Nam Đông - Paris 8: Taking sides.
Pascal's wager, reversed.
On the first of September 2007 I was already in the guesthouse in Nam Đông town with a long black tube of rolled-up maps. I sat at that red-spread table in a half-dead hallway which was nonetheless watching me closely in the way that dogs watch.
Or anyway that’s what I wrote in my notebook. In my own notebook I didn’t have to concern myself with the proper assignment of sense or soul. After a while, a TV started bellowing and was clicked off again from downstairs. A child's monologue rose up from somewhere, cut with sneezes. A circular saw started up and, between its blasts of sound, I could hear a scraping: either carrots being grated in the kitchen or perhaps more distant construction noise. In the forest, the sounds of a saw would be followed by the crash of a tree but not here. Here they meant the habitat was expanding, not contracting. This town, like all such towns in the country, was growing. The green fan on the desk turned its face like a lion. The arms of the Bougainvillea reached out straight across the doorway, their leaves trembling sadly as they failed block the view.
On the road bridge over the Giang river, two streetlights faced each other. Their shape reminded me of rearing leeches, but in their unbending stance they resembled the Chinese crane statues that flank altars in the Temples of the Land. The crane statues are old-gold but the streetlights are silver-white in the storm light that surrounds us. Down in Huế city it is raining, but the storm here will not break. The big mountain wears a little cloud on the side of his head like a patch of clinging shower-foam.
My feet hurt from walking hot roads. Women with baskets passed me and dogs eyed me from doorways. The tarmac was burnished silver. A child in too-big shoes flapped over a empty yard. I knew the concrete had been shipped in and poured but it looked like it had always been there, under and before the grasses: the surface of a huge bald skull. The new guorrl houses were built of concrete too, with pastel-pink ribbed-concrete walls. Even though they were actually bigger than the old bamboo-and-thatch ones, they seemed far smaller. There were no animal skulls hanging in them and most of the old ones had been sold.
In one private house, though, two ebony-smooth saola horns flanked a flower-bedecked altar. They stood like retainers, slightly cross-eyed, turned to stoop inwards like the horns of buffalo, or like the streetlights or the cranes. In the middle of the altar a tiny Chinese Lion, its brass face rubbed snub, danced atop a censer. A yellow bulb hung in a hood of brittle petals. It all seemed pointless plush to me except for the horns, but I accepted there was no way to justify this. In Hà Nội, stacks of Coca Cola cans were offered to the mother goddess in her palace by the lake. My visiting Italian cousin, whose sympathies were pagan, viewed this with mixed fascination and dismay.
Nearly a year later, I woke up reluctantly in my room in the same guesthouse in Nam Đông town. My head was groggy and my book was exciting, with the Pequod on the second day of the chase. Where the room, the town and the mountains had seemed alive before, the life now was all in ideas. I had to write down the conversation with Nikolas that I’d had the night before. The previous day we had been told that the saola had been driven back to the stream sources and that the spirits had been driven back to the stream sources, and in the evening we talked. Nikolas suggested there might be similarities in the way that the Katu hunters and the urban wildlife consumers saw the animals whereas conservationists like me saw the world in a different way from either. He didn't call us 'naturalist', 'objectivist' or 'modernist,' though I expect he would have used one of these words if he'd had to write it down. Instead, while admitting he could not really justify it, he told me that "monotheists" was the word that so far rang most true.
This bewildered me; surely our whole purpose was to preserve diversity, to fight against the idea that the image of God was in human shape alone. How could we be called monotheistic? He said it was because even the diversity had to be converted to some measurable quantity, a transcendent ideal like "biodiversity" or just economic value. I was appalled. Couldn't he see that was only a deal we'd made? It was a mask for protection in a monotheistic world. "Ecosystem services", "Natural Capital" (though it wasn't called that then) and, yes "Biodiversity" itself - we didn't believe in that stuff! It was a sales pitch to the powers! Of course we had to talk to the bureaucrats and the brokers, but we were still pagan in our souls.
Those were the words I wrote ‘pagan in our souls.’ The book had me fired up. "Hooray for Moby Dick!" I continued; even if I was “out in the hard, hollow little whale boat with something monstrous rushing up directly from beneath,” and even if I was there just by accident of human birth alone then "still I would support him and press his bible and be his prophet, though he would not care." I wrote that. It took me three paragraphs from denying monotheism to saying this. I should remember that I cannot really be relied on to understand the forces at work, inside me or beyond.
I think now that it is my doubts that were more genuinely pagan. Moby Dick might not care what humans thought of him, but it is clear now that he would still live or die on that basis. The "eternal whale spouting defiance to the skies," has become a ridiculous figure. In Paris, Dr Thanh said that Vietnam's whale-worshipping fishermen regarded the great container ships as if they were beings from another world - Other Gods. Yet the worlds won't stay separate, really. Cetologists can see the scars.
On every train ride, I passed the remains of mountains whose flanks had been washed by multiple civilizations but which were now being gnawed entirely away to feed the cement works nesting in their wounds. I saw the book-shaped city houses, slotted into empty lots along the road. Their facades were slathered in ice-cream-coloured plaster while square, piggy windows peered out of their concrete flanks. That's what all that cement was for. That and all the 'infrastructure.’ Infrastructure like the concrete guorrl houses in Thượng Nhật.
I also couldn’t help remembering a picture in a book in the WWF library. It showed a concrete slab where a drugged tiger was chained up so that a leering, tipsy, snake-faced businessman could rain his pasty fists on its big face. The tiger could only scowl with one side of his mouth. In Katu, the tiger is abhuy abhuop: Grandfather Spirit, Mister Demon. This guy - this random guy - could beat him up in a theme park on a dull weekend. Say what you like about Captain Ahab, at least it meant something to him to kill a god. What if the future is not justice, not vengeance, not karma but just a smug empty confidence stretching unharpooned to the end of space and time?
"Old style pagans, or animists," I wrote, "didn’t need to be on anybody’s side. They had no gospel to preach or tub to thump, things just were that way – isn’t that so?" To be a pagan among today's global religions you have to work hard to make something shipshape. That particular heroism wasn't needed before.
Judith Bovensiepen was one of the co-chairs for the panel in Paris. We chatted over bad French vegan options in a bistro and, at the end of the conference, with my flaking brain soaked in too much coffee, I tried to grab her with a question by the closing doors. She didn’t give a presentation, though, and I only found out about her work by reading about it afterwards. Actually, I just read just one paper over and over; it’s called "Can oil speak?" and it makes the criticisms of political ontology that I tried to summarize last week. Then it goes deeper into Judith's experiences from East Timor.
One scene from the paper occurs at a workshop where the majority of people are politely enquiring how the oil company will compensate them for land that has a high cultural value. A young man in a hoodie and baggy pants stands up and claims that he is a "master of ceremony." It is not, he says, a question of compensation: "Crocodiles are our grandfathers and our grandmothers, if you move them, disaster will fall on us."
What sets this young man apart from the others in the workshop? From those who are happy to accept or pretend that the world is just as the oil company says it is? Maybe he is someone who, though young, is clinging to the old world while older men embrace the new, but Judith doesn't think so. Rather, she thinks that both interpretations have always been possible and it wasn't necessary to make any final choice between them. It wasn't necessary, that is, until the oil company wanted the grandmothers' nesting beach. Projects like the massive oil development in Timor-Leste, she says, "confront people with the need to “take sides.”" 1
There must be something in this, surely. Perhaps it's something truly southeast Asian. The metaphysical roots of political ontology are in the Amazon; and specifically in Viveiros de Castro's description of 'perspectivism'2 where everyone is human inside and the jaguars are neighbours who may see human blood as manioc beer. Ursula Le Guin's story 'Buffalo Gals, Won't you Come Out Tonight' is based on ideas of this kind and includes my absolute favourite quote from her:
“There are only two kinds of people."
"Humans and animals?"
"No. The kind of people who say, There are two kinds of people' and the kind of people who don't."3
In the kind of animism found in southeast Asia, there are more than two kinds of people. As in medieval Europe, the hierarchies among the spirits are essential to their essence. Kaj Århem calls this system 'hierarchical animism'.4
It seems to me that, because it starts from an egalitarian perspective, political ontology can censure but it cannot explain. Or rather it can explain why some of us decided to dominate others, but not how we were able to do so. ‘Naturalism’ or ‘materialism’ can explain it: "animals are stupid" (and mountains aren’t even that); we humans, working together over time, exponentially expand our power to manipulate animals and mountains to our pleasure. Simple. Spirits may once have served a social function, but they are imaginary.
Hierarchical animism can also explain it: the Government, the Revolution, the Communist Party can push back the spirits because they - or It - have - or has - spiritual power. The daemons aren't driven back by God but by a Big D(a)emon. Modernity is real, in just the same way as tigers and mountains and ghosts are real. It hasn't pulled out of the spirit world at all; it has invaded it and conquered. That young man and that old woman in Nam Đông explained something to me that the postmodernists couldn't seem to get right. It was simple: the spirits had been pushed back by something bigger.
That evening in Nam Đồng, as well as accusing me of monotheism, Nikolas was also talking about the traditional Katu system of land management and its apparent sustainability. Or rather that is how I would have seen it at the time. Actually it's still the only kind of language I can reliably use to talk about it: sustainable and unsustainable systems. A “system of land management” is composed of rules which must be backed by some kind of authority. Although 'authority' is a nebulous concept, is it not? Some kind of power.
Seeing it in this way, I should evaluate whether that system was something I should invest in helping to maintain, protect or restore. I should evaluate the system and my own ability to see it maintained or restored. I should evaluate both these things in terms of my goal which was to keep saola alive in the forest.
Nikolas accepted that this was a particularly exacting standard. Certainly the old system kept the saola, just as it kept the elephant, tiger and gaur, now lost. But the saola aren't essential to the Katu like the caribou are to the Innu5; there are many other large mammals. The saola were maintained by an eddy in the cybernetic flow, a fluke in the machine, not part of its function. They're patina; any slight re-tuning could erase them. And this was a machine that had been flensed and half-gutted. Major workings had been tossed into the dustbin of history with extreme prejudice. Getting such a machine humming like it used to was a tall order indeed. What is more, some of the jettisoned components, like blood-hunting, attracted extreme prejudice from me too, along with everyone I knew including, apparently, all 21st century Katu. Other components, like swidden agriculture or buffalo sacrifice, were things which I (and probably WWF) could stomach but were deeply objectionable to the government agencies who gave us license to work in Vietnam. Mild support for swidden would be translated into something else or politely ignored whereas vocal support would have had me out of the country on my ear. I didn't say it to Nikolas in so many words but it simply wasn't efficient for me to support the traditional Katu system of land management in any way. Even the slightest move towards it was a waste of energy at best.
This was true within the world which I mostly thought I lived in, but I was not immune to the idea that my cosmology was wrong. Maybe it was because I had to deal with subjective probabilities anyway in the course of my saola search. Maybe because I'd been spending time with anthropologists or because I'd been a radical skeptic as a child or because I had interesting friends. Or maybe because none of us have ever really been as 'modern' as we pretend to be6. For whatever reasons, I was prepared to at least listen to the idea that 'systems', 'rules' and 'mechanisms' weren't the right way of thinking at all. Maybe in some sense, straightforward or subtle, there were some among the dwellers in heaven and earth whom the eyes of the body cannot normally see. What if that were so? Then I should listen to those who had always believed in them. Right?
Well those people told me that the powers of the spirits are great and various and their tempers too. They might spear your son with a falling tree because you picked up a odd-looking stone. They might lure you away down their own paths through the mist or arrive at a party in the longhouse with their families, ready for wine or blood. They might slip out between the river stones to print a deadly image in your vision or sit at the edge of your dreams, gently smiling and dressed to kill. They are variously terrible but there is one horror they take away: the fear that "we are as gods." This is retracted because the gods are still there. If we are to make plans concerning the forest, we must speak with its true masters. We aren't at the top of the chain.
And yet the chain is long. Some powers are greater than others and, of those we have heard of, one is now greater than all. One has pushed the others back to the stream sources and rules the land they once held. The Church did it in Europe and it is still doing it across the world, breaking ancient restrictions and bringing the hunters their glut from the haunted hills. In Vietnam,though, the Revolution did it. Modernity did it and is the spirit that rules there now. Surely, if you wish to seek protection for the saola, you aren't going to seek an alliance with the old spirits. They can't defend the saola. They can't even defend themselves.
So, whether the spirits 'exist' or not is just one move to be made in the struggle. Ontology is a weapon. Monolatry precedes monotheism. Allegiance comes first. We don't abandon relationships with the old spirits because we move from a 'relational' world to a dead one. If that happens, it happens later. We abandoned relationships with the old spirits because they couldn't help any more. It's not political ontology, it's ontological politics; we've chosen our side. Objectification is made possible by participating in power; an object is simply a subject that has no means to resist.
Yeah.
If that's how it is, then attempting cosmological (or ontological) move from the world of a city-dwelling pangolin muncher to the world of a Katu or Nyishi7 hunter is not going to stop the destructive consumption of pangolins or saola or anyone else. Because they don't really live in different worlds. It isn't true that the Katu inhabit a 'relational cosmos' while the city dwellers inhabit a dead world. Both the city dwellers and the village dwellers understand which relationships it is necessary to cultivate, that's all. As Nikolas says "the taboos of spirit hills are not in place because the local groups claim to “care” for the forest or animals in such places but rather out of fear and respect for the Master Spirits of those places."8 The city dwellers do not need to cultivate relationships with the spirits that guard the pangolins or the spirits which guard the hills where the pangolins live because they are not frightened by the power of those spirits. They are protected.
In the tradition of decision analysis in which I'd been training myself, I could evaluate a course of action across many worlds and I found the ontology didn't matter. Either the forest spirits didn't exist or they were losing. Even if Modernity was just the biggest demon in a world of demons, it was still going to win. In the monotheistic world you side with God and in the pagan world you side with Zeus. If you choose otherwise then you are welcome to fail.
The Katu, it seemed, had taken sides and I had to do the same. I could be grateful I did not have to do so under bomb and napalm and Agent Orange. So I did; I chose the winning side.
On the table in the guest house the things had a goblin life. The candle's wick was hooked and its feet swollen and clownish. The plastic spoons looked like white blades with empty eyes. My blue water bottle was a fat little robot and the shadow of the water in the glass hovered like a jellyfish. Duelling billboards faced each other along the dusty road and bamboos bowed and simpered behind them. Lampposts were waiting for the bridal passage. Mountain standing behind mountain, arms folded. My mind reached for the mountains but could find only a story, only a god.
This conversation with Nikolas in the guesthouse in Nam Đồng is what I've been struggling down to again and again since Paris but every time I seem to come up with armfuls of bubbles. I'm not sure if this time has been any different but I was sick of holding back. This seems to be the crux of all this.
It was because of what that old woman and that young man said that I could treat it as a choice at all. The ‘government’ or the ‘revolution’ has pushed the spirits back to the sources of the streams. So the statements which moved those two Katu people further into allegiance with modernity moved me a step further away. Partly because it made it possible that the spirits might come back in but secondly because my allegiance was supposedly conditional: It had to save the saola or at least to do its part. And the saola isn't saved.
Now maybe that is on me. I also had to keep my side of the deal and maybe I was just weak and I failed. Not the Big Daemon's fault. And I have so many personal failures to choose from so I can never bring my case. Unless, perhaps, it can be shown that my supposed ally never intended to honour the deal, or was incapable of doing so at least in spirit. In other words, if it is not a daemon but a demon. But maybe I’m just thinking that because it would let me off the hook.
And there we are.
Bovensiepen, J., 2021. Can oil speak? On the production of ontological difference and ambivalence in extractive encounters. Anthropological Quarterly 94, 33–63. A Google Scholar search turns up a few free versions if you’re interested. Even if this you hate the “theory”, the encounters described are fascinating. I’ve read it through at least three times myself.
Viveiros de Castro, E., 2004. Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation. Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, 1. This one is a big deal and easily found. Good luck with it, though!
Le Guin, U.K., 1994. Buffalo gals and other animal presences. Roc. Personally, after reading the Viveiros de Castro paper above, my take home message was “Oh, so it’s like ‘Buffalo gals.’” I’m sure I’m missing half the point but I’m pretty sure I do have the other half right at least. These lines are a dialogue between the girl who is the story’s protagonist and a female Coyote. The Coyote slaps her thigh after in delight at her own cleverness and I’m prepared to give her that.
This term is coined in the introductory chapter of a book. Århem, K., 2015. Southeast Asian animism in context. In Animism in Southeast Asia (pp. 3-30). Routledge. Again, you can try Google Scholar. I found this quite hard reading and probably go through it a few more times. I think I’ve only got some blunt basic ideas out of it.
Sorry, if you’re starting here, that’s coming out of the blue. I’m referring back to last week’s piece and to Mario Blaser’s paper referenced there: Blaser, M., 2016. Is another cosmopolitics possible? Cultural Anthropology 31, 545–570.
I’m pretty sure that, in an actual paper, I’d have to cite Bruno Latour here. I’m scared of Bruno Latour.
OK. referring back to last week again and to this paper: 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
Århem, N., 2009. In the Sacred Forest: Landscape, Livelihood and Spirit Beliefs among the Katu of Vietnam. Goteborg University, Sweden.
This one made me think of a conversation that Conner Habib recorded with David Graeber. At one point, they talk about Indigenous groups who say they prefer the missionaries to the anthropologists, essentially because the anthropologists don't actually believe (or *can't* believe, within the paradigm in which they are operating?) that there is anything real beyond the natural-material, which makes them in some sense more alien, or more condescending, or just more incomprehensible, than the missionaries, who at least take the spirits seriously. I'm riffing on what actually gets said in the Habib/Graeber conversation, but part of what's interesting is that (at least to my ears) it reveals Graeber as firmly on the naturalist-materialist side, while Habib is a full-on weirdo (and doesn't have an academic career) and is therefore much more willing to take seriously that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy (even the anarchist variants of it). To me, any serious animist approach to the world can't involve drawing a line between "natural" and "unnatural" and only granting spirit to the former, it has to recognise "modernity" and "the Revolution" as powers, beings, whatever language we use. And I see that in Gordon White and in Vanessa's work – and in the theologian Walter Wink talking about "the powers and principalities" (which I met through Alastair McIntosh's work). And then, perhaps, we get to the logic of "might is right" and what other logics one might follow, if one is not satisfied with that logic. Also the question of whether, great powers as they may be, "modernity" and its ilk might also have blind spots. Since I'm reading it with Alfie just now, I'm tempted to say that Lord of the Rings covers a surprising amount of this ground. Anyway, here's that Habib/Graeber conversation: https://soundcloud.com/user-940109391/aewch-99-david-graeber-or