Apologies, it has been a while since I posted and, in all honesty, the main reason is that I underestimated the power of the summer holidays.
Another reason, though, is that I promised to finish up this Paris-Nam Dong series. The idea of that series was to look back at an early field trip from 2008 with the benefit of some new ideas. "New ideas" is a bit disingenuous actually because, while some of those ideas were genuinely unavailable to me in 2008, they come out of currents of thought that I was wilfully refusing to engage with at the time. The reasons for that - for my disengagement or refusal - are something that I'm building up to so I'll say no more for now.
My intention was to use a panel discussion on 'animism and extractivism' at EuroSEAS 2022 as a way to foreground the ideas without stepping out of my own memories. When I decide to go ahead and blatt out a stream of opinion without context, the words come as quick as vomit and are about as pleasant to look at afterwards. I wanted a bit of the real experience of hearing the words come out of human mouths while I sat in that white-slatted room in north Paris with the caffeine pinging around in my blood.
Two problems, though. One is that the memory is fading. I wrote down ideas in my little peach-coloured Vietnamese exercise book. Ideas more than my reactions or the colour of the light. England in September is stronger now than Paris in June or than Nam Dong in an August in a Holocene that was.
More importantly, though, most of the papers presented in that panel were drafts 'not for sharing'. That definitely included the one by myself and Nikolas which, as I mentioned, was submitted in a ludicrously last-minute way and which we're finally back working on again. However, the draft nature of the other papers places this newsletter in an uneasy place.
My post on the Vietnamese whale cult made little reference to Dr Thanh's research, and spoke only of its general theme; though I did mention her answer to an audience question. I hope that was OK. For my post on goddesses and vengeance I first took names out but, after consulting Dr Telle, I put them back in, albeit rather hastily. Given the topic of the post, I was rather relieved about this. I didn't think any readers in the West were going to care what anyone did with the story of a sea princess who is driven to suicide but redacting the name and making the story generic smelt more like theft than leaving it in.
It's been different with this piece; my original version of it was just too larcenous and I think the only appropriate response is to refer to generic ideas rather than anything specific from Paris. In order to get through the rest of what I have to say about Nam Dong, I'll continue this approach and will refer to the panellists' research only where it has been otherwise published and I can cite it simply. Of course, this only works if I'm referring to things that genuinely have a generic aspect and I'm not entirely sure I am. Actually, that's part of the question and I'll get to it next time, I think.
The topic here, then, is dreams. Specifically, it is warning dreams that are believed to come, not from transformations in the alembic of the dreamer, but from beings that occupy the wider world and claim ownership of parts of it.
"Ownership" is key here. I don't want to get too deep into the anthropological background here and it's only partly because I fear I will make a fool of myself. I may come back to it later. I think it's uncontroversial, though, to say that the spirits the Katu talk about are not primarily neighbours with grievances but rulers with authority. They own the hills or the game and they may deal with transgression very harshly indeed. They may speak through dreams, divination, signs or possession. They do not necessarily speak in words but they do speak with authority1.
In Paris, I heard about spirits of the forest that did speak very clearly in words, appearing in the form of elders and explaining angrily but clearly that they did not approve of what the NGOs were doing in their forests. It was strikingly direct. I couldn't help wondering if these people had any kind of diviners among them and, if so, whether they had it uncommonly easy.
That isn't the only kind of dream I heard about, however.
Apparently two dreamers, one of them a visiting journalist, met, not a voluble elder but a beautiful woman in traditional costume who said nothing at all.
Now a Katu man, I know from Nikolas' work, might also dream of meeting a beautiful, silent and traditionally-dressed woman out in the forest. If he does so, he must fear for his life because she is almost certainly a m'rieng. That is the name for the blood-thirsty ghost of someone who died a violent or sanguinary death and it seems reasonable to translate it tentatively as 'vampire', especially as the people killed are likely to become m'rieng themselves. After the dream, the m'rieng might kill the dreamer through bloody accident, tuberculosis or a long possession ending in suicide. There won't be any punch-marks in the neck, nothing to alert Mulder and Scully or give the coroner a turn. But they are drawn to blood and bad death and also to sex; young lovers and newlyweds excite them. And, although anyone can become one if they die the wrong way, they are typically thought of as beautiful young women dressed in red. Red is their colour and the red muntjac is haunted by them or in some sense possessed of a vampire soul.
Now this lady, I suddenly feel, is the one who is speaking a language I can understand. As the thought arrives, I know that it makes no sense. The elders in the other dreams could be actual human beings standing up in an NGO-organized workshop, articulating their complaints. Meanwhile, you can imagine her entering quietly and sitting down at the back. She catches the speaker's eye and I imagine he suddenly feels a great desire for a gulp of water. She may or may not still be there when he looks up. She can, after all, come and go as she pleases. Or so it seems anyway, she might be bluffing. Although it's hard to see how she can be bluffing when she hasn't actually threatened anything. I am suddenly very glad that I have not had a dream like this myself and, so far as I know, have had nothing to do with any project where anyone has. Although - yes I'll admit it - there's a part of me that wants to be standing in that silent, appraising, dangerous gaze.
But (or just and) m’rieng also means 'rainbow.' Nikolas, a Swede, can't help associating this with Odin's route to the world of the dead. What's more, Komorbarr, the good (and sometimes sexy) lady of the hunt, seems in many ways like she is also a m'rieng herself, although she is never called one. I spoke about Komorbarr in my last post but the key point here is that, according to some stories, she/they were also once human and died a bad death. And this death was, again according only to some, connected with a hunted muntjac. However, the connection between m'rieng and Komorbarr, just like the connection between m'rieng and vampire is made by the anthropologist and not by his Katu informants and so that anthropologist (Nikolas) presumably needs to be careful. Of course, we can't simply conflate and analogize European myth with the beliefs of south east Asian forest peoples.
Depending on how you've got to this newsletter, you may or may not know that I've also had at least one dream that seemed to give me a warning about my own conservation actions. In the same place, I also wrote about another dream that felt like a direct message, in words, from something bigger than me. However, the message was cryptic and, while both dreams came to me in south-east Asian forests, none of their 'language' was recognizably south-east Asian. I did not get a dream visitation from Komorbarr, goddess of the game of the Katu country, nor from a spirit of the dry forests of Mondulkiri . I also didn't get a British goddess either despite having been well-primed to expect one. When I went to sleep in the hammock in the Cambodian village where I had the first dream, I was actually listening to a British story about a man questing for a princess he has never seen. Her name is Olwen. If I am searching for a distant mythic woman to represent the saola then Olwen seems like a shoo-in but I got Penelope and the Iliad. Why?
The obvious answer is that a rape planned in a council fits pretty well into the Iliad and that was the key metaphor of the dream. I knew immediately what that meant when I woke up even though nobody had ever told me. Another possibility is that it is because of who I am. I was born in the city, my mother Italian, my father very English but with no single English home. And I'm a biologist; when I walk down southeast Asian jungle trails, the butterflies I scatter have the names of Greek heroes and princesses pinned on them for the delight of 18th Century European silk merchants. So maybe Mediterranean myth is the closest myth to the fake-everywhere that I'm standing in. Definitely possible.
While going through my 2008 notebooks to prepare my paper for the panel, I came upon an account of another dream of mine. Here, it is with some editing but no significant redaction:
FLASH: I went to a Buddhist monastery despite feeling too busy to go.
FLASH: There was some kind of party; someone was leaving.
SCENE: Captain Ahab expounded to me and a circle of awed listeners about the antifreeze properties of a skin of a certain tree frog. It was called a 'vacuum-packed frog' because its limbs folded so neatly under its body when it slept.
AND THEN: I sent a live specimen to AMNH but it ended up in a lab where they were disappointed by its lack of commercial applications and so threatened to turn it into noodles. I called my friend Martha at the Centre for Biodiversity Conservation there and she rescued it. When I went to visit the CBC I found the frog was a big hit there, a kind of centre mascot. However I didn't get to hear too much about it because I was too busy trying to scoop up all the little white Russian crustaceans which had fallen out of their plastic trug onto the floor.
CUT TO: An occasion of Christian singing; some kind of prayer for a big problem in the world. A guy from my school, now a priest was there. When I paid attention to the words I heard this:
"Think of what Jesus Christ said, Think of what he did. He could communicate a hell of a lot better than I But he gave the crucifix."
I was disturbed by the words (though being asleep, I thought it was great poetry).
AND THEN: Myself and some other person were standing shoulder to shoulder and looking down into a picture. A city was spread out along a bay and we looked down on it over the top of a hill where three stumps stood. Three intact crosses stood down by the shore and my companion said that this place was now the true Golgotha. I disagreed. A pair of bald ibis flew past the seaside site. A long crowd of people stood on the slopes of the hill. The birds moved but when I looked at the people, I knew again that the whole thing was only a painting, like the one in our chapel at school.
SCENE: I tell Martha about the dream, and about the song in it. Martha is a real person but I am still dreaming her. In the dream conversation, I go back to the bit about Captain Ahab and complain about the box of A4 sheets of literary criticism that came with my copy of Moby Dick (not really - still the dream). I declared, somewhat proudly, that I had refused to read all that bumff. What I had done, though, was see a real white Sperm Whale while I was reading the book. Surely no other reader had done that before me. Except when had I done it? I couldn't remember.
END
Now to give some context, I read over this while looking for something that would inform my Paris paper which was then already very late. My co-presenter, Nikolas, is a bona fide anthropologist but I am not. "Impostor syndrome2" was reaching a nauseating pitch and not for the last time. I wanted a nice soundbite, a good parable, a clear little lesson that came from my own experience and not Nikolas' ethnographic notes. I hoped I might have recorded an encounter with an "indigenous person"3 that changed my thinking on a certain subject or just offered me a nugget of data. Instead I got an internal drama of entirely Western-friendly images where unsympathetic lab techs are threatening to make noodles out of the antifreeze frog I nicked from Captain Ahab. Thanks, past me.
OK there were noodles. The frog actually looked like one I found in Costa Rica once.
And that's not even getting into the Jesus business.
My autocomplete wanted that to be 'the Jesus bush-warbler.'
Bush warblers are birds with plain brown feathers that sit in hidden places laying out the same short phrases again and again with the whole of their throats. Unassuming and beautiful. You have to work for them. You have to stop on the path you're on and pay attention to a bush. Vietnam has several species and England has just the one.
Look everything's meaningful if you do this kind of thing...
Still, where universalist Mediterranean myths are concerned, I suppose my dreams aren't leaving out the big one. And no god or God or goddess or dragon or vampire or frog is giving clear instructions. Why? It it because I wouldn’t listen if they did
?
1I'm simplifying hugely and eliding a lot of controversy, much of which I do not even understand. Nikolas' dad Kaj, comparing what he'd heard from the Katu with his experiences in Amazonia and drawing on other anthropological writings about the region (notably by Descola) put forward the concept of 'hierarchical animism' in the intro to this book but it is unfortunately not freely available online.
2inverted commas because, ironically, impostor syndrome is not actually a real syndrome.
3inverted commas because this isn't a term generally used in Vietnam. 'Ethnic minority person' is what you are supposed to say.