Tommy C's Blog

When we imagine back thousands, hundreds of thousands of years from today, in a thought-experiment to understand human nature from our first ancestors, we probably conjure up images of African grasses and huntsman, the women gathering up fruits, the fierce competitions for survival and sex. We zoom out from that image and picture the globe in a second, covered in routes pointing out of Africa that took early humans countless generations to follow; then, we refocus on a contemporary city, to see that raw, elemental reality still at work in modern humans: The woman with a mediocre husband who sleeps with a young hot lawyer-winner during her ovulation; the man murdering the leader of a neighbourhood gang to gain ascendancy in his.

We look back and think up ruthless stories from evolutionary psychology, in other words. It suits our individualized, demystified, uncertain times. In 1912, before World War I, before the Victorian era was fully gone, sociologist Émile Durkheim tried to do something similar. Although now his project seems so very different: His focus was not on individuality, but collectivity; not on our selfishness but our morality; not on savagery but on religion. Not evolutionary psychology at all, then, but something seemingly quite different.

What, exactly, did he do? He analysed the simplest, oldest religion he could identify at that time - that of Aboriginal Australians - arguing in his anthropological work that in elementary religion one is likely to find the basic building-blocks of religion, and thus of group life, that later evolved into our current forms. Are you thinking an imaginary system of all-powerful Gods, the consolation of an afterlife? Not so, says Durkheim, not in the elementary forms of religion.

Instead Durkheim's story is about rituals that bond groups, totems based upon nature, where modern metaphysical trappings are mostly absent. From this we find that at the core of religion, says Durkheim, the distinction between the sacred and the profane. And from this distinction religion builds up all other knowledge - the territory of the tribe, the timing of the seasons, say - and in so doing, creates a social bond through psychological similarity, and through the social bond, creates morality. The sacred and the profane, for Durkheim, are the basic mental cagegories of man under elementary religion, from which all other understanding stems, including space and time.

Probably already you are objecting: surely we think first individually, not socially? (I think therefore I am.) Surely morality can come from other sources but religion? (Atheists don't start wars.) Surely the way we think - say, the way we categorise time - comes direct from our nature, not inevitably from our social norms? (Babies want for the future, learn from the past.) Surely Durkheim's work - which was a longish book, in fact - said a bit more than that with a lot more sophistication than that? (In short: isn't Durkheim telling a just-so story, and aren't you, Tom?) Quite so; anthropology moved away from Durkheim, and I only mean to provide a brief and simplistic gloss for you.

Now, if you read up about the Pirahã, you find a very interesting people and language. You also will find them analysed by anthropologists, who are asking questions from cognitive psychology, from linguistics, etc. Interesting stuff, not really Durkheim's type of questions. Yet in some ways the Pirahã seem more elemental - if you will forgive the implications of right-thinking progress the term might seem to connote, but which I do not mean - than the Aboriginals. You can guess what I've been wondering about this afternoon, then, when you learn that (apparently) the Pirahã:

-speak only of the present, and only of direct personal experience
-so have no history beyond living memory
-have a kinship language and system consisting of only 'brother', 'sister' and (non-gendered) 'parent'
-have no numbers and no numeracy, no or limited materialism, with few possession or the desire for more, no or limited art-work, no or limited change, no or limited words for the colours

Some of these points are contentious (no versus limited), but Durkheim would presumably, rather than argue over them, ask something else: if these are what the Pirahã don't have or aren't important, what are the big building blocks of their culture? Well, this magazine article goes on to say the Pirahã

are very laid-back, accepting things as they are, not fretting about the future, and taking great plesure in life. Above all, these are a people who live for the moment...

This immediate and literal way of seeing the world fits with the Pirahã's apparent lack of a creation myth, but it seems at odds with one of the most important aspects of their everyday life. They believe in an elaborate spirit world, which takes the form of something like parallel universes, with evil spirits inhabiting their own realsm above and below the Earth. It may sounds suspiciously like mystical for a culture suppose to lack mythology, but [Pirahã anthropologist and linguist] [Dan] Everett notes that the Pirahã's relationship with their spirit world is remarkably practical. They claim to have direct experience of some of the evil spirits - a notion made only too real to him during his early days in the Amazon when he was awoken one night and asked to ward off an evil spirit ... [which turned out to be] a prowling panther.

A mythology based on good and evil spirits - but a practical everyday one, where good and evil literally exist. Spirits: perhaps just a way of intuitively knowing that things move and do things, that humans are not the only forms that appears to act with intention. Perhaps then, their core is good and evil. I wonder what Durkheim would have concluded from that, about the core of human nature and culture? Well, in 1912 he wouldn't have concluded something simple and smiley, like, to be honest, I naively feel like doing right now, as if finishing off a nice little dream, or writing a child's Just-So story. Good and Evil; Just So. Probably Durkheim instead would have studied more, theorized more, with his deep, serious hopes for the modern world and for our moral lives, his sense of our continuity with the distant past. I won't be doing such work, and perhaps his attitudes and beliefs, and his intellectual and social projects perished with him, for:

World War I was to have a tragic effect on Durkheim's life. Durkheim's leftism was always patriotic rather than internationalist — he sought a secular, rational form of French life. But the coming of the war and the inevitable nationalist propaganda that followed made it difficult to sustain this already nuanced position. While Durkheim actively worked to support his country in the war, his reluctance to give in to simplistic nationalist fervor (combined with his Jewish background) made him a natural target of the now-ascendant French right. Even more seriously, the generation of students that Durkheim had trained were now being drafted to serve in the army, and many of them perished as France was bled white in the trenches. Finally, Durkheim's own son died in the war — a mental blow from which Durkheim never recovered. Emotionally devastated and overworked, Durkheim collapsed of a stroke in 1917.

One wonder's what terrors he suffered during his "ferocious silence" after his son's death. A whole world passing, so much destroyed, so utterly painful, so utterly unavoidable to think of.

Certainly, Dan Everett isn't about to resurrect Durkheim's lost, broken spirit. Under their new influences of "settlers, diseases, alcohol," already he seems to mourn the Pirahã's end, which may "happen very quickly":

This beautiful language and culture, so fundamentally different from anything the Western world has produced, has much to teach us about linguistic theory, about culture, about human nature, about living for each day and letting the future take care of itself, about personal fortitude, toughness, love, and many other values too numerous to mention. And this is but one example of many other endangered languages and cultures in the Amazon and elsewhere with 'riches' of a similar nature that we may never know about because of our own shortsightedness.