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Article Excerpt
* Late 19th-and early 20th-century armchair ethnographers from Frazer to Freud based their influential discussions of totemism on European colonizers' accounts of undiscovered territories, unfamiliar communities, and the misunderstood languages of indigenous peoples in North America and Australia. During the 1930s-1960s, though, the impulse to universalize social evolutionary categorizations fell into disfavor, and the academic community's obsession with sorting out animal-human kinship elements of totemism disappeared. Nevertheless, fanciful romanticisms regarding totemism clearly remain as popular culture tenets today, including deifying animals as potential gods and ancestors, shape-shifting into one's designated totem, and ritualistic killing, eating, or otherwise maiming of one's totem qua ancestor. These views assume that totemic thinking is symptomatic of a primitive, barbarous, and undomesticated neolithic capacity distinct from a civilized state. (1)
Sf often hyperbolizes contemporary social interests (after J. G. Ballard's fashion) and recaptures social concerns (in Jean Baudrillard's sense of hyperreality). The question surfaces, then, whether contemporary sf that depicts totemic relationships among humans and animals extends popularized misreading, or whether sf thought experiments reveal the conundrums created by social science, figuratively asserting that totemism as conceived by these ethnographers is an illusion. Do forms of sf simultaneously recover the more accurate indigenous sense or senses, varying from tribe to tribe, band to band, of totem? To what degree is it possible to set side-by-side the hardheaded thinking of scientific method with the extraordinary design of totemic practice?
This article explores the recovery of totemic significance in the work of self-described speculative/sf authors Nalo Hopkinson, Neal Stephenson, and China Mieville who weigh distinctions between symbolic human culture (as Boasians have done) or who renegotiate with human societies (as Durkheimians have done). (2) Freed by their preference for narrative method and story form, these authors play with the paradoxes and cognitive dissonances of human experience and existence by implementing the indirect advice offered in Levi-Strauss's observation, "Animals are good to think with." By "thinking with animals," they renew an indigenous conception of personhood and surpass, while also potentially reinvigorating, Marcel Mauss' sense of symbolic exchange--of giving, receiving, and giving in return; Emile Durkheim's "double existence," whereby the morale de lareciprocite triumphs over interet personnel, and personhood is constituted through symbolic exchange transcending--as opposed to issuing from--nature (Durkheim and Mauss 17-20 and 51-66); and even Michel Maffesoli's tribal paradigm or neotribalism, which describes contemporary social existence as arrangements among fragmented tribal groupings (76-108). In particular, Mauss's ideas of reciprocity echo with resonance in Midnight Robber and The Diamond Age while Maffesoli's inclusion of the totemic in his neotribal theory becomes reshaped in The Diamond Age.
As early as 1973, Clifford Geertz referred to the ongoing crisis of the "science of the concrete" or cultural anthropology and the inherent dilemma of the ethnographer observing the other; if the ethnographer too quickly constructs formal categorizations, that is, "the construction of impeccable depictions of formal order," then to divorce the reading or anthropological interpretation from what happens--"from what, in this time or that place, specific people say, what "--divorces it from its applications and "renders it vacant" (18). In the case of totemism, I would argue further that the slippage into borrowed formalizations renewed through a lineage of armchair readers can be both vacant and para-colonial. (3) Geertz suggests the need for a "thick description" in such forms of interpretive science, a kind of "inscription" (27). Sf authors who reinvigorate totemic narrative can represent "thinking with animals" in a participatory organic and imaginative setting with room for literalizing metaphor but can also elevate the science of the concrete, political, economic, and historical realities and the biological and physical necessities on which those surfaces rest in an entertaining and ludic manner, "instructing by delight" as Horace suggested in Ars Poetica. "Personhood" in sf worlds takes myriad whimsical and yet intense forms in beings including douen, hinte, grindylows, Remades, and Drummers. Such creatures are simultaneously perceived as animal and human. Establishing the kinship of animals and humans, recent sf employs a late 20th century sense of ethno-metaphysics while reclaiming indigenous world-views regarding reciprocal relationships among the living (human and animal), dead ancestors, and spirits. (4)
The works of interest here express the "thinking with animals" trope from Anishinaabe/Ojibwe, (5) Kwakiutl, Taino, and Arawak perspectives. In interrogating inherent questions of animal-to-human identity that pit "personhood" against "property," "master" against "servant," "culture" against "bestiality," and "mind/spirit" against "animate machine," the stories examine the corrupted techniques of colonization, the stripping away of people's rights, and the intentional rhetorical ambiguities used by power to establish who qualifies as human and who must be considered for human rights. Needless to say, colonization as an element of intellectual history manifests a contemporary form in post-WTO and IMF globalization policies. (6) Our authors not only grapple with such considerations but also provide witness of the joyousness of a deeper sense of totem, the gathering together of clans that are marked as distinct social units but are united in their refusal to remain colonized. As Anishinaabe author and scholar Gerald Vizenor suggests, this form of exploring the animal-human boundaries and essence of totem becomes a kind of Miindiwag, a curative story employing irony "to give away" an ancient truth, or a native giveaway (55-56).
Dancing rows of words and totemic narrative
To begin tracing out these informed, or, at times, reconstructed giveaways, consider the linguistic origins of totemism as captured in late 19th and early 20th century ethnographies. Extrapolating from English trader John Long's 1791 book on totemism, Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader, and the subsequent European history of the idea, Levi-Strauss writes, "It is well known that the word totem is taken from the Ojibwa, an Algonquin language of the region to the north of the Great Lakes of northern America. The expression otateman means roughly, 'he is a relative of mine'" (18). (7) Levi-Strauss establishes that totem signifies a clan name, usually an animal name "explained by the memory preserved by each clan of an animal in its country of origin, as the most handsome, most friendly, most fearsome, or most common, or else the animal usually hunted" (18). Totem was initially transcribed by Europeans from Algonquin oten, "village," usually expressed as nind oten or nind odem, "my village," the resulting metaplasm constituting a liaison heard as totem or dodem. As opposed to the French meaning of "village," the Algonquin oten denoted a group of people tied together by bands of kinship and who moved together seasonally. The "village" was the people, not the place. Each oten designated itself with an animal symbol; the original five were the catfish, the crane, the loon, the bear, and the moose (Schencke 52). By the mid-19th century, this pantheon grew to include extended-kin animals, such as the eagle extended from the crane. These animal symbols might appear on posts erected in settlements and also on birch bark along travel routes to let others know that the clan had passed by (Schencke 30-33).
Extending Levi-Strauss' discussion, Vizenor reads totems as literary animals. He stresses odoodemi, totem, or "to have a totem" as that "native presence and trace of the originary" (119). Agreeing with Paul Shepard's assertion that "[s]tories with animals are older than history and better than philosophy," Vizenor further contends that these stories belie the "social sciences' discoveries of totems and cultures in translation" (119). Vizenor adopts a "literary" as opposed to "ethnographic" method. He uses Ojibwe orator of the crane totem Keeshkemun's speech as a touchstone to discuss the metaphoric resonance of totemic thinking: "I am a bird who rises from the earth, and flies far up, into the skies, out of human sight; but though not visible to the eye, my voice is heard from afar and resounds over the earth" (120). While some might receive this instance of native giveaway as the reflection of a primitive association between totem and clan member, Vizenor emphasizes Keeshkemun's wordplay as an illustration of natural reason and contextualizes it as part of the anishinaabe's strategic refusal to support Great Britain in the War of 1812. Bahktinian dialogic reminds us that the point of view in a word is subject to reinterpretation, as Keeshkemun connects his totem crane in a "figurative sense" to the "row of his words" (121). The voice of the crane, in other words, is heard from afar as Keeshkemun desires his row of words to be heard from afar, even to the actual realms of both Britain and France. For Vizenor, natural reason is a union of nature and language, not a separation, yet social scientists "have translated and structured native metaphors as culture and a determined performance" (121).
If "indian is a social science simulation of modernity," as Vizenor (56) suggests, then indian totemism may be said to create an arbitrary and simulated universalization of indigenous traditions. The resulting myriad of simulacra maintains currency in plastic-shamanistic texts rife with romantic mystique. More dangerously, however, historical ethnographies extend the 19th century scientific hysteria of polygenesis, which sharply demarcated civilized man from a "primitive" origin. Levi-Strauss, of course, firmly characterizes this tendency as civilized man's vain hope of escaping himself as well as nature by acquiring a "second nature"; for Levi-Strauss, no unifying interpretation of totemism exists or is necessary; his entire discussion of totemism serves primarily to demonstrate that "the mind of the scholar himself plays as large a part as the minds of the people studied" (121). Unfortunately, however, his own reading of midewiwan survivance stories(8) of the original five odoodemi falls short in Vizenor's reading by viewing "the native creation stories as relational, cultural objects"; Levi-Strauss "renounces the oneiric metaphors of [the original totems] and traces of anishinaabe survivance," thus demonstrating "in his theories a structural conversion and misuse of imagination, native transmotion, the contingencies of humour in trickster stories, and the dialogic circle of literature" (122). In a witty miindiwag, Vizenor "returns" and "gifts" Levi-Strauss' recognition that scholars "misread" the concept of totem by pointing out how they maintain Levi-Strauss' assumptions still short of indigenous origins and reformations.
Genuine totemic narrative, then, consists of oneiric metaphor. "Natural reason and survivance are metaphors; more than transference, or the imaginative trace of other experiences, metaphors are the systematic concepts of absence, presence, totems, and transmotion in anishinaabe stories. Metaphors are crucial in the interpretation of native literature, and metaphors are comparable as native traces, totems, shamanic visions, action, and conscience of survivance" (Vizenor 122). Even more directly: "The totem is a native metaphor, a literary connection with creation, shamanic visions, and natural reasons" (123). Reducing these metaphors to "categorical representations of human development and comparative culture" creates simulations that serve "the perverse distinctions of savagism and civilization" (123). (9)
In sharp contrast with overly-reductive simulations, or what I've termed indian totemisms, contemporary sf when indigenous scientific literacy and history is used knowledgeably can exploit the metaphoric implications of "thinking with animals" and often intermingle wildness and domesticity to explode the notion that haunts the uncanny landscapes of contact narratives, (10) one common trope of sf novels--namely, that "we" tame New World appearances with advanced forms of technology....
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