Medios de comunicación

thing is surely part of a divine mystery. But the step from the stomach quest to the spiritual one is not in itself as idealistic as Hocart wmild seem to make out. The earning of spiritual points is the initial impetus of the search for purity, however much some few noble souls might transmute that in an unselfish direction. For most men faith in spirituality is merely a step into continued life, the exact extension of the organismic stomach project.

There is a small debate being aired in certain circles of anthro­ pology today about the many ways in which primitive life was superior to our own. Levi-Strauss himself has taken a stand in favor

of the primitive.24 I don't want to go into the pros and cons of it and the many subtle and valid arguments produced on both sides. But it does help us to understand the primitive world if we agree to the old anthropological tenet about "the psychic unity of man­ kind"-that is, that man everywhere, no matter how exotic a

particular culture, is basically standard vintage

Homo sapiens,

interchangeable in his nature and motives with any other human being. This is what the whole movement to rehabilitate the primi­ tive-from Hocart to Levi-Strauss-has been about: to show that he is basically no different from ourselves and certainly not inferior mentally or emotionally. Well, having agreed that the primitive is no worse than we are, it might be in order to add that he is no better. Otherwise, as we shall see, we cannot really understand what happened in history, unless we try to make out that a different animal developed, nor can we understand the problems of modern society, unless we pretend that modern man is a wholly degenerate

type of Homo sapiens.

What I am saying is that if modern man seems mad in his ob­ session to control nature by technology, primitive man was no less obsessed by his own mystical technics of sacrifice. After all, one of the things we have learned from the modern study of mental illness is that to make the body the referent of the whole cosmos is a technique of madness.25 It is true that by institutionalizing macrocosmization, primitive man made it a normal way of referring oneself to transcendent events. But this kind of "normality" is itself unreal, it blows man up to an abnormal size, and so we are right to consider it self-defeating, a departure from the truth of the

human condition. If the primitive was not less intelligent, he was equally not less intent on self-perpetuation. When we "step ofF' into history, we seem to see a type of man who is more driven­ but this is only because he started off already obsessed with control and with a hunger for immortality. It is true that primitive man was kinder to nature, that he did not cause the kind of destructive­ ness we are causing and, in fact, did not seem capable of our kind of casual disregard for the bounty of the natural world. It would take a lot of study and compilation of comparative data to bear these impressions out, but I think that if primitive man was kinder to nature, it was not because he was innately different in his emotional sensitivity nor more altruistic toward other living forms than we are. I think, rather, that it was because his technics cif manipulation was less destructive. He needed a tree, the spirit of

an

animal or plant, the sacrifice of

one

animal of a species. As we shall see, we grind up astronomically larger quantities of life, but it is in the same spirit and for the same basic reasons. If we talk about a certain primitive quality of "reverence" for life, we must be very careful. The primitives' attitude toward animals considered sacred was sometimes more cruel than our own is. They did not hesitate to sacrifice those whom they considered their benefactors or their gods, or even hesitate to kill their chiefs and kings. The main value was whether this brought life to the community and whether the ritual demanded it.2" Man has always casually sacrificed life for more life.

Probably more to the point, man has always treated with con­ sideration and respect those parts of the natural world over

which

he has had no control. As soon as he was sure of his powers, his respect for the mystery of what he faced diminished. Hocart makes a telling point about the evolution of man's attitude toward animals : As his superiority and mastery over the rest of the living world became more and more apparent he seems to have become more and more anxious to disclaim relationship with animals, especially when worship became associated with respect. There is no objection to an animal's being the objec_{t of} a _{cult when this does not imply respect but is merely} a procedure for causing the animal to multiply. It is a very different thing when ritual becomes worship; man is loath to abase himself be­ fore an animaJ.27

The

_{Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics}

₂₅ Hocart attributes this to "the growing conceit of man." But we could just as well see it as a result of natural narcissism. Each organism preens itself on the specialness of the life that throbs within it, and is ready to subordinate all others to its own continua­ tion. Man was always conceited; he only began to show his destruc­ tive side to the rest of nature when the ritual technology of the spiritual production of animals was superseded by other technol­ ogies. The unfolding of history is precisely the saga of the succession of n�w and different ideologies of organismic self-perpetuation­ and the new injustices and heightened destructiveness of historical man. Let us turn to this.

The Primitive World:

In document Diagnóstico de la Comunidad de San Juan (página 15-0)