Gifts Unlooked-For

I spent today with some of my family at a northern Pennsylvania heritage festival - demonstrations of pioneer-era domestic crafts, presentations on log rafting and the underground railroad, that sort of thing. There was also a short concert by the Seneca Moon String Band, who play Appalachian and Irish folk tunes. I was initially drawn to the stage from across the festival grounds by the reedy, Jerry Garcia-esqe strains of the autoharpist's vocals, and proceeded to settle down in the shade of the ancient maple tree looming over the portable bandshell and thoroughly enjoy the remainder of the set.

One thing that I found particularly striking, however, was something independent (so far as I can perceive) of any formal characteristics of the performance itself. I refer to the lyrics of the Shaker song "Simple Gifts" (you've heard it), a rendition of which the band started into shortly after I arrived:

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,

'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,

To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.

This is by no means a rarely-performed piece in modern times; perhaps especially in secular, rather than religious, settings. But what impressed itself upon me on this occasion, for the first time in memory, was just how profoundly Buddhist is the song's sentiment. Nirvana - freedom; not least of all from shame concerning our temporal circumstances - is the place [that is no place] just right, which is attained through true simplicity in mortal existence.

I have no idea what confluence of psychic contents, social setting, and neurophysical reactions to rhythmic/melodic influences caused me to perceive this semantic echo of 5th century B.C.E. India in a composition from 19th century C.E. New England, but the all-too-infrequent sense of what I can only subjectively term "transcendence" was undeniably attached to it.

I Guess That I Could Get Crazy Now Baby, Cause We All Got In Tune

A particular area within anthropology that has long been of interest to me is the interaction of individual psychology with elements of culture and social structures. This kind of interaction can be seen in an especially striking form in experiences of spirit possession occurring across a wide variety of cultural settings.

An interview with scholar of Jewish mysticism Rachel Elior about her new book, as noted on the Paleojudaica blog today, discusses a spirit-possession legend specific to Jewish folklore, namely that of the dybbuk. The dybbuk is believed to be the spirit of a deceased man, which enters and takes control of a living person. What is interesting about Elior's analysis of this legend (from what I can gather from the interview excerpt; I have not yet read the book) is her conclusion regarding its social function:

Elior argues that for women, dybbuks could be a means to escape the demands of a confining society. Once possessed by a dybbuk (or at least claiming to be), women were no longer considered responsible for their own actions, and were exempt from arranged marriages and relieved of wifely duties. Thought to be the souls of sinners, these spirits gave a certain degree of power to the powerless, freeing them from the norms of routine life and its conventional ordering.

I find this interesting in light of parallels that can be drawn with the Hauka religious movement, originating in French-colonized Africa, practitioners of which believed themselves to invoke the spiritual identities of colonial officials. Some scholars have theorized that this activity allowed the possessed to reclaim a sense of agency within the disenfranchising context of foreign occupation (further discussion of this and other aspects of Hauka can be found in chapter 3 of Paul Stoller's Sensuous Scholarship).

The use of possession experiences as a means of reclaiming personal or group power in the face of social oppression or disorder appears to recur throughout Western history. The latest installment of the Documents blog's continuing series on possession discusses analyses of the "dancing mania" of the ~14th-18th centuries in such terms:

The dire living conditions of the late Middle Ages - natural disasters, the Black Death, famine, social unrest - made Medieval Europeans seek relief in 'the intoxication of an artificial delirium'.

And of course we have the myth of Dionysus and King Pentheus.

So, in light of this apparent tradition of social resistance through intentionally-induced states of alternate identity, how might we interpret contemporary bacchanals? The participants, as those of the aforementioned historical examples, do not seem to consciously identify as members of a coherent movement against prevailing social conditions:

What’s the point? Well, it’s just an event where a bunch of people can get together to have fun, expend pent-up energy, and meet tons of new people with similar interests.

Yet, from the hippies at Woodstock to the candy-ravers of the 1990s, those who collectively tune in, turn on, and drop out have been repeatedly vilified and condemned by guardians of the normative order. Can a trance-based movement, regardless of intent, effectively call into question an authority simply by forcing its hand, thus revealing its lack of perfect control?

Law and Morality in Two Domains

For this first post, I'd like to jump right into the kind of activity that I hope this blog will come to sustain - in this instance, the synthesis of two synchronistically-related (in the Jungian sense) concepts that recently thrust themselves before me.

Kenworthey Bilz and Janice Nadler's paper, "Law, Psychology & Morality", addresses, among other concerns, the consequences of a disconnect obetween legislation and the moral sense of the public. Because the laws of a society derive their power to control behavior from the fact that the public has largely internalized their validity as a source of direction, when a law is introduced that contradicts other internalized (e.g., moral) values, not only is the new law likely to be rejected and in various ways circumvented (cf. the prohibition of alcohol), but the authority of the legal system itself is called into question:

...if the law is not viewed as a legitimate
moral authority, then compliance may be lower. There is some evidence that exposure to widespread social and political corruption leads to diminished respect for law and lower levels of legal compliance.

This brings me to the latest installment of the Documents blog's discussion of the role played by trance-state and possession in the work of some pop musicians. The subject this time is Joy Division's Ian Curtis's apparent insight into the unkind vagaries of a life lived in society (here characterized as descriptive laws, not unlike those of nature), and his recognition of its incompatibility with his own precepts of moral justice (metaphysical prescriptive laws):

In Wilderness, prescriptive law plays only an indirect role, showing through in his feelings of indignation, guilt, and shame at seeing moral laws transgressed. Nevertheless, the fact that these feelings show through so strongly indicate that the relation between the two types of law is highly relevant in understanding Curtis' situation. For Curtis descriptive law (the cruel laws governing social life) and prescriptive law are fundamentally incongruous, conflicting: the laws of social life ordain that the laws of morality will always be trampled underfoot.

The failure of an arbitrary law, whether established by a legislative body or through social custom, to reflect a dominant moral sentiment is experienced as a mismatch of what is with what should be. When such a law comes by judicial fiat, it will often be a target of transgression, and possibly result in an undermining of the institutional authority by which it was imposed. But when a law is, rather, a subtle property of the social structure itself, then perhaps, as Curtis demonstrates, we only have recourse to the equally diffuse transgressions of art.