Smoky Trails: On Taussig's 'Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man'
Smoky Trails: On Taussig's 'Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man'
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烟熏小径：论陶西格的“萨满教、殖民主义和野人”
DOI：
10.2307/3033060
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发表时间：
1987
影响因子：
1.3
通讯作者：
David Stoll
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
David Stoll
大卫·斯托尔（David Stoll）是《人类的渔民还是帝国的创始人？》一书的作者，该书是一部威克利夫圣经翻译者的历史，由 Zed Press 和文化生存杂志于 1982 年出版，他是斯坦福大学人类学系的研究生。民族志通常有一个自传体注释：这里1我们有一个人类学家训练成为萨满的故事。 1970 年，迈克尔·陶西格 (Michael Taussig) 前往哥伦比亚西南部时，他还是一名医学界的难民。当他在考卡山谷 (Cauca Valley) 进行实地考察时，他的心思并没有放在亚马逊流域的致幻藤本植物雅格 (yage) 上。相反，他沉浸在甘蔗工人的政治斗争中，这些工人是逃亡庄园奴隶的后裔，他们在 19 世纪发展了自己的小农经济，并一度洗劫了附近的卡利市。一百年后，这些黑人农民中的大多数都被赶到了悲惨的军营镇去种植园。他们的农场被一片单调的绿色农业综合企业海洋吞没，只有地平线上的甘蔗磨坊打破了这一点。起初，陶西格忽视了他的女房东不断努力消除她的房子里的巫术。谦逊的小个子男人、巫医或治疗师带着他们的咒语和魔药来来去去。但当他研究土地保有权和无产阶级化时，20 世纪 70 年代初的劳工组织正在被打破。这位政治经济学家转向神话和魔法的研究。陶西格遇到的一些民间治疗师是来自太平洋沿岸丛林的黑人。其他人是来自安第斯山脉最东端的因加和西邦杜伊印第安人。他们在源源不断的魔幻现实主义中谈论奇迹、圣人和邪风，加布里埃尔·加西亚·马尔克斯已将这些魔幻现实主义转化为文学。陶西格了解到，哥伦比亚南部的风景充满了魔法和巫术。据称，最强大的萨满是居住在亚马逊丛林普图马约河下游的野生印第安人。在他的治疗师朋友的帮助下，陶西格循着这些谣言进入了普图马约。在现在被殖民和分割的丛林中，即使是鄙视印第安人的定居者也会向土著治疗师寻求治疗，因为他们担心他们的苦工和对手会用巫术来对付他们。在这些人的雅格想象中，狂野、野蛮的印第安人形象也是具有强大治愈力的形象。很快，陶西格将这些图像追溯到世纪之交的橡胶繁荣时期，当时数千名普图马约印第安人死于英国资助的秘鲁亚马逊橡胶公司之手。这是陶西格开始他的新书的地方。他引用旅行者的叙述，深入研究了橡胶时代的交涉战争。由于橡胶赞助商实际上正在摧毁他们自己的劳动力，因此这些暴行违背了常识。它们与我们通常理解的政治经济学相矛盾。这就是陶西格这位象征人类学家的诞生。他没有从政治经济学的角度解释普图马约恐怖事件，而是认为它遵循了更深层次的象征逻辑，这一逻辑也构建了“真实”的意义。陶西格的第一本书《魔鬼与商品拜物教》（1980 年，北卡罗来纳大学 P.）展示了哥伦比亚农民如何对现代社会进行他们自己的前资本主义批判。除其他外，他们指责贪婪的店主将灵魂变成与魔鬼交换的商品。新书延续了作者象征性的马克思主义方法。显然，它是一部解释性著作，而非科学解释性著作，反映了解释性人类学家对文学批评日益浓厚的兴趣。但与某些新作品不同的是，它充满了人和解释类别。有时令人产生幻觉的散文，由于作者与萨满朋友的雅格幻象而变得更加尖锐，以一种许多人类学所不具备的方式传达了生活经验的感觉。它还创造了一种丰富的感觉，即不同社会阶层对现实的争夺方式，而克利福德·格尔茨的全知象征人类学却缺少这种感觉。然而，一些读者可能会发现萨满教、殖民主义和野人更容易阅读而不是理解。原因之一是陶西格用马克思主义美学，特别是贝尔托·布莱希特和沃尔特·本雅明的美学来解释他的经历，并假设他熟悉这些思想家。解决这个困难的一种方法是将这本书视为一种文学体验。如果考虑到雅阁旅行的某些特征，这个论点就会浮现眼前。这种物质本身是一种浑浊的棕色液体，一般来说，它对真理寻求者的第一个影响是让他们呕吐并失去对肠道的控制。清洗的暴力往往伴随着野生动物和魔鬼等危险的形象：喝雅格酒的人可能会担心自己即将死去。但如果克服了这些考验，人们可能会得到更吸引人的异象作为回报，甚至可能爬上天堂与上帝交谈。雅格之旅早期阶段的呕吐、排便和恐惧的必然结果是本书开头的橡胶繁荣暴行的故事。陶西格随后关于治疗的章节对应于雅格朝圣者进入幻想、过去的图像和死者记忆的神奇治疗体验，他将其称为“死亡空间”。他指出，正如橡胶热潮将强大的危险形象灌输到集体无意识中一样，萨满巫师也将这些相同的形象从中拉出来，以求治愈。因此，恐惧和治愈都来自同一个“认知黑暗”，一个产生权力图像的混乱的神圣领域。我们都熟悉人类学中的浪漫主义倾向，以及对部落和农民的救赎力量的信仰。陶西格相信，正如萨满巫师为病人驱除邪恶一样，他们的榜样也可以帮助我们驱除我们自己文化和历史中的恶魔。但这并不是克洛德·勒维·施特劳斯的萨满教，他将这些人物解释为秩序的创造者。他的萨满教也不是埃文斯-普里查德在阿赞德人中发现的理性占卜科学，也不是维克多·特纳所建议的旨在创造无缝统一感的仪式。相反，根据陶西格的说法，萨满教是一个恶作剧。这是一系列没完没了的恶作剧，打破了对秩序的追求，破坏了既定的范畴，并由此导致了某种救赎。这就是陶西格发现马克思主义美学如此具有启发性的地方，特别是在记忆和1.迈克尔·陶西格的主题上，萨满教，殖民主义和野人：恐怖与治疗的研究（芝加哥大学，?23.95）
David Stoll is author of Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire?, a history of the Wycliffe Bible Translators published by Zed Press and Cultural Survival in 1982, and is a graduate student in the anthropology department, Stanford University. Ethnography often has an autobiographical note: here1 we have the story of an anthropologist training to be a shaman. Michael Taussig was a refugee from the medical profession when he went to southwestern Colombia in 1970. His mind was not on yage, the hallucinogenic vine of the Amazon, as he settled down to fieldwork in the Cauca Valley. Instead, he immersed himself in the political struggles of sugar cane workers, descendants of escaped hacienda slaves who, in the 19th Century, had developed their own smallholder's economy and, on one occasion, sacked the nearby city of Cali. A hundred years later, most of these black peasants had been pushed into miserable barracks town for the plantations. Their farms had been swallowed by a monotonous green sea of agribusiness, broken only by cane mills on the horizon. At first, Taussig ignored the incessant efforts of his landlady to rid her house of sorcery. Unassuming little men, curanderos or healers, came and went with their magic spells and potions. But as he studied land tenure and proletarianization, the labour organizing of the early 1970s was being broken. The political economist turned to the study of myth and magic. Some of the folk healers Taussig met were blacks from the jungles along the Pacific Coast. Others were Inga and Sibundoy Indians from the easternmost chain of the Andes. They talked about miracles, saints and evil winds in a never-ending stream of the magical realism which Gabriel Garcia Marquez has turned into literature. The landscape of southern Colombia, Taussig learned, was teeming with magic and sorcery. The most powerful shamans of all were reputed to be wild Indians living far down the Putumayo River in the Amazon Jungle. With the help of his healer friends, Taussig followed those rumours into the Putumayo. In that now colonized and subdivided jungle, even settlers who despised Indians would come to indigenous healers for cures, of the sorcery which they feared their peons and rivals were directing against them. In yage visions of such men, the image of the wild and savage Indian was also an image of great healing power. Soon Taussig was tracing such images back to the rubber boom around the turn of the century, when thousands of Putumayo Indians died at the hands of the British-financed Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. This is where Taussig begins his new book. Citing travellers' accounts, he delves into the war of representations during the rubber era. Since the rubber patrons were, in effect, destroying their own labour force, the atrocities defy common sense. They contradict political economy as we usually understand it. That is what brings out the symbolic anthropologist in Taussig. Instead of explaining the Putumayo terror in terms of political economy, he argues that it obeyed a deeper symbolic logic, one which also constructed the very sense of what was 'real'. Taussig's first book, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980, U. of North Carolina P.), showed how Colombian peasants engage in their own precapitalist critique of modern society. Among other things, they accuse greedy store-owners of turning souls into a commodity which they exchange with the devil. The new book continues the author's symbolic Marxist approach. Clearly a work of interpretation rather than scientific explanation, it reflects the increasing interest of interpretive anthropologists in literary criticism. But unlike some of this new work, it is populated by people as well as interpretive categories. The sometimes hallucinogenic prose, sharpened by the author's yage visions with his shaman friends, conveys the feeling of lived experience in a way which so much anthropology does not. It also creates a rich sense of the way in which reality is contested by different social classes, a sense missing from the omniscient symbolic anthropology of Clifford Geertz. Some readers may find Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man easier to read than to understand, however. One reason is that Taussig interprets his experiences in terms of Marxist aesthetics, particularly those of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, and assumes familiarity with such thinkers. One way to get around this difficulty is look on the book as a literary yage experience. If certain characteristics of yage trips are taken into account, the argument swims into view. The substance itself is a murky brown liquid whose first effect on truth-seekers, generally, is to make them vomit and lose control of their bowels. The violence of the purge tends to be accompanied by images of danger such as wild animals and devils: the yage drinker may fear that he is about to die. But if such trials are overcome, one may be rewarded with more appealing visions, maybe even a climb up to heaven to talk with God. The corollary to the puking, defecating and fear of the early stages of the yage trip are the stories of the rubber boom atrocities at the start of the book. Taussig's subsequent chapters on healing correspond to the yage pilgrim's entry into a magical healing experience of fantasy, of images out of the past and memories of the dead, which he refers to as the 'space of death'. Just as the rubber boom fed powerful images of danger into the collective unconscious, he points out, shamans pull those same images out of it in order to heal. Terror and healing therefore come out of the same 'epistemic murk', a sacred realm of confusion generating images of power. We are all familiar with the romantic strain in anthropology, the belief in the redemptive power of tribal and peasant peoples. Well, Taussig believes that, just as shamans exorcize evil from their patients, their example can help us exorcize the demons of our own culture and history. But this is not the shamanism of Claude L6viStrauss, who interpreted such figures as creators of order. Nor is his shamanism the rational science of divination discovered by Evans-Pritchard among the Azande, or a ritual intended to create a sense of seamless unity as suggested by Victor Turner. Instead, according to Taussig, shamanism is a practical joke. It is an endless series of pranks which break up the search for order, destabilizing and disrupting established categories, and through that leading to a kind of redemption. This is where Taussig finds Marxist aesthetics so illuminating, especially on the subjects of memory and 1. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: a Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago U. P., ?23.95)