I am back in Cambridgeshire. In fact I'm back in my old haunts from before we moved last year. This Wildlife Trust nature reserve and popular dog circuit preserves the old pools where Lord Byron once swan and where, centuries earlier, Chaucer's Miller's tale was set. I have to say I have never felt any lingering lascivious energy in the place but then I've never seen the otters either so what do I know? Last week I spoke about returning from Vietnam in 2012 and placing my hands on the bodies of oak, ask, hornbeam and field maple, feeling their shag and sinew and speaking their names with delight.
Well how about that? There it is! I genuinely hadn't ever thought of the trees that way until I wrote that just now. It'll sound artificial but I promise you my hands just tapped it out without me thinking I was saying anything particular.
That won't be the case for the rest of this piece. I have to start tying the threads together from this whole series, going right back to the whale.
I thought one of the best bits of Moby Dick was the compendium of whale lore. How quickly the names have changed, and the knowledge that goes with them. The blue whale is now an undisputed reality, for example, and science will now side with Melville against Aristotle and agree that whales are actually fish. Apparently American literature students skip the "cetology chapters" so often that it's a matter of debate why he had to put them in. A friend who teaches English literature in the states told me that one explanation was that Melville's urban landlocked readers had to understand the ins and outs of whaling so that in the final moments, the trap could snap efficiently on Ahab's leg. That can't be everything, of course. The book lampshades its own untidiness. It sends out claws like an explosion and lights things up for a moment in the dark. For all that, its trap is well-made.
On the seventh of July 2008, as I said, I was reading Moby Dick above the flood-swollen confluence of two streams in the shadow of a mountain whose name and evil reputation I had not yet heard. It was called Bol Ông and - look - here at Byron's Pool a wind rises in the sycamores when I type that name. Who knows? It could mean 'grandfather mountain', using the Katu word for mountain and the Vietnamese word for grandfather, though with the wrong tone. On the old printed maps we had it was called Núi Kam which might perhaps be a bad French attempt to render the Vietnamese for 'forbidden mountain' or might just be an older name from before the mountain spoke. In our time, it was also called Bol Gun (pronounced 'goon') and - yes - we get another rising of wind when I type that. Let's repeat the experiment under controlled conditions! "Gun" is perhaps its true name.
"Gun" is the name of one of the giant snakes that live on the hill. Or rather it is the name of a spirit - an abhuy - who is associated with the snakes and who manages all the wild animals on the hill. Or perhaps, as one man told us, his name is Ông which is actually not the Vietnamese word for grandfather at all There are many dangerous and freakish animals there, including white ones. There are white monkeys and someone got sick because he tried to shoot one. The hill is dangerous because it is haunted by the ghost of an old man who died because he kicked a certain vine that he was not supposed to kick. The vine makes a noise. There is a tiger (there could not have been a tiger). There is a pool on the hill, that is a 'trrla' - what I would call a pig wallow. A big red fish lives in that pool.
All these things were told us by different people at different times. Was there any single thing behind them? Was there, perhaps, an original picture of this mighty haunted mountain which had been broken when the war broke the knowledge held by the old takah tahals . Was the knowledge, in fact, still alive but hidden only from us outsiders, either deliberately or because we had not understood how to elicit it, or found the right people to ask? What I am sure about is that the paragraph I wrote above, simply by being a paragraph, makes everything seem more coherent than we found them. Beliefs, fears, rumours, conversations, memories: unruly data all of them; fertile ground for a story to form. Will it be a neat story that names and then shelves or will it light up something stern and monstrous for an instant in the dark?
The hill is not particularly high, only 648 m. In the border ridge just three and a half Euclidiean kilometres away, there are peaks twice as high. Yet Bol Ông is not part of such a ridge. In the land cut by the Khe it stands proud. The maps we were making told us that it once separated the lands of A Verr from those of Ta Lu, before A Verr split to A Séch and La Vân and all three were transplanted out to the meanders of the river and given numbers within the commune of Thượng Nhật. That was in 1973.
Long before that, the villages had moved from over that border ridge to the south, from the lands of the M'raang. Both of us had also done fieldwork with the Katu people still living in that catchment and Nikolas had already looked into the stories of another such powerful hill which also lay between the territories of three villages. That hill apparently had an original master spirit who ruled over the other ghosts, spirits and animals of the hill. He, or his underlings, could kill a man or his children if they hunted a turtle, or even took a special pebble from his hill. The agent behind these actions might be said to be the spirit or might be said to be the hill. Perhaps they are the same thing or perhaps it is more like the difference between saying that 'Russia' or 'Putin' has done something; not identical in meaning, but often equivalent. However, while the hill was called 'evil' (ác), the terrifying spirit was regarded as 'strict', 'dangerous' or 'clean'. He did not approve of people in the village watching porn, for example and his hill was free of leeches. In vengeance against the village he or his underlings could possess a woman and make her smear her face with shit but on the hill itself it was forbidden to defecate. Another word applied to this spirit and others was 'deaf'; he was unlikely to listen to pleas for mercy, unlike the kindlier hills of some other villages. He had helped them in the war, though, and stories were told of it. There is no reason to think that this particular spirit drank the blood of enemies, still less of children. Only some spirits did that, although it was difficult by our time to get any information about this at all. All in all, though, the spirit of this hill was, at least according to some villagers, their spirit. 'Like a stern but responsible father [the hill was seen as] nurturing and protecting the villagers...but also punishing them if they faltered in terms of morality."1
I've spoken about whether or not words like 'fairy', 'vampire', 'ghost' and 'demon' work to translate Katu terms and I'm still confused about this. However, I think English has no easy word for a spirit like this. Perhaps that's because, for us, there wasn't one perched on every mountain but a single big one in the sky (although 'Thou shalt not" was first heard on a mountain, of course). Anyway, Nikolas, and other anthropologists seem to call them the Master Spirits of the hills and the term seems a good one to me. It seems they are common and widespread. I'm sure I'm sounding very ignorant here. The name of the master spirit of the M'raang hill was 'old pangolin.'
Alex Aisher based on an ethnography of the Nyishi in Arunachal Pradesh discusses the differences and similarities between the people hunting them and the people eating them2. He suggests that the Chinese restaurant customer and the Nyishi hunter, when faced with a pangolin both perceive that the beast is rare and strange in varying measures and these two qualities are somehow connected to each other and thereby to value. The difference between the two men is in how they react to that value. The man in the restaurant says 'this is valuable, I must consume it!' whereas the man in the forest says 'this is valuable; it must belong to a spirit and so perhaps I had better not touch it. Nikolas believes that these kinds of taboos are what kept some animals alive in the Katu lands and it's certainly plausible. Unlike the Nyishi, the Katu did not believe pangolins to be the special care of one great master spirit but, like turtles and pythons, pangolins are slow-moving creatures which can make their home on a single hill and so be entirely protected by its master. As the master of Bol Ông is associated with giant snakes, so is the master of the hill in the M'raang associated with pangolins. In fact I rather wonder if the spiritual power of pangolins might have more to do with their ecology than their physiology. After all rabbits are pretty bloody peculiar beasts; we just happen to be used to them.
Aisher suggests that if the city dwellers, the pangolin eaters, could undergo a 'cosmological twist' towards the Nyishi perspective, it might be possible to stop them cleaning out the forests. But he also says that Nyishi, like the Katu, know that their own hunting has led to massive declines in animal populations. The old practices to maintain harmony had been abandoned with alarming speed. And they keep on hunting. The evidence that there's a solution in cosmology looks poor.
Anyway, the stories we heard about Bol Ông were similar to stories Nikolas had heard about this hill in the M'raang, although we did not dig so deeply in Nam Đông as he had there. However, the process was more advanced in Nam Đông and, by 2008, Bol Ông was clearly one of the major locations for illegal logging in the area. Probably because of the long protection by the spirits, it still had kiền and, until recently, lim trees and was in a prime location to allow their trunks to be floated downstream to the commune. "Nowadays," we were told by way of explanation "people aren't scared of anything; they just don't want to walk so far." The diversity of reasons not to be scared, however, was almost as confusing as the diversity of frightening spirits. Some said that outsiders who didn't know the hill's reputation could now operate freely in the village territory and the locals saw nothing happened to them when they hunted on Bol Ông. One person said that an old man had gone to petition Gun himself, sacrificing a buffalo and requesting that the spirit kill the giant snake so it would not harm the villagers - although apparently the Communist Party had "revealed all the hill's secrets" by that point so perhaps the old man, if he existed, was seeking to reconcile the spirit to a fait accompli. Still, while many said that 'people' weren't scared of the spirits any more, I think it was only the "Power of the Revolution" guy who said that he wasn't scared himself. And that wasn't because the spirits didn't exist, but because he was protected from them by a greater power. The old woman on the morning of the 17th of July was less certain; the government might have pushed the spirits back but there was still a snake living in the Giang river with the rats and plastic bags and to meet its gaze meant death. That was the same river that flowed under the road bridge by the guesthouse and as far from the stream sources as it was possible to be. Things had got worse since the sacrifices stopped, she said. Perhaps, Nikolas, suggested later, she meant that the serpent's former master was no longer able or willing to control it. Perhaps that made it the government's problem and she was hoping we might put in a word to someone in power who could help. She didn't know, perhaps, that we were incapable of even engaging with such a thing and that, if we had been... well I remember the growing fear that a basilisk was crouched in the cupboard in my childhood bedroom. You couldn't reassure yourself the monster wasn't there because by the time you'd checked it would be too late. I was protected from the basilisk now by its nonexistence. The Katu people didn't seem to be able to access that level of protection just yet.
One might think that it was only a matter of time until the spirits didn’t exist for the Katu either. But then, when I walked from the tourist quarter to the WWF 'field office' in Huế city, I would see clusters of red incense stalks stuffed into the crannies of the street-figs and red paper horses roosting in their boughs. Fragments of money-ash stamped "Bank of the Underworld" blew down the tanned streets between those trees and beneath the rising skeletons of new hotels which stood behind them. In Hanoi the spirits were more reserved but splendid old-gold and dust-red ancestor altars spread their wings in the top rooms of a thousand concrete houses. Kinh Vietnamese students and assistants who worked with us tended to see the Katu beliefs not as particularly exotic, only as rather extreme.
The political ontologists, following the Zapatistas, want a world where many worlds fit and not one world to rule them all. The 'modernist' world - our world - is overriding and devouring the older 'relational' worlds of indigenous people. But how can a world kill another? Surely the whole idea of 'separate worlds' suggests they cannot even touch. There are answers to this, of course, but it is a source of discomfort nonetheless. Listening to anthropologists in Paris I got the impression that that broad swells of discomfort were split now by the fins of critique. Doesn't this way of looking standardize and homogenize indigenous people? Aren't we being led astray by our own fascination with difference and ignoring the boring ways that we're the same? And isn't it exactly a modernist move to cast reality into clean-lined agents whose arcs intersect and collide; to focus on what things are there rather than on how to approach them and to posit clear binaries? Isn't that what this warring worlds story does: render the actors and name them?
When arguing that the “atîku" of the Innu nation is a fundamentally different thing from the "caribou" of wildlife managers, Mario Blaser states that "the former is a nonhuman person that has will, while the latter is an animal driven by instincts.”3 To him, that is proven by the fact that biologists try to predict the caribou's behaviour with simple rules in mathematical models. Yet biologists are not supposed to conflate models with reality. After all, we can also use them to predict the behaviour of humans and must accept that our predictions will be imperfect; no-one knows the future, after all. Admittedly understanding biologists isn't Blaser's primary concern but I do think that he has erred in his attempts to deduce our cosmology. Of course, he can see us as the Heirs of Descartes, but we see ourselves as people who are employing tools fit for a job.
It's not that simple, of course; certainly tools can be traps. At a tourist bar in Huế after a workshop, I remember arguing with a colleague about the possibility that any surviving saola might have learned to avoid snares. I wasn't arguing with the idea that "animals are stupid" and that's why snares work. But animals aren't that stupid. Learning to avoid a place of pain has long been known to be possible in sea-slugs. There's no reason why a saola should be any worse at detecting snares than we are and I've never been caught in a snare myself because I know not to step in them. I can't be sure but I suspected my colleague's resistance came from an assumption in models used to interpret camera trap data. These posit that animals don't learn to avoid the cameras. If you think about it, you have to admit that this assumption can't be 100% true. Somewhere in the world there's a wild animal that got so freaked out by the flash of an automatic camera that it's run away from any hint of them ever since. Still, having a camera flash at you isn't a negative stimulus on the order of being forced to sever your own foot. For the camera trap model, the assumption is probably good enough under most circumstances and you don't need to make a far more complicated model to incorporate the jumpiest critters. For understanding the possibility of saola survival, where a single paranoid animal would have been of immeasurable value, we couldn't afford to ignore such quirks of behaviour.
Although I do think that my friend took the model assumption as truth, it still wasn't hard to persuade him otherwise. The wildlife biologists that Mario Blaser spoke to might or might not have used the 19th century language of caribou being 'governed by instinct' but I think the important thing for them was that their models worked well enough for the job. Yes I do think that such tools slowly slowly get us in the habit of thinking of animals and humans as objects to be predicted and manipulated. However this is the opposite of what the political ontologists are saying. We don't use the tools because we believe the world's a mechanism; we believe the world's a mechanism because we use the tools. Sure it probably goes round and round and, as in any such situation of 'positive feedback' there's little point in asking who started it.
You can say that we see animals, including many humans, as objects because that's the world we were born into. You can also say that it's a choice we must make all the time, while we're doing other things.
The problem with that is that the snares do work. If you think of it as a mindfulness issue, then you have to also be mindful of that. Maybe a saola can be a free agent when moving in the forest as her heart would have her move but is the blackened skull slotted into the rafters of a guorrl house not an object? Can you really see it otherwise? And what about a saola in a snare, silent and waiting for the hunter's knife? Is it just the sliders in my mind that make her into a person or a thing or does the snare itself play a role? If a beast can be made into a thing by a snare that a human could slip out of, then doesn't that make the beast closer than a human to being an object? Not in some kind of Great Chain of Being sense, just closer in that there's a simple route to get from A to B. Unless, of course, there are other kinds of snares which specifically catch us.
We never found any particular Katu lore or knowledge about the saola specifically but, as large forest animals, saola were the concern of the lady Komorbarr. For the Innu, Blaser says, atiku are in the domain of a male spirit called Kanipinikassikueu who, like Komorbarr (or Ino in the Odyssey), was human once upon a time. Hunting is part of the commerce between this spirit and the human communities, that's why the Katu 'world' is classed as 'relational'. Among the Katu, the skulls would be painted at the start of the ceremony and the spirits invited to party in the guorrl. Although it was a sacred ceremony, it also had the flavour of a celebration after a business deal or of a wedding feast. Respect must be displayed but, if I understand correctly, not exactly submission. Kaj Arhem, Nikolas' father, noted similarities with the rites of marriage between clans; the hunted animal's body takes the place of the gift from the bride's family to the groom's.
Anyway, the skull in the rafters thereafter was a token and a line of communication. Incense, wafted under it and under its neighbours, would draw attention from all the hills around.
Århem, N., 2009. In the Sacred Forest: Landscape, Livelihood and Spirit Beliefs among the Katu of Vietnam. Goteborg University, Sweden.
Aisher, A., 2016. Scarcity, Alterity and Value: Decline of the Pangolin, the World′s Most Trafficked Mammal. Conservat Soc 14, 317. https://doi.org/10.4103/0972-4923.197610 A Google Scholar search in November 2022 turns up some free pdf versions of this paper.
Blaser, M., 2016. Is another cosmopolitics possible? Cultural Anthropology 31, 545–570. This one is also online.
That rabbits’ scrotum fact has been neatly filed away in my brain besides the 4-headed penis of the echidna.
I try to resist my temptation to suggest more possible avenues of reading to explore, each time I read one of your essays, but it seems I am succumbing once more! I am currently midway through Federico Campagna's Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents, a wonderful and strange set of reflections on "worlding" as a fundamental human activity and what happens when cosmological stories come unravelled. I have a hunch that his ideas might unsettle and enliven the conversation about "a world of many worlds" and what worlds (somehow) do to each other, which seems to have got rather stuck, at least in the corners of academia where you have been encountering it.