...differently.

(Levi-Strauss, Cannibalism ritual transvestism, 1989)

PRIMORDIAL CONFLICTS AND CULTURAL MEDIATION: OUTLINE FOR A DISCUSSION

Predation and incorporation, or the bonds of body-destruction phantasies, are fundamental components of human social relationships and as such culturally ordered. Yet the cultural variation of aggression and its counterpart, love, is not without limits--patterns of aggressive behaviour can be shown to evolve from certain psychosexual dynamics originating in infancy. Following Mimica's (1991a:49, 1991b:82) argument of the organismic interrelatedness between mother and infant as being cannibalistic in nature (foetus and infant eat the mother's bodily substances) and as such presenting a universal substratum of human sociality, one could say that the two basic affects, love and aggression, emerge as a first bifurcation of the original corporeal interdependence between mother and infant. The concern of this paper then is to bring into sharper relief Levi-Strauss' implicit suggestion that the continuum on which aggression has no fixed place is also of a developmental order. I offer an interpretation of cannibalistic figures in Australian Aboriginal accounts that, within a framework of Freudian psychoanalysis and object relations theories, seeks to show how some such primordial forces are given a cultural meaning. The paper works through a hypothesis that owes much to the insights of the pioneer psychoanalytic anthropologist Geza Roheim: the mythopoeic symbolism of Australian Aboriginal societies objectifies to a high degree pre-oedipal dynamics. At the centre of these are positive and negative identifications with the maternal phallus--'the psychological core of the bisexual identification' (Bak, 1968:16). Much in-depth psychological research with individuals would have to be done before it will be possible to determine the extent to which such a hypothesis might apply across Aboriginal cultures and time. I believe such a research to be worthwhile, not least because it can shed light on how cultural transformation is experienced at the core level of the self (Erikson, 1977). (1)

Continuities between the early infantile experiences of the individual and social process establish an uninterrupted circuity: refracting love and aggression, cannibalistic monsters, bogeymen, and ogres can be seen as concrete manifestations of the conflictual relationship between mother and child on the one hand, and between absolute (maternal) incest and sociality on the other. They pay testimony to the struggles and anxieties, but also the ferocious joy, that are part and parcel of the breaking out of the maternal bond and the quest for social relatedness that mark the growth of the human self. Whether stuck up as a frightening mask at the post of a child's bed in Victorian England, identified as the seductive call of a bird that wants to lure an Aboriginal child away from the safety of the camp at night, or declared to possess an infant in northern India who refuses the breast, the hungry ogre lingers on the margins of 'home', ready to attack the one who steps outside. Pertaining to the same developmental processes, cannibalistic creatures are as ubiquitous as incest prohibitions and as varied in their expression. But if the ogre curbs the child's attempt to pull away from the mother and her symbolic objects (the breast, the bed, the home) (2) and thus encourages endosocial bonds, the ogre that symbolises the breach of incest prohibitions (like for instance Dokonikan in the Trobriand Tudava myth (Malinowski, 1949; Devereux, 1986--88)) curbs such self-directed strivings. The first-mentioned creation of life-extinguishing demons for children, placing fearsome 'guardians' around the dyadic unity, is fuelled, I suggest, by the mother's identification with her child. This particular form of self-love of the mother qua the child is important in consolidating the vital somatic and emotional linkage between the two (although overemphasised bonding techniques on the part of the mother can also stultify the outward-directed attentiveness of the infant). From this angle, cannibalistic images for adults such as Dokonikan may be seen to similarly designate a form of incestuous self-closure. Indeed, the ogre for adults that punishes incest may be understood as a continuation of the earlier (pregenital) guardian of such a bond. But note that, here, the earlier protective role of the demonic 'outsider' is inverted: the bond represented by the incestuous cannibal figure is perceived as a trespass that threatens the reproduction of society as it is secured through exchange relations with recognised others. Yet a further involution can be traced. As Mimica (1991a:38) and Wagner (2000) have argued, the ubiquity of incest prohibitions notwithstanding, the taboos on marital and/or sexual liaisons with certain relatives present not only an affirmation of unconscious incestuous desires, in the way Freud (1900:375; 1905; 1912-13) saw it. They also present their fulfilment. This occurs indirectly (and hence in a viable form) through a series of metaphoric obviations. I will only mention a few examples of such cultural creations: women may consume animals in place of their newborn child; vital activities and bodily functions--planting, hunting, eating--may be perceived as being sexed (as among the Yagwoia of Papua New Guinea, see Mimica, 1991a, b); the procreative flow of bodily substances may be substituted by gift exchange and ritual practices (as in Australian Aboriginal initiation rites, see e.g. Roheim, 1945; Berndt and Berndt, 1946); and more explicit phantasies may become real in dreams, myths, legends and literature (Rank, 1912; Roheim, 1988).

The impulse to make others a part of the self finds a direct expression in cannibalistic ideas that are inherently ambivalent; at once incorporating and destructive. It also underlies the desire to extend one's own identity to others. For Freud (2000b:98) identification constitutes the earliest form of emotional relatedness. Ambivalent from the beginning, he explained, the processes of identification at the onset of the oedipal stage appear like descendents of the earliest phase of libidinal organisation, the oral sucking phase. The latter is also described as the cannibalistic stage (Abraham, 1966:38) where the intake of food is not distinguished from the autoerotic experience of sucking. Ontogenetically then the earliest experiences of libidinised incorporation seem to point to a primordial (pre-oedipal) meaning of incest: as autosexuality or self-creation (see also Mimica, 1991b:108-10).

In what follows, I explore the ambivalent nature of cannibalistic images in the Pitjantjatjara and other Australian Aboriginal life-worlds in light of its significance for the psychogenesis of the self. From this perspective cannibalistic images appear as projectively instituted split-off parts of the self in both their integrating and fragmenting role. Self-integrating dynamics are manifest in the phantasies of incorporation and devouring that a particular ogre-figure and spirit-eater symbolises. In this determination one may also speak of the motif of the internal stranger or negative double (Rank, 1971), which represents the wish for self-incorporation. The representation of this wish in the image of the ogre is perceived as socially destructive. In contrast, images of dismemberment (Rank, 1992:248-56) are positively valued in so far as they are associated with rebirth or reanimation--the 'psychologic' of the making of a sorcerer and of initiation rites. (3) My ethnographic entry into the pre-oedipal dimension of an Aboriginal mythopoeisis is from the eastern end of the Western Desert, where people (who refer to themselves as Anangu) call the ogre MAMU. However, I believe that the kind of analysis engaged here justifies a wider cultural scope, including aspects not only of the expansive Western Desert cultural bloc, but also of Central Australian societies proper, such as the Warlpiri and Arrernte. (4)

As the discussion involves a number of visual images, I mention that the present exploration of an image of horror has grown out of my aesthetic analysis of Pitjantjatjara children's drawings first made during the 1940s on a former Presbyterian mission station in the northwest corner of South Australia. The designs have evolved into a distinctive local art style now produced by women in a broad range of mediums (Eickelkamp, 1999; 2001; 2002). The imagery is non-iconographic and perceived as beautiful and pleasing to the eye. In marked contrast to other Aboriginal art forms Anangu say that these 'anyway' patterns do not come from the Ancestral Law or Dreaming, and instead flow freely from the human imagination. The artists furthermore assert that they do not depict a story, scene or any specific object at all. However, on account of certain typical features, several designs have been retrospectively associated with MAMU, as I describe later on. I here want to mention that self-closure is a characteristic feature of both the finished designs and the process of making the patterns--the person literally draws in upon herself and simultaneously withdraws from the social field. Indeed, the general trend of development of this art style has been towards a progressive pronunciation of its features, unfolding through self-referential contractions and expansions of typical design elements. A comprehensive formal aesthetic analysis of artworks across a variety of media and across six decades, including pre-contact forms of visual representations such as cave paintings, body decorations and sand drawings, showed that the local style belongs in the aesthetic field of the Western Desert mythopoeic imagery. The circumstance of being able to document the morphogenesis of an art style and to study the artists' lives and work, opened the door for an investigation of elementary psychosexual and psychosocial features that appear to account for certain dominant aspects of this visual aesthetic. The devil-devil or MAMU is likewise a cultural element that has remained comparatively stable throughout the history of the community and the wider region. I want to suggest then that the continuity of aesthetic forms of which the MAMU is a part has been sustained by a dominant psychic orientation.

In the free abstract patterns that make for the local art style, preference is given to the bilateral organisation of forms. I have shown elsewhere that bilateral symmetry is also an organising principle in the kinship system and endowed with moral value in the notion of LIPULA, meaning 'being levelled', 'balanced', 'equally distributed', and hence 'fair'. I hope to show that the negative figure of the MAMU too can be comprehended in terms of a symmetrical structuration, if understood as a dynamic function of intrapsychic and intersubjective processes. As Lacan (1948:27) formulated it:

The notion of the role of spatial symmetry in man's narcissistic structure is essential in the establishment of the bases of a psychological analysis of space ... it is the possibility of the mirror projection of such a field into the field of the other that gives human space its originally "geometrical" structure, a structure that I would be happy to call kaleidoscopic.

PHALLIC IMAGOS

One of the central questions I wish to pursue throughout the analysis of cannibalistic images is how the maternal bond and its phallic signification continues to sustain the structure of the ego and its relationship to the world. (5) The examination of a cannibalistic ogre can only offer a partial answer to this complex and profound question that has been dealt with extensively in the psychoanalytic researches into Central Australian cultures, principally by Geza Roheim and later John Morton, and, if marginally, Annette Hamilton. These ethnographers have emphasised that the Aboriginal imagination has created an environment of an oral paradise: the mythscape of the Dreaming is seen as a self-replenishing source of nourishment, and as such is a maternal symbol. However, it can only be sustained through the phallic strivings of the mother-image, and this entails an aggressive component: in the peripheral zones of the benevolent environment live malicious creatures who, as expressions of cannibalistic desires, at once threaten and protect the contours of the good objects.

The Splitting into Good and Bad

Melanie Klein's analysis of the dynamics of projection and introjection in early infancy provides a most productive framework for thinking through the MAMU-figure and related phenomena such as sorcery practices, spirit-children, and the spirit of the dead. In 'Contributions to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states', Klein (1935:262) explains:

From the beginning the ego introjects objects "good" and "bad", for both of which the mother's breast is the prototype--for good objects when the child obtains it, for bad ones when it fails him. But it is because the baby projects its own aggression on to these objects that it feels them to be "bad" and not only in that they frustrate his desires: the child conceives of them as actually dangerous-- persecutors who it fears will devour it, scoop out the inside of its body, cut it to pieces, poison it--in short, compassing its destruction by all means which sadism can devise. These imagoes, which are a phantastically-distorted picture of the real objects upon which they are based, become installed not only in the outside world but, by the process of incorporation, also within the ego.

In order to concretise the reality of the psyche that Klein has described in analytic terms and to set things in 'flesh', I present two out of many ethnographic examples, more than seven decades apart, that testify to the collective articulation of such pre-oedipal processes. Daisy Bates (1985:235-6) gives the following depiction of the making of a sorcerer, JALNGANGOOROO, in the early 1900s from the area around Broome, which reads like a translation of Klein's persecutory objects and their introjection into the language of a particular cultural symbolism.

The hereditary jalngangooroo first took his brother-in-law to a cave shelter, away from the people in the camp. He then put a magic snake inside him, these having pointed heads and tails. Next he put magic sticks and a little bird inside his brother-in-law's head, stomach and back. By and by these began to bite the brother-in-law and they continued to bite him until all his fat had been bitten out. The jalngangooroo who is giving his magic knows when all the fat has been taken out and as soon as this is done he puts more snakes etc. inside the stomach, head and back. Soon the man's eyes feel clear and he hears a noise inside him. He comes outside the cave and all the things that have been put inside him come out and he sees them all moving about. Presently they come back to him again and then he rubs his breast and closes them in and he knows he is jalngangooroo.

The second example is from Barbara Glowczewski's Les Reveurs du Desert, and I provide my own translation from the German edition. Glowczewski (1991:162) reports an account of a Warlpiri woman's experience of conceiving her eldest son after she had been hunting in the vicinity of the sacred site of the Initiated Man in the Yarunkanyi rocks. Two rockholes, one large and one small, are connected through an underground canal filled with water. They are the traces of Two Cannibal ancestors, Yupajarrayi, who had dug the holes in order to roast their victims in them. The Nungarrayi explains:

When, by chance, I saw the dried up holes, I thought to myself, "This must be the place where the Two Cannibals roasted...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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