Raw Women and Cooked Men

I'm not sure exactly what I intend with this blog. I guess I'm utterly fascinated by the perpetual feast, the "universal chomp," as Annie Dillard put it, that is life on earth.  Over the winter I wrote two things down in my notebook (yes, an honest to goodness tangible artifact): "between birth and death, there is mostly eating and sex;" and, "In winter we struggle to eat; In summer we struggle not to be eaten."  I wrote down a good many other things as well, but these illustrate a general thrust that seems to continually occupy an expansive territory in my imaginative terrain.  You see, I like food: studying it, growing it, acquiring it, preparing it, and of course eating it. I love it. And I know too that, whatever else I am, I am food. We all are. Indeed, that's all anything is when it comes down to it. Everything is food. Only the gods are exempt from this most basic of realities. For the rest of us mortals ("mere bellies" though we may be) life is merely a passage through the alimentary canal of a hungry planet. So existence, the great dance of life, is really a matter of eating and (not) being eaten.  

Fiery Gizzard, besides being the name of a singularly spectacular creek and hiking trail on my native Cumberland Plateau, seemed like an appropriate name for a platform for engagement with topics such as these . . .  

I recently read an article by a favorite anthropologist of mine in which he recounts the 1929 ethnography of yet another anthropologist in which the latter reconstructs an exchange between a Fijian king and a carpenter who built him a particularly fine canoe: "The chief apologized that he could not offer the carpenter a 'cooked man' or a 'raw woman,' for Christianity, he explained, 'has spoiled our feasts.' The 'cooked man' refers to an enemy cannibal victim, the 'raw woman' to a virgin daughter of the chief offered as a wife." I am certainly not advocating either cannibalism or an economy of virgin daughters, but this account has something to do with where I'm  going with this blog, even if I'm not quite sure what that might mean. 

I teach undergraduate anthropology classes. In a section concerned with cultural meaning we examine the concept of key metaphors--that each culture possesses a distinct handful of domains from which they/we construct the bulk of their/our cultural narratives ("the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves").  By way of example, we look at Franz Boas's (and others') documentation of the Kwakiutl Cannibal Dance.  Central to this ritual enactment of core cultural values is the appeasement of the spirit of Bakbakwalanooksiwae ("cannibal at the north end of the world," in Boas's translation). This mythical spirit is the originary cannibal, or the cannibalistic impulse that has the potential to manifest in all of us if we do not undergo proper socialization. The ceremonial dance is performed by a secret shamanic society known as the Hamatsa (an initiate of which is pictured below).

Every time I look at this photograph, taken by Edward Curtis in 1914, I can't help but wonder what is going on in this man's head, or rather, what cosmic synapses are fusing in his cortex in this momentary state of ecstatic unity. The accompanying description reads:  "Hamatsa shaman, three-quarter length portrait, seated on ground in front of tree, facing front, possessed by supernatural power after having spent several days in the woods as part of an initiation ritual." After such initiation this man is ever after qualified to represent one of Bakbakwalanooksiwae's many mouths in the course of the cannibal dance ceremony. For the Kwakiutl, as for many peoples of the world, eating is damned serious business.

In a related concept in Kwakiutl cosmology, the souls of the dead are thought to enter the body of salmon (the principal food item for most all peoples of the Pacific northwest coast) and are released back into the eternal cycle of life only when that salmon is eaten, thereby releasing the soul to animate another human body. Thus salmon are always and only eaten with greatest respect, as they are nothing less than the bearers of souls in the great re-cycling bin of eternal life/death, the deliverers of what in Sanskrit was called samsara--the continuous flow. This is in some sense a form of cannibalism, but one whose end is the perpetuation of the life force of a people. For the Kwakiutl then, food, eating, and hunger are key metaphors, the axes around which cultural identity and self conceptualization revolves.  

In a similar conceptualization, and since her work seems to be a general guide in this entry, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard excerpts a quote from an Inuit shaman who says, "Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that men's food consists entirely of souls." Yes siree! Exactly that!  

It is matters such as these that interest me here. I'm also just quite simply interested in food and eating. So, a celebration of life's comestibles; a picaresque of mytho-gastronomic intrigue; tempered with a recognition that we all eventually end up on the menu. And maybe that is what we all seek after all, this reintegration, by way of digestive forces, back into the great belly of the universe. We'll see what comes out of it.