Nam Đông - Paris - (and actually Norfolk) 5: Tangles
OK let’s get this part knocked on the head. Cut through the crap.
I’m sitting by a high and grimy window looking out across the improbably blue October sea. The tide is going out and the silver and gold of the North Sea shore is laid out for the sunshine, stitch after stitch. I remember walking on the beach here with Hannah before we ever went to Vietnam, before we ever went to Sulawesi even. Fan-palms and fantails, rattan and centipede, beasts with dark eyes in secret clefts of the forest - these are things from other worlds. Yet other worlds, Shipden to Doggerland, lie under the sea here in sheaves. In the crumbling cliffs, I once found a nugget of bloodstone and tusks occasionally tumble out, I am told. Being back here I’m reminded of stories like the one about the sage who met God in the desert and asked how it is that we all become so trapped. God says He’ll answer but first would the sage be so good as to get Him a glass of water from the village down the track. Well the woman in the first house is the woman of that sage’s dreams and, long story short, a lifetime later his wife and children and everything he has built have been swept away in a terrible flood and God is shaking him awake by the shoulder and asking if he got the water yet. I suppose the water got him.
I called this newsletter ‘traps, cages and spells’ as an aspiration and I’m not sure that it is one I have met so far. I should talk about the traps soon, the ones that bristle on the ridges, the snap traps and squash traps and loop snares for squirrels. The lines of snares with thick wire and thin wire and bamboo or brush fences. The old Katu dardiers that shot bolts into boar and, later, into soldiers but which I never saw. Bomb traps for tigers and trap-spam for bears. There is skill in trap making but some traps take more skill than others. Bicycle brake-wire is sold by the bucketload in roadside towns and it’s not hard to twist a loop in it and post the end through for a noose. Now put a wrist or ankle in that noose and have some spring to pull it taut and a trigger for that spring and that’s it, you’ve a snare. You can line a hillside with them in a few days of hard work.
If it’s caught, the archetypal serow will struggle till it dies unless it slices its own foot off first or uproots the snare and in either of those cases the wound may fester. The archetypal saola will lie down patiently until the hunter comes or until it dies of thirst within earshot of the stream. I don’t know how true these stories are but I’m pretty sure that not only the archetypal human, but in fact almost any grown human will work the thing loose with one hand and be free in seconds. Unless the spring is actually tall enough to flip us upside down, any one of us who could get into the forest in the first place would be easily able to get out of a snare. Barney, who ran the WWF programme that I sort-of-joined in 2006 put the secret of snares to me quite simply. “Animals are stupid,” he said.
And, very simply, that’s why there’s no hope. I’ll put it better somewhere else but basically, if you’re working in the interests of a human group, whether you belong to it or not, you are either assuming they already have political power or you’re trying to get it for them. The possibility of a future where they are masters of their own destiny is essential. It’s horrific, in the 21st century, to suggest that they will always be dependent on the whims of the powerful and that this will never change. But political power is a kind of power that exists only within a certain differential. At the moment it’s still possible to believe all humans exist within that differential but it’s harder when you move outside the human sphere. Across a wide enough gap, politics doesn’t matter and power takes other forms. It’s like chemistry in the hearts of stars; irrelevant.
So there’s a Goldilocks zone for politics and the snare is a thing outside it. Sure you can make snares political in academic papers if you must but, let’s face it, only because that is what you like talking about. Classic Political Ecology has some things it is good at saying and some things it is bad at saying. It’s great at talking about injustices Marx thought could be fixed. But ‘animals are stupid’ isn’t something anyone can fix or any structural change will iron out for you. Grand transhumanist (transbiotic?) prophecies throw buckets of imaginary nanomachines over it and run away and that’s really the most convincing attempt1. Critical social theorists brought up through Marx, Arendt, Illich and others want to tell us that capitalism is fundamentally ravenous and any deal you make with it will be twisted, betrayed or simply forgotten. How can eco-types be so naive as to trot out notions like ‘Natural Capital’ or valuation of ‘Ecosystem Services’ and try and bargain with the beast? One answer, I think, is that we already have to deal with the thing called Homo sapiens and we’re already on the back foot. We’ve already had to convince ourselves that somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, humanity and something like ‘nature’ are going to co-exist long-term. For us it’s not the Capitalocene or the Plantationcene and it’s not the Chthulhucene either (though the Chthulhuzoic might be coming). It’s the Anthropocene and no-one said we had to like it.
A fly is blown into a web on the window and its builder scrambles to intercept. He’s chosen a good place. Traps are being set at every scale; in rotten logs Pleurotus hyphae lasso nematodes and so on. Mara, the devil, is called “a snare floating in the sky” in some Buddhist scripture, I think somewhere I read. There is something fundamentally sticky about the cosmos; sticky and ravenous. Snares are worked in deep.
Animals aren’t as stupid as we think they are, I have evidence of that. Nonetheless, the snares clean out the forests. We have evidence of that too. Bicycle brake wire, a bit of free labour, a decent amount of skill and just a lot of people. Nothing like the resources the United States spent trying to clear the same forests of humans with a great deal of tragedy and zero ultimate success. You can’t catch us so easily. How would you catch us then, and who tries?
These past weeks - months now - I’ve been trying to get my head round a little bit of anthropology and it’s frustrating. I’m never quite sure if the answer to my question is so obvious that everyone’s got bored of it, so impossible that everyone’s given up, so divisive that it’s dangerous to talk about or simply not of interest to people who care about people. “Theory” is, according to many, the name of the trap anthropologists have walked into. Some anthropologists also think that; though I understand they’re unlikely to stay in anthropology if they do. Anthropologists are fairly omnivorous so it makes sense they should be trapped like bears: fill the area with snares so they’ll fall into something new wherever they blunder. Us natural science types, by contrast, just follow the tiger trails with imperial confidence and walk straight into the single snare placed behind the big log. Or even just turn into the blind alley where the sign says ‘Huge Grants Here.’ I’m not sure I even am a “natural science type” any more but I know, when I’m in that kind of conversation, if I’m being clever or if I’m being stupid. With anthropology I’m never sure.
Here’s one of the little puzzles that I feel like nobody wants to answer. I’ve alluded to it a few times in this series with the question of whether aul can be called ‘fairies’ or m’rieng can be called ‘vampires.’ I can illustrate it with an example of two beings that appear in Katu ethnographies. One I have referred to already: Komorbarr, the goddess of the game. The other is called xoong katiec. Katiec means 'earth' but it is also the name of a great spirit that might perhaps be called a god. Might be if I knew what the rules were, that is. ‘Xoong,’ meanwhile marks the name of a large mammal; or ‘beast’, as you'd say in an older English. Xoong xoor is the saola, the fern beast, and xoong katiec is the earth beast; or perhaps the “beast of Katiec,” if “Katiec” refers here to the god. However, as the Katu speak of xoong katiec, they make it plain that it is effectively the same as, or perhaps a form of, the being called He Le, and also of the being called A Da. Yet He Le is solitary, male and fierce whereas xoong katiec is female, numerous and generally unthreatening. This seems, to me, similar to the descriptions of Komorbarr and the spirit who is her/their husband or other self. Male and female, plural and singular, beautiful and grotesque, these characteristics pool distinctly within each name in each pair but there is some spillover among them. Sometimes, perhaps, people say it is Avua or He Le that is female, that is multiple, that is gentle and Komorbarr or xoong katiec might be the one that is ugly or fierce2. Is the reality of it so unstable or do some people not know what they’re talking about. Or both?
Personally, Nikolas may find himself reminded of figures from European myth when he hears about Komorbarr but I believe it is dangerous in his discipline to make such comparisons formally. For me, though, there is no such problem with claiming that xoong katiec is the same kind of being that fought with Arthur nine nights on an Irish beach - as I heard on my ipod under the headman’s house in a village in Mondulkiri. It is of a kind, too, with the bane of Adonis and with the beast which bore Freyr and was bought with Loki's head. It was by the scar that one such creature left on Odysseus’ thigh that he was recognized by his old nurse. Beings of this kind are depicted on the walls of Altamira and Göbekli Tepe. The javelina of Amazonia are in fact distinct from them (and from the jabali and jabalinas of Spain) but they do undoubtedly share a distant heritage and no-one will get upset if I say so. Biologists will justifiably get a bit cagier if I say javelina fulfil the same 'function' as jabali or xoong katiec but the inverted commas around "function" are wards against the awful idea that these beings exist just to support us. That is the worst idea for biologists; the most heretical, the most dangerous, most problematic, outdated and wrong. It inspires, in people with my training, something very like disgust. To us, the idea of the Eden-machine where nothing and nobody spills out of their bounds belongs as dead as the thought that the stars are the holes where the rain comes through. The worse idea that the rain exists to feed our crops belongs deader than that. Reading Donna Haraway, this year, it seems to me that she brings this biologist’s disgust into social science theory, though perhaps the interfertilization has been more complex than that.
But I definitely digress.
“Xoong katiec” is, in the ordinary way of talking, the Katu word for wild boar. And, again in the ordinary way of talking, the wild boar in the Annamite mountains are the same species now running free again in the Forest of Dean. There are plenty of other ways of talking. In 2011, Colin Groves and Peter Grubb controversially suggested splitting all the world’s hoofed mammals into about double the number of species although they considered the data insufficient to properly split the wild boar. Since then it’s emerged that wild boar contain genetic elements from what had been considered entirely other species of pig3. Perhaps, like humans with Neanderthals and Denisovans, they had also hoovered up useful genes from vanished forms across Eurasia. It’s increasingly obvious that the idea of ‘species’ is really an attempt to fudge something together that fits a historical preference for ‘ideas in the mind of God’ or perhaps just a cognitive preference for some kind of brick to play with.
In a 2016 paper which I read last week,4 Mario Blaser claims that the ‘atîku’ of the Innu Nation is not really the same thing at all as the ‘caribou’ of the Canadian wildlife department. Rather the two relate in the same way that a hypothetical or invisible duck and a hypothetical or invisible rabbit might share the same repeatedly-illustrated head. While I would translate both ‘caribou’ and ‘atîku’ as ‘Rangifer tarandus’ and would also translate ‘reindeer’ in the same way, I suppose Blaser would claim all these terms are different. Atîku is governed, like xoong katiec, by a spirit who was once human. The relationship of the Innu with these beasts therefore necessarily involves negotiation with that old man; who is generous but not infinitely so. So atîku cannot be the same as caribou and the ordinary way of talking is precisely what Blaser is up against. Because, if people’s claims are incredible then their politics are unreasonable and can be dismissed. A generous, previously-human master spirit of the reindeer isn’t a reasonable starting point for a serious conversation about hunting regulations or for a serious conversation about anything at all. Political ontologists like Blaser and Arturo Escobar5 pick up on a tendency of politicians in the Americas to describe indigenous activists as infantile. They want to eat their cake and still have it. They want ridiculous things and so there is no reasoning with them.
Why are different things controversial for biologists and anthropologists? Actually that's not even the question because I don’t think it’s really controversial for Nikolas to translate 'xoong katiec' as 'wild boar'. In some particular anthropological circles maybe but, it seems to me, those people are still saying these things in order to achieve human political ends. Why are different things controversial when we talk about animals and when we talk about spirits? If I talk about animals, the worst thing is to suggest they are there for humans at all. If I talk about spirits it's much better to suggest that they are there for specific groups of people than to imply they might be equally there for all of us. But what if I were to imply that some humans are not equally real for all of us? Isn’t it the duty of any anthropologist to say that is not so? To say “No, you are simply denying their existence because it is inconvenient for you that they exist.” That is the proper response, though I think that in practice it might be delivered with greater venom or greater shock.
I remember one day in Nam Đông where a young Katu guy invited us both out for coffee. I made no notes so this is just what I remember. The cafe was in Hương Hưũ, the old district centre, a short motorbike ride away. There was a little market, hanging motorbike tyres wrapped in striped foil and stacks of chubby inflatable reindeer in primary colours. It was a bright day and the cafe was on some kind of rooftop terrace with a view of a crossroads, a graveyard, a government office and the bronze-knuckled hills brewing up clouds. The young man had been helping us out by introducing us to people in the villages of Thượng Nhật. Although T- in village 6 was friendly and bright like a bird, the head of village 5 was grizzled and prickly and I suspected him of getting the cuts from illegal logging in the two villages’ shared ancestral lands. So we were grateful for introductions and felt indebted although we did also pay him. For him, I think, it was exciting and prestigious to be seen with the white guys. For us, it was nice to be treated as interesting people, rather than interesting things; even if we were still only interesting because of the sort of thing that we were. I think we talked about internet access in Nam Đông town before the conversation turned to the spirits. We spoke, I think, about the cockatrice-thing that lived in the river. "Do you believe they are real?" our host asked, talking about the spirits in general. I may have said what I said to T-, that I did not know. Nikolas said "OK but how about this, if you believe in them, then they are real."
"No," I said, not letting our Katu friend answer, "I don't think that's right. If they're real, then you believe in them. that's what I think."
And then we went beyond the limits of our Vietnamese and began to argue in English, excluding him entirely. I consoled myself with the thought that he had wanted to get close to these weird exotic creatures, and now he was seeing their natural behaviour. Theories came off our coffee like clouds off the mountains and they bristled with traps. I felt vaguely that I was respecting him and protecting him by saying what I said, not placing his beliefs in a special preserve patronizingly reserved for 'traditional cultures' but in the dangerous arena where they have the chance to win to power.
Yeah, I suppose I did think he needed protecting. I’m not sure if what I’m feeling right now is the resignation of the archetypal saola or the rage of the archetypal bear. I have got myself tangled, I suppose. I think that’s enough ‘theory’. Perhaps it’s time for me to set my own trap.
Tune in next week to test it!
https://www.abolitionist.com/
Århem, N., 2009. In the Sacred Forest: Landscape, Livelihood and Spirit Beliefs among the Katu of Vietnam. Goteborg University, Sweden.
Frantz, L.A., Schraiber, J.G., Madsen, O., Megens, H.J., Bosse, M., Paudel, Y., Semiadi, G., Meijaard, E., Li, N., Crooijmans, R.P. and Archibald, A.L., 2013. Genome sequencing reveals fine scale diversification and reticulation history during speciation in Sus. Genome biology, 14(9), pp.1-12.
Blaser, M., 2016. Is another cosmopolitics possible? Cultural Anthropology 31, 545–570.
Escobar, A., 2017. Sustaining the pluriverse: the political ontology of territorial struggles in Latin America, in: The Anthropology of Sustainability. Springer, pp. 237–256.
You bait your word-traps richly, Nicholas!
The thought that there is a zone within which politics makes sense and a limit beyond which it stops making sense calls to mind the old Greek distinction between "Zoe" and "Bios", as Agamben talks about it. Also the etymological connection to "polis". Built into the language of politics is a sense that it stops at the city limits. I've played with the language of "uncivilised politics" now and then, just to double down on the paradox. (Lena from the Long Table has some thoughts on this, too, from her research on Dark Mountain.) I'm thinking also of the parallel hierarchies Martín Prechtel describes in the Mayan village where he lived, the hierarchy of the chiefs and the hierarchy of shamans, the one human-oriented and at the centre, the other at the edges and oriented to human/more-than-human relations.
Concerning "animals are stupid", this feels like a statement that holds for a certain value of "stupid", admittedly a pertinent one. "Stupid" might also be an accurate description of the way of going about inhabiting a planet that currently dominates the activities of our own "species". James Bridle makes a similar point early in Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence. David Abram has an essay somewhere about the plurality of skills/intelligences (not sure what language he uses exactly) between species.
The taboo on universalising, especially when it comes to the kind of beings that don't have a Linnean classification, seems like a postmodern reaction against the grand unifying projects of early 20th century comparative mythology, etc. But there's a move beyond that which is coming - I think of the way Gordon White uses "something like" (with scare quotes) throughout Ani.Mystic to enact a humbler mode of cross cultural comparison. The Blaser paper makes me think of Illich's short book, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness.
Finally, all this talk of traps takes me back to Hyde's Trickster Makes This World. And I realise that my own trap may be this kind of proliferation of possible connections...