Extra-modern peoples are often viewed not only as materially underdeveloped, politically immature, and culturally uneducated, but also as being fundamentally cruel. We cannot discuss here all these accusations, which tell more about those who pronounce them than about anything else. But there is one we would like to examine here: the supposed cruelty of indigenous peoples. We will do so with the help of Lévi-Strauss’s and Pierre Clastres’s ethnographies.
Clastres argues that the social organisation of extra-modern peoples is directed to maintain an egalitarian order. Myth, language, and ritual coalesce around this goal.
Myth provides the foundations for the undivided social body. The time of the “gods” and the “ancestors” is the ground of the presently-lived time and supplies the “law” on which the living-together of the community relies.(⊕)
The chiefs look after the myth by perpetuating its words which they must not only transmit with their speeches, but also know when to apply so as to make justice there where conflicts may eventually arise.(⊖) For “language is the very opposite of violence.”(⊗) Hence “the chiefs are not there to command” but to “prevent [all other members of the group] from fulfilling an[y] eventual desire for power,” so as to “ward off the irruption of division into the social body.”(⊘) Therefore, the chief must also be generous, as otherwise he himself would promote social division;(⊙) and if he does, “the village or band will simply abandon him and throw in a leader more faithful in his duties.”(⊚) In short then, “generosity” and “talent as a speaker” go hand in hand.(⊛) Besides, speaking – which is therefore the privilege of the chief – is less a privilege than a duty,(⊜) which means the chief remains by all means “the group’s prisoner.”(⊝)
Finally, rituals inscribe the source of the “law” on the body of all the members of the group, indistinctly; and painfully enough so that its sign remains forever on their skin (as scarifications, mutilations, tattoos, etc.):
“You are one of us. Each one of you is like us; each one of you is like the others. You are called by the same name, and you will not change your name. Each one of you occupies the same space and the same place among us: you will keep them. None of you is less than us; none of you is more than us. And you will never be able to forget it. You will not cease to remember the same marks that we have left on your bodies.”
[…] The mark on the body, on all bodies alike, declares: You will not have the desire for power; you will not have the desire for submission.(⦶)
The details are remarkable:
The ritual subjects the body to torture: […] Holes pierced in the body, skewers forced through the wounds, hanging, amputation, […] torn flesh: cruelty’s resources seem inexhaustible.
[…] The initiators make certain that the intensity of the suffering is pushed to its highest point. Among the Guayaki, for instance, a bamboo knife would be more than sufficient to slice into the skin of the initiates. But it would not be sufficiently painful. Consequently, a stone must be used, with something of an edge, but not too sharp, a stone that tears instead of cutting.(⦷)
The brave silence of the initiates, astonishing:
Precisely insofar as the initiation is – undeniably – a test of personal courage, this courage is expressed (in a manner of speaking) by silence in the face of suffering.(⦸)
But their silence is also essential:
Silence gives consent. To what do the young people consent? They consent to accept themselves for what they are from that time forward: full members of the community.(⦼)
And yet this ritual cruelty contrasts with the tenderness displayed by all the members of the group, on which Lévi-Strauss writes:
The Nambikwara wake up at dawn, relight their fires, warm themselves up as best they can after the chill of the night, and make alight meal of whatever has been left over from the previous day. Shortly after this the men go off hunting, individually or in groups. The women stay behind in the encampment and busy themselves in the kitchen. They take their first bathe when the sun begins to get up. Women and children often bathe together, for the fun of it; and sometimes they light a fire so that when they come out of the water they can squat in front of it and warm themselves […]. Other bathes follow during the course of the day. […]
In the heat of the day the camp falls silent. […] At other times everybody talks all the time, no matter what he is doing. Laughter and high spirits are general and there’s a constant flow of joking and teasing, obscene or scatological references being greeted with particular approval. An enquiry or the arrival of a visitor brings all work to a halt; and if two dogs or birds should chance to copulate everyone downs tools and watches closely and with fascination. Work does not begin again until this important event has been discussed at appropriate length.
The children laze about for most of the day, and although the girls may give their elders some momentary assistance the boys enjoy a more leisurely life, with some occasional fishing. Men who have not gone hunting devote themselves to wickerwork, or make arrows or musical instruments. or do a little to “help in the house.” Most households are perfectly harmonious. Towards three or four in the afternoon the hunters return home. The camp then becomes more lively, conversation takes a broker turn, and the groups that form and re-form have no longer family basis. Dinner consists of flat cakes of manioc and whatever has been found during the day. At nightfall the women take it in turns to go out into the bush and cut down or otherwise collect enough wood for the night. […]
The wood is heaped in one corner of the camp and everyone takes what he needs. Family groups re-form as the fires begin to blaze and the evening is spent either in talk or in singing and dancing. Sometimes this is kept up well into the night; but usually, after some preliminary caresses and a bout or two of affectionate tussling, each couple draw more closely together, the mother takes her sleeping child in her arms, all fall silent, and nothing is heard in the night but the crackling of a log, the light step of someone looking after the fire, the barking of a dog, or a child crying. […]
They […] feel and show […] the liveliest affection for their children; and this affection is returned. […] When they are crossed, children often hit out at their mother, and their mother does nothing to stop it. […] The children are not punished. […] The Nambikwara children know nothing of games. Sometimes they make toys of a kind out of rolled or plaited straw, but in general their only pastime is wrestling-or some other form of shared physical exertion-and their existence is one long imitation of the grown-ups. […]
Household pets […] live in intimacy with the children and are indeed themselves treated as children. They share in the family meals and receive the same marks of interest or tenderness as do the human beings: their lice are picked for them, they take part in games, and people talk to them and caress them. […]
To turn to the grown-ups: the Nambikwara attitude to matters of love can be summed up in their formula “Tamindige mondage,”of which an exact if inelegant translation would be: “It’s good to make love.” Daily life is impregnated […] with eroticism. Love-matters arouse their interest and curiosity in the highest possible degree; they never tire of discussing them, and conversation in the camp is full of undertone and allusion. Most sexual activity takes place at night near the camp-fires, at times, but more often the partners go off a hundred yards or so into the neighbouring brushwood. Their departure, immediately noticed, is the subject of widespread jubilation; jokes are made, speculations exchanged; even the children are carried away by an excitement whose origins they know perfectly well. Sometimes a little group of men, young women, and children will dart off, whispering and laughing the while, in pursuit of such glimpses of the proceedings as they can secure through the branches. The protagonists don’t at all care for this, but they have to put up with it, just as they have to put up with the teasing that will greet them as they return to the camp. Sometimes a second couple will follow their example and make off into the isolation of the bush. […]
I wrote it one night by the light of my pocket-lamp: “Their embraces are those of couples possessed by a longing for a lost oneness; their caresses are in no wise disturbed by the footfall of a stranger. In one and all there may be glimpsed a great sweetness of nature, a profound nonchalance, a […] satisfaction as ingenuous as it is charming, and, beneath all this, something that can be recognized as one of the most moving and authentic manifestations of human tenderness.”(⦾)
It is this extra-modern peoples want to protect with their ritual cruelty. In contrast, we dislike the latter, we condemn it… and on such premise we have erected the cruelest world imaginable.
Thus a Yanomami’s fearful reaction before it:
While the houses in the centre of [any] city are tall and beautiful, those on its edges are in ruins. The people who live in those places have no food, and their cloths are dirty and torn. When I took a walk among them, they looked at me with sad eyes. It made me feel upset. These white people who created merchandise think they are clever and brave. Yet they are greedy and do not take care of those among them who have nothing. How can they think that they are great men and find themselves so smart? They do not want to know anything about these needy people, though they too are their fellows. They reject them and let them suffer alone. They do not even look at them and are satisfied to keep their distance and call them “the poor.” They even take their crumbling houses from them. They force them to camp outside, in the rain, with their children. They must tell themselves: “They live on our land, but they are other people. Let them stay far away from us, picking their food off the ground like dogs! As for us, we will pile up more goods and more weapons, all by ourselves!” It scared me to see such a thing.(⦿)
Clastres again:
What is an extra-modern society? It is a non-divided, homogeneous society, such that, if it is unaware of the difference between the rich and the poor, […] it is because the opposition between the exploiters and the exploited is absent.(⦻)
(⊕) Clastres, Archeology of Violence, p. 214.
(⊖) Clastres, Archeology of Violence, pp. 214-215. Cf. Clastres, Society Against the State, pp. 29, 36.
(⊗) Clastres, Society Against the State, p. 46.
(⊘) Clastres, Society Against the State, p. 31.
(⊙) Clastres, Archeology of Violence, p. 213.
(⊚) Clastres, Society Against the State, p. 45.
(⊛) Clastres, Society Against the State, p. 36.
(⊜) Clastres, Society Against the State, p. 41.
(⊝) Clastres, Society Against the State, p. 46.
(⦶) Clastres, Society Against the State, pp. 186, 188.
(⦷) Clastres, Society Against the State, pp. 181, 183.
(⦸) Clastres, Society Against the State, p. 184.
(⦼) Clastres, Society Against the State, p. 185.
(⦾) Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, pp. 272-277, 285.
(⦿) Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, pp. 349-350.
(⦻) Clastres, Archeology of Violence, p. 213.
Nambikwara boy. Photograph by Michel Pellanders, taken in the Native Land of Vale do Guaporé in the Mato Grosso in 1987