NZZ Folio 01/07 - Thema: Schmerz 

  Inhaltsverzeichnis
Why human culture drips with blood
By Nigel Barley

«They came in the night and grabbed me, took me outside and tore my
shirt off. That annoyed me - you know how hard it is to get a decent shirt in
the village - but they were all masked so I didn’t know who it was. Then
one of them beat me on the back with those sharp reeds that really cut you
and pushed me in the bullrushes - you know the ones whose sting lasts for
days. Then they dragged me down to the lake to a muddy bit where the
crocodiles live and threw me in the water, shouting that the crocodiles
were coming. They held my head under the water till I nearly drowned and
something sharp grabbed my leg and when I was hysterical they ran away,
laughing. I dragged myself home and collapsed. The cuts all got infected
and I couldn’t move for three days. The pain was terrible and I got a fever
that nearly killed me. It was a wonderful spiritual experience.» 

The words of an anthropologist describing his initiation into a men’s

masking society in East Africa. Anthropology is full of pain. First, there is
the pain of the fieldwork researcher. This is an odd pain for his or her
suffering is taken as a measure of the value of their work. Anthropologists
have been beaten and scarified, circumcised and starved, spat on and
rubbed in excrement, all in the name of getting inside the skin of local
people, understanding the way they think and feel. Pain is the ultimate
proof of seriousness of purpose, of sympathy and empathy, the absolute
core of the participant observation that is virtually the only intellectual
capital of the subject. It is assumed that people who go to Africa or Asia to
study exotic cultures must feel pain as the ultimate «being there». You just
know that any anthropologist worth the name who was working on
Christianity would absolutely insist on being nailed to a cross.

Yet, as my colleague’s words show, you are not supposed to make too
much of it. It was a wonderful experience. For the measure of your
understanding of what you have been through is that, where as for other
mortals it would have been hell, you actually enjoyed it. To live amongst a
people, suffer pain and hardship at their hands and not love them and their
way of life is to be simply an ungrateful tourist who failed to grasp the local
viewpoint. You are the equivalent of someone who went to Paris and
couldn’t be bothered to go up the Eiffel Tower. I once worked among a
people where the central rite of a man’s life was to have his penis peeled
for its entire length. It literally sorted the men from the boys. Without
undergoing it, you were a snivelling child, wet and smelly, as contemptible
as a mere woman. After the transformation, you were a real man, the finest
thing God had created and allowed to swagger and swear oaths on the
knife of circumcision. I sat up all one night worrying about whether to
become a «real» man or - more seriously - a «real» hairy-chested
anthropologist. Then, I paid a fine of six bottles of beer to the men to be
classed as «honorary circumcised». I still think it is the best deal I ever
made. 

Then there is the pain of the «natives». That, too, is everywhere. Pain is a
resource that is deployed lavishly in human culture. In the Third World, we
think immediately of a government monopoly of pain, the torturers in their
dark rooms who live hand in glove with military dictatorships and absolutist
regimes and deploy their batons, castor oil and electrodes in the loyal
service of the state. One day, we smuggly believe, progress will sweep
them away and everyone will enjoy universal human rights. 

Yet pain is not just an aberration within imperfect nation states. In villages
and townships, cattle camps and nomadic encampments, pain is proudly
and openly deployed in traditional ways. Boys have their penes cut to open
like flowers when they have an erection or drive pins through their noses
and tongues. Men slash at their genitals with glass. Girls have their clitores
sliced off, their lips pierced and their feet hobbled. Backs and faces and
stomachs are pricked and carved and tattooed with blunt nails. People are
mutilated and maimed and disfigured.

Human culture drips with blood and inflicted pain and the surprising thing is
that most of it is voluntary. For pain is an important cultural resource and
even in the West, we are raised in an economy of pain. As a child, I was
assured that Christ suffered for me. I was to be redeemed by suffering
myself and when I suffered I should accept it and offer up my pain to him.
The explanation and colonisation of pain is a principal concern of all
religions. I once bought a poignant T-shirt. «Shit happens,» it declared.
«Catholics say shit happens because of original sin. Jews say shit
happens because I don’t love my mother. Protestants say shit happens
because I don’t work harder. Hindus say here’s that same old shit coming
round again. Buddhists say: What shit?» 

The body is not just something we live in. It can be used to show our social
and symbolic place in the world. In the West, as we grow up, we have to
gain slow ownership over own bodies until we are recognised as adult.
Adolescence is a series of battles over ownership of hair, face, genitals
and young adults notoriously dye, pierce and paint ever part of the new
territory they have gained. The first thing you do with newly private bits is
flaunt them publicly. When we change our social status, join the army, get
sent to prison or admitted to hospital, we lose control of parts of our bodies
again. Body and symbolic status are so closely tied together that, as we
get old and our bodies fall apart, our social place falls apart too. 

Elsewhere such transitions are less gradual. They may involve dramatic
public rituals and often pain is part of this. Pain strips us bare of
pretension, humbles us, reduces the whole world down to our own bodies
and concentrates time to the here and now, this very second we are living
through in agony. It has been said that we are only truly aware of language
at the moment when it becomes opaque, as in poetry. Pain does the same
for human experience. It is the opposite of that dissolution of self that
comes from orgasm or the mystical nirvana for it etches the brutal reality of
the material in every fibre of our being. For this reason, it is often a central
part of rites of passage, where people pass from one status to another.

Nothing more dramatically demonstrates the difference between members

and non-members than the infliction of pain that is humbly accepted in the
knowledge that, one day, the sufferer will become the tormentor of
neophytes in his turn. Nothing carries more clearly the message that what
is being acquired in the ritual is of huge value and there is no bigger gap
than that between the torturer and his (even willing) victim. And the fact
that the change may be carved into the living flesh of the initiate makes it
permanent and truly part of his or her being. 

Moreover, pain is a versatile currency. «Stop crying or I’ll give you

something to cry for» our parents would threaten us as children. Physical
pain turns up at funerals as the counterpart of mental anguish, expressing
the social loss the living have suffered. But here it is usually self-inflicted,
unlike at initiations. Whereas, in the West, we may slip into black and look
a little sad, around the world, the bereaved gash their heads, punch
themselves in the face, chop off digits or make themselves permanently
blind by crying and sitting in smoke. 

Such drama belies the evanescence of physical pain. Like smell, in all
languages, pain is powerful and evocative yet defies vocabulary. Doctors
struggle to grasp it and interpret their patients’ groping descriptions of it. It
is a private language impossible to communicate. Pain can only be
compared to something else, something usually inflicted by others. So it is
«stabbing», «throbbing», «splitting» and perhaps this is why cultures
around the world are only too willing to ascribe it to the hostility of others,
to the external malevolence of witchcraft, sorcery, divine attack, rather than
the treachery of our own flesh and blood. And, as shown in the words of
my colleague undergoing initiation, it cannot be held on to.

Pain is quicksilver. When we have it, it is the only reality. When it is gone,
its intensity becomes incredible even to ourselves. Ask any woman who
has undergone childbirth or any victim of the concentration camps. Pain
must be constantly recalled, commemorated, marked in other ways or it
simply dissolves, slips through the cracks of perception and becomes
implausible even to us who have suffered it. Perhaps this is why pain-
reformers, those who campaign against the brutality of traditional rituals,
have so little success. Initiation is their principal subject and female, rather
than male their preferred target. This is because feminist crusaders ideally
see all culture as a male conspiracy so that girls have a greater claim to
victimhood than boys who will only grow up to become oppressors
themselves. 

Several years ago, I was attacked in the street at night, quite out of the
blue, in what I had always considered a safe part of town. A boy of about
sixteen came up behind me and swung a baseball bat at my head. I must
have caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye, for, by
some miracle, I turned and so only received a glancing blow to the temple
as he ran off laughing. The policeman who interviewed me was clearly
bored. «We know who it was» he said, yawning. «But we’ll never prove it.
They’ll all stick together and no witnesses will come forward. It was a kid’s
gang. They’re a bunch of teenagers and this is their initiation. It may seem
odd to you but they have to go out and beat someone up to join. They
didn’t make a very good job of you and the kid will probably have to do it
again.» - «It’s nice that someone is keeping up standards.» This was not a
joking matter and he looked disapproving. «If it’s any comfort, you were
chosen completely at random. It could have been anyone. There was no
reason.» 

But I knew it wasn’t that simple. Years ago, I had ducked out of my own
anthropological initiation into fieldwork, paid the beer instead of yielding up
the terrible pain of circumcision. Now, this was the bill coming round again.
It was an explanation worthy of being put on the T-shirt with the others,
another version of the human insistence that we lived in a just universe.
Now, I can no longer recall the terror and pain of lying there on the
pavement, blind from the blood flowing into my eyes, as passers-by
stepped carefully round me. In a few years more, like my initiated
colleague, I will probably describe it all as a wonderful spiritual experience.