybody, right? If you got too much right. You are no good. That's when I was brought up. I'm finding that in my old days that. No longer. There because that has gone that concert. Sharing take care of people has gone. It is no other matter for me but themselves and the the length that people will go to screw things out of. You can just horrendous. So I really sympathize, you know, but the traditional hunter gatherer societies.
Unknown: We're going to sort of starting this morning kind of you going to last with.
Morna: I don't know. I've probably said enough really, but I've said enough I think. Sorry. But I I feel like unless it unless. So much more becomes passionate. In the sense that we feel it passionately, you know, like I I talked about morality being painful and empowering this kind of morality is, is is sensed, it's felt it in the gut but in your lungs it's in your stomach. Hurts, but actually we all experience that. It's just. We don't have a language for it anymore and and and so you know, when you look at a lot of the writing, a lot of the academic work. A lot of the. Ethnography, that's around so much of it has been blared of that passionate quality, and it, it seems like you know that just bringing the caring what's there, naturally bringing that evolutionary imperative to care for one another and to touch one another. You know. People are terrified to do that. You know you would start. It's like a ripple effect and you start to bring in this passion. Sense of, you know, we're defending ourselves. We're defending our children. We're defending our communities, our families. And as an academic, it's all right to say that, you know, having done my PhD at the University of Edinburg. H would have been very frowned upon to bring in any political slant. You present your argument, and it's really theoretical and really analytical. Sophisticated. But you know you don't tend to make too much of political commentary on and. And I think that unless you start breaking through that in academia, where which is where a lot of of great thinking and great information.
Ingrid: Is pulled.
Morna: It has. It has to be going out. It has to be. Injected with blood that has to be passionate and it has to be. I take on another quality. Because really what we're talking about is the survival of the species. I mean we it's not, you know, 40 years ago you might have said this and said, well, you know, who knows what will happen. Might all get better, but we're talking about the survival now of our kids. I have children. So England not sitting on the fence anymore. I feel like. We have to. We really have to start arguing this strongly. Bring in the passion, bring in the fact that I care about this and and then you start to change the feeling, you know, of what's possible. What can we say? What can we bring out into the public culture? What parts of the body are lost from the public culture? The the female, the reproductive, the, the sensual, the tactile. And people are are incredibly ingenious and thinking about ways of you know when when we think together, of how you could start to reintroduce that to the public culture. But first you need to not it. It feels like there's a lot of withholding of that personal. Passion. And the ability to be hurt by what's happening around us.
Earlier Discussion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF6QLPmgKRE
Morna Finnegan: ... It was like a calling song. And I never, one of the things that I regret is that I don't, I didn't write down the name or I don't remember the name, but it was a kind of like, calling in something good, calling in a gift or something that was going to be of use to the community. because they, of course, knew that we were trying to negotiate an entry to that camp. But I just remember this feeling of there was a tangible quality to the music. And it was kind of characteristic of the group that we ended up being able to move into in that everything was done in that very kind of collective, dynamic, musical atmosphere. there was a feeling that the people were continually using the whole body and the voice to make a statement about, the kind of society that they were and what they valued and the fact that, the first night that we were in the camp, they danced Ijengi and just there's there are a lot of connections that I think get left out of the final the final sort of academic piece. And that I would like to look at more closely in the context of what I'm saying about power. I mean, the fact that first night as well, the two older women, the two eldest women seem to be controlling Ajengi. And again, really, really physical, really, everything being stamped out, everything being kind of pushed into the most public domain by women, physically, linked, interlinked. And the fact that, when one woman danced, there were always a few others at her back. Or if a young woman started up a song, there would instantly be 10 others there. You can feel a different understanding and use of the body at play, you know, from the moment you enter that kind of community.
Chris Knight: So, but the ejengi is the men's ritual, and you're saying these ladies, these women had a control over that?
Morna: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's one of the things that I most clearly took note of, because I had read, you know, I've read a lot of Jerome's descriptions of ejengi. And I knew it wasn't like a sustained two, three-day ejengi. It was being performed because we were there in camp for the first night. But the fact that these two, it was actually the two eldest women who called the Jengi in and then kind of controlled him while he was dancing.
Chris: That's very, yeah.
Morna: Helped by a lot of the male dancers.
Camilla Power: That's very interesting because I've been in a camp with the Hadza where it has been the older women who actually were holding Epeme instruments and so forth. And of course, Ejengi and Epeme, the Hadza ritual, were both supposed to belong to women originally.
Morna: Yeah. Yeah, it's very, very, very interesting to watch how, they really are like the power source. These elder women, they're kind of scary, whenever they, when they assert themselves like that, when they dance like that, and they have a lot, you can tell they have a lot of power by the way they conduct themselves. But the fact then that it's kind of like the, what's really interesting is that, and this is also kind of thinking about the power, Camilla, in the way that I'm thinking about it now, is the fact that it's never allowed to stop. So there's almost never a moment where this has dropped. Like you have the big ritual moments or the dance moments where people are really mobilized and you have the elder women controlling things. But even through the night, I remember lying in desperation trying to get to sleep because there was always somebody kind of a few people just holding it, just keeping things going. There was always this buzz of those, a few lines of song being sung, a wee bit of drumming. And that's my memory of being at Mbula, is that there were very few times, maybe around noon and through the early part of the afternoon, things got quiet. Otherwise, it's not just motion, it's also the voice in motion as well as the body. It's keeping this charge going all the time in the social kind of ritual space.
Chris: You've talked about the body a lot, but not specifically Eros. And your paper was the politics of Eros. What's most difficult for people in the West to understand is that women can have paths through being erotic.
Morna: Well, you know, Chris, I think you're... Yeah, eros, you see, this is what is interesting. Eros is not really in its old classical sense. It's not just the erotic. Because we can get lost in this, you know, that it's about being sexy, it's about being erotic. That is very much part of a constellation. I mean, giving birth is erotic. dancing with your friends is erotic. it's kind of like it's embedded in a much deeper understanding of the erotic. of what Eros is. And actually, Barbara Ehrenrech talks about this. She says, we tend to, we do with erotic what we do with everything else. We isolate it, we privatize it, and we turn, we pull it back to the individual woman's body, which then, you know, is an object of desire. She says, Eros, in many cultures and in the old sense, is closer to how Jerome talks about this, actually. It's about feeling fantastic together. It's about the sensual connection, the sensuous connection that is made, and the fact that it's not about the pair bond. It's not about romance, although it's, you know, that's there, the desire and attraction is very powerful, you know, in these cultures. but it's taken out of its individual or, dual frame and set into a collective frame. I mean, I think that the level of charge that you feel from those women, it's It's as much about collective desire, and it's as much about the fact that the female body has achieved this powerful, collective, attractive voice. It feels, just feels like, and I said that actually in the paper. Eros is to do with laughter. It's to do with joy. It's to do with sex. It's to do with desire. But it's not just, you know, confined to being sexy. That really doesn't do it justice.
Chris: Yeah, But it, yeah. But it doesn't exclude that either. I mean, that's the point. It's all these separations that we have in the West, which are themselves as the root of the oppression, of course.
Morna: Well, they've been defined for a long time by a grammar that didn't arise out of the female body. When you talk about patriarchy, you're talking about a whole different language. And I think you start to hear a different language when you're looking at what comes from the female body as it has a voice and a shape and culture. it's a very different thing.
Camilla: Mona, can I ask about your description, corporeal morality, and how you contrast that? So you're talking about morality arising from literally the skin from contact, from the experience of the body, shared experience, contrasted to what you call command and control. So one is about this yearning and desire and the other is about kind of punishment. Do you want to say more on that?
Morna: Yeah, I mean, that again, I feel like I've been looking at power from different angles for a long time. And that this is another kind of Ave. is understanding how morality works in societies that aren't based on command and control. So punitive, kind of fenced types of morality that have to be inflicted from the outside. I think things like Aquila, Nom, are really, really fascinating cultural centres for looking at morality, because of course what they do is they place morality in the body and actually right around that kind of core reproductive centre in the solar plexus. So in the womb area is where morality is lodged. The cosmology, the kind of the philosophy nearly of morality is there. But you can't If you look at nom, if you look at Aquila, it can't be activated alone. You can't, it's what I was saying at the start about power. You can't use it for yourself. It's useless if you try to use it only for yourself. And there are stories from the Juntois about dancers who tried to use their nom for their own benefit and end up kind of getting very much marginalized by the rest of the community. Aquila. Aquila is has there's so much integrity in these in these corporeal terms, you know, they've come right out of the body, but they're full of integrity because you can't privatise them.
Chris: Perhaps just to remind everybody, because some people might not know that Aquila is this very, very wonderful and amazing central concept of the Benjetti, which connects blood, the blood of the womb, menstrual blood, the blood of game animals with the moon, and conservation and well-being and fertility. It's a concept which we just, you can't imagine having in the West. Let me know, because obviously over here, the moon is a bit suspect. It's probably moonshine and menstrual blood, you're not even allowed to talk about it. And so.
Camilla: And with the Hadza, they are, they're words that are untranslatable and that have a lot of range of meaning. They really encompass the whole cosmos. But as Morna, I think it's such an amazing suggestion Morna makes that they have this root in the body. and they are rooted in this feeling. And above all, it's the question of sharing that feeling of visceral, what Morna expresses, this visceral, inter-subjective experience shared together is the root and the basis of morality and the root of understanding all this range of meanings that become apparent to people.
Chris: The concept you use more is the articulate body. The women's body is collective, is a collective body which has a voice and is very, very, very articulate.
Camilla: And that expression comes from who?
Morna: Do you link that to? Who do I link the articulate body to? I mean...
Camilla: The historian or whatever you call it.
Morna: Sorry, you're breaking up. Camilla, say it again.
Camilla: Yeah, sorry. I'm just referring so people get it. The articulate body is coming from Bakhtin. And that whole idea that laughter is the kind of source. So we're getting an idea that laughter itself is the source for morality itself.
Morna: Absolutely. Bactin is really, I mean, I remember when I was, the paper was going to the JRAI, someone, one of the reviewers suggested taking Bactin out.
Chris: No.
Morna: And was he, I don't know, I obviously they were anonymous. I have this reviewer in mind as a he was saying, well, this isn't relevant to, the hunter-gatherer ethnography. It's just a random kind of reference that you could do without. And my argument was that really we needed back teens' ideas to fully understand the massive political, philosophical, historical, implications of this way of being the body. And he just talks so beautifully about the great generic body of the people and the fact that it was expressed through laughter, through irreverence, you know, through being, stamping through the public space, being body, being connected. being explicit, sexually explicit. you would have the hag mother who was, leaking milk and had death, spraying out of her.
Chris: It wasn't just any old part of the body, it wasn't your forehead so much, it was the lower bodily stratum, which is the source of all the laughter, your **** and your belly, your **** and your everything. That's one of those things are collectivized. They've got such a powerful subversive voice, turning the world upside down.
Morna: Yeah, I mean, also, if you think about Bactane and this lower bodily stratum, And then you think about the Benjele women's lyrics when they're really kind of taking control. And the language is so graphic. It's so earthy. And it's really like the words of these songs are saying things like, the penis gives birth to nothing. It's no competition. It died already. The vagina wins. You know, and these are at the very heart of the public cultural domain. So it's very much Baktin, really, but organically happening and real, because Baktin was reflecting on those cultures after they had already been annihilated by this very kind of heavy, you know, the imposed morality, the control and command system. had already been able to silence that body. But to find it happening in Mbule and then to not use the insights that Baktin brings to this would have been nuts. We have to have eloquent theoretical frames for this stuff, compelling ways to look at it. Also because for us, I think, it is It's, I mean, for us as in people raised in these kinds of cultures, you need a way to understand how the alternative operates. The Bendeli speak for themselves, but we need the tools.
Chris: Just to say briefly, Jerome and I are writing a book. It's called When Eve Laughed, The Origin of Laughter. And we were both totally convinced that Mwajo, the Benjelli women's rival performance to make, you know, take the **** out of some idiotic, usually guy that's been throwing his weight around of being a complete idiot. It's that kind of laughter is the is the first word when that when all that laughter breaks out and it's and it's gesticulated and expressed without words, but it's mostly laughter that collective voice. If you want to know what the first word ever spoken in human language was, it was that it was that belly laugh. So, I mean, so fantastic.
Morna: Yeah, It's so interesting because I have been, I just finished a book totally going off the, off the, down a different Rd. here, but I just finished a book called Cave in the Snow by Tenzin Palmo. He's A Buddhist nun. about her experience, of she went in retreat into a cave for 13 years. And she's a fascinating woman, really, really fascinating. But one of the things that she committed herself to, she said, having understood a lot of the Buddhist, you know, history and tradition, And having committed her life to Buddhism, she came up with a statement. She said, I'm going to achieve enlightenment as a woman, in the body of a woman. Because this is where we bring our riches, you know, into all areas. For her, it was the spiritual. But I mean, the cultural, the political, the social, you know, education. To bring the language of the female, the collective female body, out of that individual biological framework and place it in a collective framework just kind of explodes a lot of the assumptions that people live with about what's possible for us as humans. Yeah. I was also thinking about, I guess, I mean, going back to things like Aquila and Nom and the ways that we can understand what's happening in these kinds of society. I think it's also really important not to lose the really detailed ethnographic, information that comes through and things like Aquila and Nam, the step-by-step process of how these things are employed, the, like the graphics almost of the rituals as they're used. going back and forth all the time between the really intricate ethnographic detail and what it gives you and the theory and the reflections on, other kinds of society.
Chris: Do you want to give us a taste of that detail in connection with Aquila? Not that maybe not everyone here in this.
Camilla: Not everyone will be familiar with the terms, so expand a little maybe.
Morna: Yeah. I mean, in terms of, well, I mean, in terms of things like Aquila, or not, actually, there's this weaving together of female reproductive fluids and the body with male labour, male kind of biological concerns. So, you know, you have controls around menstrual blood, as one of the big kind of Aquila signals that are linked to hunting luck and linked to game blood, linked to pregnancy and childbirth, but also linked to, from what I understand from Jerome's work, especially where he writes about older people cultivating their aquila. It's also linked to energetic power, dancing power, you know, the ability to communicate with spirits, to become a combetti, to be able to be articulate ritually, So all of these things, male, female bodies on the reproductive level are being woven into the whole kind of ritual, spiritual.
Chris: Domain? When Jerome asked one of his friends about Aquila, the answer was, well, it's about woman's biggest husband, and woman's biggest husband is the moon, and the moon gives The moon's blood in you is that source of Aquila. And of course, the moon waxes and wanes and it has this, as you call it, flux and periodicity. And so the power comes and it goes, comes and it goes. So yeah. Wonderful.
Morna: I mean, dialogism is another concept of bactines. And you see that so clearly there as well, where different bodies, you know, are being used to work, almost to work against each other to create energy, to create the motion of this pendulum. That's another thing that's really interesting. And you see that with Aquila too. The fact that there's women's Aquila, there's men's Aquila, just like there are women's spirits, women's songs, men's spirits, men's songs, but these things are always working on each other and kind of moving through each other and creating this energy, this what the Juntois call heat, you know, the ideal is to, it's almost, you think of quantum physics nearly, things having to work on each other in this very controlled ritual. way so that they can move past dualism, move into something. And the descriptions from especially a lot of the Japanese ethnographers and things that I witnessed like Bibuja, the dance for joy. Eventually at a certain point you have this working on each other kind of almost aggressively and then it all moves out into euphoria, a feeling of intoxication, this sense of people feeling really good about themselves. I was looking back over the article as well, and the terms that Michelle Kisluk uses when she talks about women's dances are all, you know, euphoria, intoxication, enchantment, beauty, joy. And the language is very much to do with feeling good, people feeling really connected. And I think that is really the key thing, because if you get stuck in duality, if you get stuck in, okay, you know, women are powerful because they're women, they're very much, you know, using their bodies to assert power. You have to also take the next step into the collective ritual domain where the work that's done creates something that takes people beyond, you know, even sex, individual, the individual biological body. It's really an incredible virtuous system.
Sammy: Yeah, I was just going to ask because in your 2018 presentation on Tarag on the, you talk, I think you're talking to your PhD. And then in your JRA article, you didn't touch on the subject of, I suppose, the establishment of governments and governments and society. You talked about sort of Hobbs, and then you talked about what we're living in now. And then you talked about, obviously, this, the idea of what you're talking about now is the idea of this energy, almost like a ball of energy touching your solar plexus, sort of around everywhere, and we each have a part of it. And then you sort of briefly mentions natural law. And I just did a quick Google search for natural law on Wikipedia and it says it's the sort of foundation of the enlightenment trying to get away from the divine rights of kings. But the history goes back to sort of Greek, Greek society and Roman society. Is there? Because you said it was sort of the, someone has to reason and determine what natural law is because couldn't we say that in terms of Rob Criss's theory is talking about in terms of how we became human in terms of women's power, that women said this isn't natural, this is the natural law and this is how we establish it? Because you seem to be sort of making a distinction between natural law and what you're talking about in terms of Just waking up every day. we have to make society every single day. Women have to do their songs in the crowd of lions, say, denigrating male genitalia, and men have to sort of fight back a bit. You're sort of making a distinction between what a natural law is between what you're talking about. So why did you not, why did you sort of disagree with the natural law elements or have you done much research into that, what I'm saying, or?
Morna: Not really. I mean, I was, what I was really looking at, I was trying to separate out the understanding of, Hobbes's understanding of law and power and how a society can function. And comparing it kind of more with the Rousseauian model, where you have cooperation and negotiation, dialogism as opposed to the kind of monologic system. I think, I mean, We can talk about law. It's an interesting idea to place in the context of these kinds of societies, egalitarian, gender egalitarian societies. But what I was saying about the fact that things are very much centered in the body and held in the body. Also, I mean, Jerome has talked about this This understanding of how law or morality, shared ethics operates through the mnemonics, you know, of the body itself. The mnemonic devices are things like menstrual blood and, you know, semen and milk and the moon, game blood, they're very elemental, earthy devices. And sometimes I think if we lean too much on the idea of law, you lose that kind of sense of the way things are being held in, coming out of and returning to the body all the time. But more than anything, what I wanted to do by looking back at the idea of law that Hobbes introduces was to compare it with what we're seeing here, rather than getting, you know, going into a deep analysis of the kind of legal system, the kind of authority framework Hobbs spoke about and that was later developed, to look at how people like the Benjelli or the Juntwaag almost go in another direction.
Camilla: Well, can laughter lay down the law, in fact, because it's not a, it's not something incorporated in texts or put into legal statutes. but laughter can operate to create a kind of law in these societies.
Morna: Yeah, and also the, it's, for a long time, I think I was really missing the, fact that, yeah, laughter seems to be central. I mean, laughter is like a loosener anyway. But the, Also things, that you don't hear so much about when we're talking about how a society might regulate itself and function, like, laughter, beauty, happiness, joy, that these things could become principles that also have a direct impact on people's willingness to participate in the group and willingness, for example, to engage in these ritual repartees that gives such a presence and a voice to the female body.
Camilla: I remember reading particularly from Dasha Bombyakova's thesis about Masana, which obviously Jerome knows and Ingrid knows so much about, and this incredibly positive value that everybody would take part in Masana, which is again one of these so difficult to translate terms of collaborative play that can go from children's games all the way to spirit plays and rituals. But it's such that it's that expression of joy that the people are going to share that joy and that there's such a strong value that they will participate in that. In the meantime, just.
Chris: In the meantime, I've just got a message from my daughter and she's just sharing this around. As men are more vulnerable to COVID-19, Has anyone considered allowing women and children out of lockdown first? We could run the testing for a few weeks, see how things go on men's day at home, baking banana bread and clapping.
Camilla: Particularly older white men maybe. I don't know. That might work good. I've got a question. questions from people joining in, because there must be some, people must be finding this, some of this quite amazing material in terms of its presentation and the emphasis on how women get power. How is that expressed? What can we learn out of it? What can we get from it? Anybody like? Yeah.
Naphysa Awuah: I had a question to. I am Nafisa. I'm very interested in like theatre. So I was very intrigued by the use of, yeah, carnivalesque and this theatrical theory and pushing more towards playing on the word, you know, playing on the word play. And I was kind of interested in what you might think about the ways in which we interpret drama and theatre in the West include dress. So I was, and I don't know very much about the subject, but I was kind of interested in what you might think about or what you had to say, ethnographically speaking, about the way that dress translates into morality. You mentioned kind of briefly that men wore skirts, women wear skirts in this community. Kind of how that feeds into the ritualistic elements of the whole, yeah, of the society as a whole, how dress feeds into those elements. I was kind of interested if there was anything to say about that.
Morna: So how people's dress is relevant to ritual or to the egalitarian ethos, you mean?
Naphysa: Yeah, kind of how it feeds into rituals and as well as gender and kind of talking about this corporeal morality, kind of elements of nakedness perhaps. I don't know much about this particular group of people, but I would imagine that there's kind of a different than we have in the West, different ideas about modesty, about shame, about body parts on show and the public and in the public domain. So I'm kind of wondering more about that, perhaps.
Morna: Okay, my first thought is probably that Jerome and Ingrid would give you a fuller answer to the question of, clothes, maybe, clothes that are appropriate for, particularly like, I'm thinking of ritual, ritual clothes, ritual, costume or masking?
Chris: Just to say, Camilla's posted on Facebook your photograph, and it was taken down on the basis that it was ***********.
Camilla: I used one of the very beautiful photos you took at Mbulu of the collective group where some of the women were topless, obviously, as per normal, and there were women with babies of the breast and so on. But of course, Facebook, exemplifying a command and control patriarchal morality or policing, said, you can't use that photo, take it away. So I fooled Facebook and put it up anyway. But it was just a beautiful, ironic example of the difference between a corporeal morality, where people have skin to skin contact and feeling each other all the time, compared to Whatever Facebook represents.
Morna: I find it really interesting that at Mbula, the traditional dress was all... So the fact that the, it was definitely women who were insisting on, not covering up because we were there. And I think when you come into a community for the first time, you create a certain amount of formality. And the fact that they were quite assertive about, coming forwards to us and also not like a lot of the younger guys put on T-shirts and, whatever collection of jeans or shorts they had. But the girls and the women, didn't and were, seemed to form the kind of the core, the cultural core in terms of representing, themselves physically. I don't know if that makes sense. I think you have to go back to an understanding, like Camilla says, of Contact, skin contact being really fundamental. And the fact that there's no shame in particularly exposing breasts, because these, they're as much as anything. You need to be able to feed a baby at short notice. And there's an assertion made about the fact that if you are breastfeeding, if you are lactating, you're beautiful, you're fertile, and your body is something that is powerful. So I don't know if that answers the question.
Jerome Lewis: Well, I think there's some interesting points you've raised there, and the question of nudity is something which people like Bambingelle are criticised by their neighbors, and it forms part of the sort of classic insults that they receive, that they walk around naked, that people don't know how to wear clothes properly, that they're somehow disrespectful to others by not wearing clothes when they appear in villages and other places like that. And so these kinds of attitudes over time when they're drummed into you again and again have made some people feel more, embarrassed is not the right word, but conscious of their nudity perhaps. And so people do put clothes on when they're, particularly when they're going to below their neighbours' places. But within the forest space that people inhabit, nudity is encouraged. It's something which, I mean, it's not nudity in the sense of taking all your clothes off. People keep a cash sex, a loincloth on. And in Ethiopia, for instance, where I was working, people were genuinely nude there. And they thought that wearing clothes was a sign of weakness. So it was a very different attitude. that you're somehow ashamed of your body if you're wearing clothes and you shouldn't be ashamed of your body. But in the Benjeli case, they even have a verb for mixing up your bodies, which really refers to the business of how you sit with others and how you share space with others. And it's quite interesting seeing everyone on the Zoom here all in their separate little pods. Not even, I mean, no touching possible, of course, but not even any melting, blending of images. So we're all separate. And this is something that Benjele really think of as somehow unhealthy. So I'm just going to join the pod. And so what it really is about is this resting your body against those who are near you. And it's not arresting which is imposing. It's arresting which is about sharing that physicality. And there's a really strong bonding which happens when you regularly share skin touch with people. And of course, this is not sexualized. This is just about feeling comfortable. It's about feeling the sense of the warmth, the physical warmth of people around you. There's a very sweet study done by Barry Hewlett, which I have no idea how he I mean, he told me how he did it, but anyway. So he asked people to get on the bed that they slept in and show him how they had been sleeping. And he was comparing the amount of square meters that an individual requires to sleep. And it turns out that the relatives of the Menjeli in the north that he studied, each individual occupies about 0.4 of a metre squared when they go to sleep. What that means is that people are lying in great piles of bodies, mixing their legs up and their arms up and just sprawling across one another in a very intimate sense of closeness with those around them. And I think it really illustrates very well this importance of keeping that skin contact going. The endorphins it produces Anyone who's been through the blessing of giving birth will now be told to make sure they have skin contact with the baby as soon as it comes out. And these really are very important parts of how human beings build love. Love is a chemical process as well as an effective process. And there are some very core physical practices we could all do, and they increase our feelings of affection, of care, of love for others.
Naphysa: And just to add to that, perhaps it kind of feeds into this idea of Eros that we've created in modern society, which naturally links the erotic to the pornographic and makes it difficult for us to kind of imagine, you know, someone that you might hug with clothes on. If you see them at the beach in a bikini, it would be, you know, absurd to put your chest against theirs. And this idea that our clothes form this layer of modesty rather than, you know, being something or intimacy being a feeling, which can be extended from skin to skin contact. And I think that's something that we've definitely lost more in a Western society, Westernized kind of, yeah, clothes, there's modesty kind of society. We don't understand, perhaps as well, the idea that intimacy can be non-pornographic, physical intimacy can be non-pornographic, can be non-sexual, non, you know, can be about emotional desire. right? Or, I'm just wondering if that rings true, perhaps?
Jerome: Yes, I think it really does. I mean, that's the heart of it. And it is a tragedy, really, that we've so sexualized human bodies that we can no longer, in a sort of comforting and comfortable way, share that kind of contact with the people that we care about. Or we can, but of course, it starts getting misinterpreted easily and not understood.
Morna: I wonder if that's because also because we're, not connected in the way that, say the Benj L.A.R., the fact that the loss of connection and the the focus on separation, the focus on people being kind of individuals, individual egos with a whole array of things closing them off or shutting them down. It's like what Barbara Ehrenrich says, you lose not only the connection, but you lose this general kind of sensual, malleable, thing that happens whenever you have routine contact. I mean, I think the fact that when people move together constantly with skin contact, constantly touching one another, it's like you said, Jerome, it's the, almost like the chemistry of egalitarianism. the ability to share, the ability to trust changes. It's not intellectual, it's not theoretical, it's not even political. It's really, you know, a kind of physical, chemical, organic process to feel that level of connection. If you think about it, the fact that it's things now we're moving into this virtual kind of existence, it's been increased by the current situation. But I've been saying it for a long, time, this idea that we're connecting using virtual media. And it seems that people are more and more disconnected, more and more uncomfortable with each other physically. and there are ways that this stuff can be used that are useful, but it just seems to be part of a step further back from really kind of deep, physical, sensual, chemical connection that we need, because we have however many hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary precedent to it. And it's all the things that, I value culturally come out of that. They come out of those kinds of really deep visceral connections, blood connections, earth connections that, you know, Zoom just doesn't do.
Chris: My daughter was just mentioning another thing, which is that when the government said, you're only allowed to go take exercise once a day, I mean, obviously, when you're told you're only allowed once a day, I mean, a lot of people think, I'm going to sneak in another day, another few hours of exercise. So there's far more people sneaking around, trying to get into the park and they're probably normal. And with any luck, Having been told, obviously understandably, that we mustn't hug each other and all that stuff, maybe it will be a huge thirst to get really with each other once, once we're free of this very, very strange moment of, I mean, that's hopes that we really appreciate. tactile affection, now that we've been denied it for so long and really appreciate being out and doing real things with the birds and the bees and the squirrels and the trees, after having told we're only allowed to do it in little short spells.
Camilla: Social distancing, unfortunately, feeds into a kind of command and control authoritarian hierarchy. It enables it terribly. So we've really got to summon a resistance to and feel like rebels against it in some sense. Obviously though, without endanging ourselves and so. How do we do that? How do we create this movement? Because I was thinking, I was talking to a friend today on e-mail, Jonathan, I don't think he could come in today, which was sad. And I sent him your beautiful old paper from Oxford, corporeal morality. And he was talking about the, you know, what are we going to do to resist and build the better world? And I was thinking of the NHS now is almost a collectivized female pan-ethnic comes from all four quarters of the world body, which of course the ruling class is currently cutting off bleeding chunks to privatize it. So we've got this privatization versus a real collectivized, and in some ways the NHS as well, it's never been more under attack. But also it's never been more powerful symbolically as this collective. And of course, it's not totally female, but it has a female bodily aspect to it. I don't know.
Chris: We've got Danny here as well.
Camilla: Yeah, we've got NHS workers here.
Chris: Some workers here. I don't know if they want to.
Camilla: No, I'm not saying everybody's female, but it's got a...
Chris: Danny told us last week that he was working in a matriarchy. So I don't know if you want to. Expand on that, Danny. You'll have to unmute. Unmute, unmute, unmute, unmute. I'm just working with women who find me ridiculous at times, if that's what you mean. It wasn't quite what I meant, but...
Naphysa: I think if I might add something to that. Just the idea of the NHS as a symbolically female body, obviously, the NHS's main reason for existing is care. And care is often associated with female bodies and matriarchy. And yeah, I do often think of the NHS as kind of a female thing. And even though obviously many people associate the profession of medicine and being a doctor or a medical professional or a healthcare professional with kind of masculine roles of power. The NHS as a body, yeah, as a collective organisation, is almost, it kind of reminds me or sits in the same place in my mind. It's like, you know, like a mummy group, like, you know, where you go kind of a non-transphobic mum's net of care extending into the world, which is kind of, yeah. where it sits in my mind. And so I wonder if there's any power to that symbolically, considering the NHS female in that way and the idea that it's a caregiver.
Lynda Berry: I talk a lot to parents because I'm a key worker about in education. So, and I get a lot, I have one parent who just goes on and on and on about how great the NHS are and how people will suddenly, you know, appreciate all these key workers and see it as this is really what society is. It's just like, Just caring, helping people. It'd be great if that happened. That suddenly the feminine, if NHS is like the feminine, if it's like venerated at that point and then we have this kind of surge of connectivity, that'd be great. Yeah, I think so.
Danaidh MacGabhan: My experience of the NHS, it's more like the army, it's very hierarchical, and I think probably the modern NHS grew up in the context of, well, think about Lawrence Nightingale and the Crimean War and things like that. So there's a tension, I think, you know, it's amazing the reason why it's so hierarchical and so controlled is because it's by and large female, female, dominated in numbers, but controlled, I mean, NHS staff are generally friendly people and, caring people and, people who like to party like everybody else. But the NHS culture, it's very, very controlled, very hierarchical.
Chris: All the nurses and doctors who clap and applaud, you know, somebody who's managed to come out of, you know, intensive care on a ventilator and he's alive, it might be controlled, but it's genuine, isn't it? I mean, the feelings are just... just, you just, you just, you feel like crying. I mean, it's just such an enormous upwelling of emotion and pride that a life has been returned, and it just, that is, that is a good example of ritual that's actually getting into the NHS. And it, once it, once it starts these sort of rituals, you know, we have a sort of potential for it to go a little bit further. These, I mean, you know, there's something a little bit weak about just clapping and so on, but compared to what the Ben Jelli get up to, but It's a beginning, isn't it? Or it could be.
Naphysa: And I think there is that tension between the NHS as like a, as a, yeah, sort of bureaucracy, a hierarchy, and the fact that care, life and death are such emotional and intrinsically human feelings. It's not, you know, when you send someone into the hospital, of course, from the perspective of the healthcare professional, there are tick boxes, but also there is the sense that you're holding someone's life in your hand. And that is deeply emotional and deeply physical, the way that someone, if you find out a family member's in hospital, you feel like you're keeling over. And I think there is something to that, like you said, Danny, about the tension within the NHS, because yeah, the people who work in the NHS are human and they have to feel this sense of life and death, but also compartmentalize in order to do their job and to make it possible. I wonder if there's some... If there is some way of kind of harmonizing the two, and maybe clapping for the NHS is one of those ways in which we're trying to embody the emotional ritual into, you know, the institutional, the organized, the bureaucratized.
Camilla: I heard Dominic Rabb actually saying today, talking about a sense workers, the NHS, but also delivery drivers, supermarket workers, cleaners, that we have to do some levelling up. So that was a Tory saying this. So it's about some kind of collective defence of principles of egalitarianism. So yes, there's this tension, but somehow all these workers that have taken on board so much risk and so much stress and so much hardship must get real rewards. There really must be some levelling up. And we've kind of got to hold these Tory ******** to account. Yeah, so what are we doing? Yeah, it isn't just something we're going to sit back and watch, I hope. It's something we've got to be very active about, very active. When people feel that, oh, well, the nurses can go back to their meagre wages and they've done their stuff, and oh, yes, quite a lot of them actually died.
Jacob Fishel: Yeah, I think one of the things that's beautiful about this event is that it's bringing us back into our bodies in a very real way, which is calling into the tension between business, capitalism, economics, and life, the force of life and health and the tension. And the dialogue is, do we open up, do we go back to normal, or do we stay in the body and put life first? In terms of the ritual of the duality of gender, you mentioned in the paper the fluidity and multiplicity of Mbati, that they're stepping away from a fluidity into a rigid genderization, and then going back into like the ritual is very binary. And then it seems to release back into something else. And for us, what that something else is, law, is money, is control and command. So my curiosity is what do their rituals release into that might be a lesson for us now.
Morna: So from the from when people are engaged in these rituals that are kind of confrontational. And yeah, building momentum, building heat, building energy. I mean, one of the things that is really interesting to me is that in everyday life, There's such a kind of meticulous sharing, such a level of such egalitarianism and vigilance, a lot of vigilance at play in making sure that things get properly shared, properly distributed. It's not, you know, flowery and passive. It doesn't just happen because people want to share, they're forced to by one another. And, you can see that if you, whatever it is that you happen to have available to hand out. And looking at the literature as well on the Juntwa, you see the same kind of thing, that it's where you come into the gendered rituals, that there's this sharp distinction created, and where you do get a kind of stepping, drawing back into coalitions. And it's as, yeah, I mean, really what's happening is, what seems to be happening is that the What I said earlier about the fact that you're using the possibility of duality, you're using the possibility of difference. And the fact that in that there is also the possibility of patriarchy, there's also the possibility of breakdown. Using it creatively, in order to generate power and to highlight the fact that, we're working together, bringing this out into the public domain, making it visible, making it active, so that we can kind of collectively keep an eye on it. And I remember when I came across a statement that James Woodburne made about gender egalitarianism in these kinds of societies. He was referring to it as though in ritual time, you had this strong antagonism between the sexes. And it seemed almost as though he were, the conclusion was that this was something that they hadn't yet managed to fully eradicate, you know, this *********** tension, the conflict almost that's brought out in ritual. But in fact, it's there for a reason. It's functional to have that kind of pitting yourselves against each other sexually and collectively. It's not that people haven't found a way to level it or to address it. It's that it's being used creatively to almost like to produce fuel. So I think you have a really interesting twist. I'm sure Jerome would have a lot more to say about this. I.
Chris: Just wanted to say before Jerome comes in, it's just when Bruce Parry and Jerome did the filming of Nagoku, it was just so, beautifully clear that the women's Nagoku was a matriarchal sort of seizure, joyful, funny, rival seizure of power. It's so clear in that in the statements and the little clips we had in that video, which we can access very easily, that the women wanted to sort of surrender, knowing that the men are going to do their regengi before too long, but also kind of, as you say, Mornen, it's almost as if the women want a bit of a provocation from the men, like some sort of taste of threat to women's solidarity in order to once again mobilise their their power. In other words, you need both. You need the Jengi in order to motivate Nagoku, and you need Nagoku to motivate Jengi. And it's, as you say, a pendulum. But that element of conflict is actually the engine of it all. I mean, without that, and Jerome has beautifully written about all this as well, just sameness. What's the good of sameness? I mean, everyone's the same. I mean, that's death. If everyone's the same, there's no energy anyway. Nothing's going to happen. If everything's just, everyone's equal, you know, you need some kind of conflict and resolution of conflict and then re-emergence of conflict and then new resolution. And of course, as you know, I think, and I think a lot of us will agree with this, that the moon is the clock that does that. The moon waxes and it wanes and it produces that, it's the clock for that pendulum, or rather the pendulum is the moon's, you know, every clock, every clock needs a kind of pendulum to keep it going and it's the moon. or has been for hundreds of thousands of years. The moon's the moon's the clock we evolved with, and it's part of our bodies, most obviously with women. But yeah, conflict is needed. Hegel wrote about all that. Without conflict, there's no life.
Morna: Yeah, also back team, he says it's in the, it's in that constant kind of cycling that dialogue against one another, that people, he says it beautifully, I can't remember the words, but that's where we become who we are. You know, it's not something to get rid of, it's the point. It's the whole point, you know, that you're using that constant kind of like, that coming together to become something else, something bigger.
Jerome: I mean, just to come back on the point about what Woodburn said, I think it's quite revealing. And it's to do with the differences between the so-called immediate return hunter-gatherers that we know around the world. And the case of the Bayaka is actually quite unusual. In many situations, what has happened is that inequality has taken root. patriarchy has installed itself. And one of the things that James was trying to understand was what were the main pathways for that to happen. And so he looked around and he saw that the Australian Aborigines actually offer a really remarkable model because they have a day-to-day life which is radically egalitarian, where all the food collected is shared. It's very difficult for anybody to gain advantage through controlling other people's access to vital resources like food or land or water. Yet, they have, not everywhere, and it varies to some extent, but pretty uniformly, a very patriarchal system which favors the interest of elderly men over the interests of young men and women. And the main Ave. through which those men achieved that process is religious. It's ritual. And that's why James thought that the conflict between men and women was one which could lead to inequality between them if manipulated in the right way by either party. And in the Australian case, what the older men did is they controlled the access of younger men to wives. And they did that through requiring young men to achieve a certain level of initiation before they could marry. And this put the old men in a very powerful position in relation to those young men, being able to make all sorts of demands on their labour in order for those young men to get initiated. And then from that, control of the women, because the elder men tended to marry more than one woman. So anyway, there's an ideological system which enables patriarchy to come into an egalitarian system and impose inequality in the political sphere and religious sphere without it being imposed in the economic sphere. Now, the interesting case in the Hadza case, one thing that James saw happening over the period of time that he visited them was that men became more and more sort of violent in their epimere responses to women. And he was wondering in his own mind if that was some sort of precursor to them having the opportunity of situation conditions change to beginning to impose more authority, political control over women. It hasn't happened as far as we know, but it was something that he considered. And there was a very interesting paper by a Japanese researcher who had worked in the eastern part of the Mbenje region, so about 50 miles to the east of where Morna was working. And he began his fieldwork in the 1970s, and just at the recent Chags in Malaysia, he gave a paper in the panel on Ijengi and the changes that he'd noticed in Ijengi over the period of time in which he's been observing it. And what he'd seen since the arrival of logging and market economies really penetrating into the forest, was that men were becoming more and more aggressive in their imposing of certain restrictions on women and the uninitiated during a gengi. And he was quite shocked by this. And those were the sorts of observations. I mean, I've been going back for, whatever, almost 30 years. But over 50 years, you can really see those changes and it was very interesting to hear his reflections on that. So there is something about the fragility of these ritual systems and it's the cooperation, the collective will of the women in Benjeli's society that really seems to hold this together and that is there's a whole sort of hidden side of ngoku which goes on as well, which is very important in developing that solidarity. And the solidarity is very robust. And it's maybe what the Hatsu women have managed to hold on to as well through their ritual practice. And it is a vulnerable constellation. These things, people sort of imagine egalitarianism is somehow simple or easy. And I think what people like Mbengelli show us is just how much energy and effort and sophisticated understanding of human nature and human relations and the relations between bodies and the sort of chemistry of good living, how that, how to maintain that and keep that in operation. And it's a very great achievement.
Chris: You told us, Jerome and Ingrid, that there was a moment, I think, a couple of years ago or three years ago, when the women felt a bit intimidated in one of the areas where you're most familiar with, and they stopped doing nagoku for a whole period. And as I understand it, Ingrid was quite upset about this. And then partly through Ingrid, I'm sure it may have happened anyway, nagoku got reinstated. And it was a huge relief that once again the women could do nagoku because they'd have actually, I mean, Catherine Townsend has written as well about how once the women's counterpart in Jengi it's abandoned and women don't do it anymore, then who knows what will happen, how much everything will be skewed over in favour of a patriarch, which obviously the logging situation and so on, hugely, you know, hugely.
Camilla: It's also an issue for the Hadza because, well, for one thing, we're not sure that even Epema, which is kind of the balance between the sexes ritual, carries on. But the women's ritual mitoko is becoming increasingly rare and in different parts of Hadza country isn't there at all. And that is their counterpart that holds the balance with Epeme. So when James was talking in that way about Epeme, he was kind of leaving the mitoko out of the count. because they do work against each other in the sort of ways that, or they have in the past worked against each other in the sort of ways that Mona's talking about. So it kind of goes to show that principle of creating solidarity against the other sects is what is the power, as Mona suggests. I just wanted to put in that from a kind of evolutionary perspective, the evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists who want to explain morality have made the argument that, yes, the only thing that can give groups morality is solidarity against other groups, but what they mean is warfare, actual warfare. So they're not even thinking about women, they're thinking about men having wars with each other. That is what creates laws and rules amongst the different groups, which of course is completely ludicrous. As soon as you think of something like sexual morality, how does that ever come out of a situation of warfare? Well, the only kind of warfare that can possibly lead to sexual morality is 1 between the genders that's operating in this moving pendulum of resistance.
Chris: Which is a kind of battle of the sexes, but obviously, at the end of the day, it's playful. It's not warfare. Women, when they laugh at the men, they want the guy that they're laughing at to join in and see himself as others see him and join the human race. It's a very generous form of Warfare, if you like, it's not, it's but yeah, attached people on this panel should just know that there's a, if you like, the major alternative theory.
Camilla: The major theory. I mean, our theory doesn't come into it much. It's the major theory, isn't it?
Chris: The overwhelming, if you're interested in, like, looking at, like, you know, academic anthropology, evolutionary anthropology, how did morality emerge? How did we get rules about sex and various other things? How did moral systems work? The dominant paradigm is warfare between men. Or execution squads.
Camilla: Or execution squads.
Chris: It makes absolutely no sense. But then I'm afraid that is the dominant theory.
Jerome: It's what's tragic about it is it panders to the sort of American ideals of macho men making history. And it's just ********. If you look at the ethnography, there's no evidence whatsoever for these sorts of hunter-gatherers to get involved in warfare. I mean, you occasionally get a group of men who might be so outraged by the behaviour of somebody that they take violent action, and it may lead to that person's death. And certainly in the area where I work, a couple of people have been murdered in that way. But it's very much a spontaneous rage reaction as opposed to a calculated mission, sort of command and control type organization that leads to a successful capturing or whatever it is of somebody else. And what really, and this is what Chris and I have been developing in that Wild Voices stuff, is that, of course, the opponent is not other people. It's these really scary big cats that roam around in the places where people evolved. And those are a very intimidating, frightening opposition, and they eat you. They really don't mess around. And that is sufficient to explain the emergence of a normative order. A normative order, a set of agreements that people hold between themselves. That is morality, fundamentally.
Chris: We co-evolved with these big cats. The big cats are lunar. They are lunar. They have fantastic night vision, and they're rather lazy. And they prefer to eat you when you can't see what is eating you, which they can do when it's dark. And that happens through the night when the moon is dark. And it's been perfectly well worked out. Craig Packer and others have done lots of statistics about it. So as we co-evolved with the lions, and they were particularly dangerous when there was no moon in the sky during the night, clearly the seeking safety in numbers, the polyphonic singing, the solidarity against the lions would have had a pulse. and that pulse would have been a lunar one. Every dark moon, it was very important that you sing for your lives. And as Morna was saying, when you hear that polyphonic singing, it sounds like 30, 40 people, perhaps it is 30, 40 people, but even if it's only six or seven people, the lions would really, as Jerome points out, the lions don't really like taking risks. A lion that's got a bit wounded on one of its paws, you know, it's a very serious thing. They don't want to mess with a bunch of women and children singing like this, they're really well organized. So that relationship with lions is the key one. And as Jerome was saying, it was nothing like, warfare between territorial groups of men that would not have led to any kind of morality, let alone sexual morality. Why would, how could warring groups of males, and part of the eye point, by the way, I've read is that these males, the reason for their warfare was to steal and rape each other's women. Well, is that how does how does what hunter-gatherers understand as sexual morality come from erotic each other's women? I mean, it's just it's completely absurd theory, but it doesn't stop it being dominant.
Camilla: Yeah. And does anybody else want to come in with a point or can we ask Mona to say something to wrap up or?
Jerome: Gabriella wants to say something.
Camilla: Yeah. I just wanted to. Just to come to the kind of point about the nocturnal, I love that thing you said, Morna, about the power continues through the nighttime. There's always these strains of singing. And I'm just thinking now in our command and control society, We get very angry about people making noise at night time. But obviously, in the world of kind of big cats roaming around, actually, you really want those people to be noisy at night. And they're valuable people who are helping and bringing something to society. Yeah, I just wondered if you had any good examples of kind of nocturnal singing or behavior.
Morna: Well, I mean, other than what I was saying about hearing this going on constantly, you know, I mean, a lot of people say that they can't sleep whenever they're in a Benjelli camp for that reason. And Jerome is probably immune to it now because we have spent so much time there. But I just remember lying awake hour after hour thinking, oh, please go to sleep. And it was always somebody singing, talking, moving, you know, a bit of drumming, somebody else singing. And it seems, I mean, I don't know what Jerome would add to this, but it kind of felt to me tangible. It felt like there was this very clear use of sound. I looked at it from the perspective of women and the fact that, keeping the song going, keeping the buzz alive, not allowing things to shut down for too long, meant that you also kept something open socially and in terms of a living space. But yet it makes total sense to do with predators and keeping the camp safe as well. The fact that you would always have this kind of buzz going. But if you think about what that does for a group of people, I was thinking about what Jerome said about the fact that there's this savouring of contact and the fact that there is this constant generation of sound, music. I mean, if I think about myself in my house, with all this stuff around me and the walls and the doors and the locks and the keys and There is a real sense of, we're talking now about isolation, social distancing and self-isolating. We've been self-isolating for about, I don't know, 4 or 5,000 years. So we're getting more and more dug, entrenched into the isolated mind, the isolated body. And what you see with people like the Benjeli or the Juntois is what happens when you don't self-isolate. Like Jerome says, whenever you manage, women are able to stay strong ritually, to stay, you know, to keep that strong, amplified, collective signal going. that will have it will have effects on so many levels in terms of the ecology, in terms of safety from predators. But politically, in terms of what women manage to hold, it has huge repercussions.
Chris: Camilla, before we close, can I just make an announcement? Catherine wanted me to make an announcement.
Morna: Okay.
Chris: It's about the book club. So next, not this coming Thursday, next Thursday, between 5:00 and 6:00, I believe, Catherine, who's the organizer of the Radical Anthropology Group's New York Chapter, is organizing a book club, reading my book, Blood Relations.
Camilla: Where's your book? Show it. Have you got it?
Chris: Oh, well, I mean, I'd have to get up and move around.
Camilla: No, don't get up.
Chris: I mean, I could get, I could get a copy, but anyway, it's so, and we're going to come in and that's it. That's Chris and I, blood relations. OK, so we're going to do the introduction and Catherine was really told me, Chris, don't forget, I've got to remember to announce it. So there you are, it's been announced.
Camilla: Excellent. Yeah. And we're going to do that on, we're trying to do that one on Jitsi with a very simple logging on Jitsi with Blood Relations Book Club.
Chris: So... Okay, just explain. There's an incredibly simple alternative to Zoom. It's called Jitsi Meet, J-I-T-S-I Meet. And you don't need any IDs or codes or passwords. You just say Blood Relations Book Club. And then, and as long as you're there doing it at the right time, it magically all comes together. It's a much simpler system than Zoom. And if it is better in other ways, technically, rag might switch over to Jitsu because it's more secure, for example. Apparently, I'm told that, well, we've got a session on spies. We've got Felix Paddell doing the anthropology of the intelligence agencies, but I'm told that as we're doing Zoom now, we are being projected on the wall at GCHQ. I mean, Zoom is completely open to the intelligence agencies. I'm not particularly worried about this evening, but I mean, it's a bit of a joke, but Anyway, that's the book job. So, Camilla, what's happening now? Are we having a pint in the virtual pub or are we going to close after thank you.
Morna: I'm going to close. We've gone. I think the virtual pub would be very unsatisfying, wouldn't it?
Chris: It would really. I have got lots of whiskey here, but.
Camilla: We'd like to buy you a pint, Warner.
Morna: Yeah, you know, I'm looking forward to being able to actually do that in person.
Chris: A real Guinness, yes, okay, yeah, We'll do that. So is everyone agreed, are we going to close the whole thing? I think it's been a, I've had a few texts down here and the chat saying absolutely brilliant, going to definitely come along next week. So next week is Jerome and Kofi Klew. And they're going to be doing a talk, which is a, I mean, what do we say, Jerome, it's kind of about Extinction Rebellion, but it's about how we start the revolution, I suppose you could say, but with an understanding that any revolution worth anything is going to not come from academics over this part of the world, it's going to come from the global South. and led by indigenous people, the kind of people we've been talking about today. So I think that's the topic, am I right, Jerome, for next week?
Jerome: I'm not sure that's exactly how it's phrased, but I'm sure we will end up covering those.
Camilla: I think we put your...
Jerome: You've cut out, sorry. Yeah. anyway, I mean, it's certainly, I mean, one of the things I was planning on talking about was just the debt that we academics owe the indigenous people of the eastern woodlands of North America for the grilling that they gave the Jesuit priests in the 16th, 17th century, which provoked such a radical rethink of the values of Western European society. that it provokes the age of reason. And that really was quite a remarkable feat that is completely ignored. And it's worth just reminding people of the importance of that contribution. And then I'm sure Kofi will have a lot to talk about revolutions and the stuff.
Chris: So brilliant, Mona. I don't know, Camilla, do you want to say anything more?
Camilla: I'll try and, well, just about the book club, there is a Facebook on RAG for the book club, but other people who aren't on Facebook, I'll try and mail out information about that. Otherwise, just say thank you so much to Morna. We're getting lots of comments from everybody who's been just really found it an amazing discussion. Even if people were just listening, they were still really interested in it. And so so we always are. Thank you so much.
Morna: Me too. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. It's amazing that actually you can kind of make the, having criticized technology all evening, you can make the connection this way. And I'm really glad that I was able to do it. See you all.