A Primal Evolutionary Phenomenon and a Recurrent Social-Cultural Constituent
“It is a singular property of the human species,” writes Leroi-Gourhan, “that by confining itself to engendering action, it periodically eludes the organic specialization that would definitively tie it down. If the hand of the earliest anthropoid had become a tool by adaptation, the result would have been a group of mammals particularly well equipped to perform a restricted series of actions: It would not have been the human being. Our significant genetic trait is precisely physical (and mental) nonadaptation: a tortoise when we retire beneath a roof, a crab when we hold out a pair of pliers, a horse when we bestride a mount. We are again and again available for new forms of action, our memory transferred to books, our strength multiplied in the ox, our fist improved in the hammer.”(✢)
We are also again and again available for new sensations, for multiple, too, is what we can sense, and for the very same reason: our gained verticality multiplies our possibilities to perceive, and it does so exponentially. Now, as we have written elsewhere, language brings order to the excess of sensations to which our senses expose us, thus turning the un-delimited multiplicity of what we can sense, which is practically infinite, into a de-limited multiplicity, thereby structuring it.
Yet everything named must be distributed, that is to say, it must be named and distributed at the same time. And the most immediate and effective way to confer it meaning consists in placing it within binary structures: bright/pale, warm/cold, long/short, etc.
There are two reasons for this. The first one is that our own body is organised (not systematically but often enough) in dual terms: we have two brain hemispheres, two eyes, two arms, etc. The second one is that our experience reports to us the recurrence of dual phenomena, or at least we tend to map them thus: absent and present, in and out, above and below, in front of and behind, concave and convex, striated and smooth, etc. How else could one explain, for instance, the system of synonyms and antonyms on which the vocabulary of any language is based?
Lévi-Strauss’s stresses that binary thought is the “least common denominator” of all thought, a direct expression of the structure of the mind (and behind the mind, probably, the brain).”(⭐︎) In turn, Leroi-Gourhan recalls that “the movement of the universe is not only rotary but also alternating and contrasting.”(✻) After all, the development of life on Earth responds to binary choices and patterns: plants and animals (i.e. chemical vs. mechanical food intake), radial and bilateral symmetry among these, invertebrates and vertebrates with locomotive or relational forelimbs, etc.
As for Lévi-Strauss’s claim regarding human thought, compare Leroi-Gourhan’s contention that “basic binary oppositions” implicit in the “operational sequences” – which are always “more-or-less subconscious,” “unverbalized,” and “unrecognized” – that guided the creation of the earliest human “material culture,” “social organization,” and “cosmology.”(❄︎) Furthermore, Lévi-Strauss finds such oppositions at play in most forms of social organisation, including totemic classifications; in funeral and fertility rites like those which, from Southern Africa Western- and South Australia, reflect a bemusing regularity when it comes to the employ of binary chromatics; and in many twin-myths like, for instance, the myth of lynx and coyote among the Nimiipuu and their neighbours in North America. Whereas Marilyn Strathern and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro show that individuals in Melanesia, Amazonia, and elsewhere are also inherently binary beings, both because their constitutive “plural relations” are “first reconceptualized as dual” in terms of gender and because they remain through their lifetime a composite “singularity of body and soul internally constituted by the self/other, consanguine/affine polarity.”
The latest contribution to this line of thinking is, no doubt, Roy Wagner’s much awaited The Logic of Invention, which was published posthumously in 2019. But we shall refer to Wagner’s book in another occasion, as we would merely like to supply here an example of the way in which binary thought defies the standardised formulas its detractors attribute to it.
Twisting Dualism(s) among the Bush Mekeo of Papua New Guinea
Our example – or, rather, our catena of examples – is taken from Mark Mosko’s excellent study on the Bush Mekeo people of Papua New Guinea.(✥) And it turns around Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the “permanent” or “dynamic disequilibrium” lying at the core of binary structures,(✺) which, more often than not, relate reciprocal, i.e. inverted (or reversed), rather than complimentary, terms.(✕) We are willing to call a “twist” – or a “double twist,” for it is often bidirectional – the logical operation that introduces dynamism and disequilibrium into the structure.
The Mekeo (or Kovio) people base their view of their place in the world upon the model supplied by the body and its environment, i.e. upon a basic binary opposition: inside⎮outside. The limit between the body and its environment proves problematic in both directions: while illnesses follow from an excessive exposure of the body to its outside, to which the body thus becomes permeable, death follows from the exteriorisation of the body’s substance, in particular from the loosening of blood. Yet, at the same time, eating is seen as a positive transference from the environment to the body, and defecation as a positive transference from the body to the environment. Then comes the “twist”: the opposed terms do not simply stand one against another, but encompass one another, reflect one another, and reverse one another, since the outside is somehow contained in the inside by the “guts,” while the inside is somehow contained in the outside in the form of “faeces”; put otherwise, belonging inside the body but receptive of what the body ingests from its environment and productive of what the body discharges, the “guts” are a sort of internalised outside, whereas the “faeces” discharged by the body are a sort of externalised inside.
The Mekeo village partly reflects this very same structure, but in inverted terms. Somewhat counterintuitively – we are before another “twist” – the village is the outside and the surrounding bush the inside. Yet, at the same time – next “twist” – the village has something like “guts,” namely its geographical centre, where all waist is stocked before being discharged into the bush. Hence, since the village is the outside instead of the inside in respect to the bush, its “guts” represent an externalised inside, unlike the “guts” of the body, which, as we have seen, are to be viewed as an internalised outside.
Analogous oppositions can be found in other aspects of the Mekeo life, as well.
In its social composition, for example. The Mekeo distribute themselves in exogamous patrilineal clans. Now, each clan is to the other clans as the body is to its environment: it has an inside (the men of the clan in question), an outside (the men of all other clans), an internalised outside (the women of the other clans with whom the men of the clan in question marry, i.e. their spouses and mothers), and an externalised outside (the sisters and daughters of the men of the clan in question, who at some point will leave their clan to marry). No “twist” here. But think in how elsewhere – to wit, among the Tupinamba of Brasil, who organised themselves in matrilineal clans instead – it was possible for some men to marry their sisters after these had married their enemies and become widows after their brothers had their former husbands killed.
Back now to the Mekeo. A final illustration of their binary logic is provided by the roles of chiefs and sorcerers in times of war and peace, respectively. The Mekeo have two chiefs and two sorcerers: a peace-chief and a war-chief, a peace-sorcerer and a war-sorcerer. It would be easy to group together the two chiefs on the one hand, the two sorcerers on the other hand. Yet their relations are far more complex – or, again, “twisted.” While the peace-chief cleanses the blood eventually caused by the peace-sorcerer in times of peace, the war-sorcerer cleanses the blood caused by the war-chief in times of war. Therefore, the peace-chief is to the peace-sorcerer what the war-sorcerer is to the war-chief, and thus too the peace-chief is to the war-sorcerer what the peace-sorcerer is to the war-chief.
A Law of Strict Reciprocity
All this does not only make patent the inventiveness and baroque qualities of extra-modern binary logic. It also gives us a hint to its motivation: potential conflicts can only be conjured by cooperation, but cooperation alone presents the risk of speeding down social life to a point of freezing its dynamics, and so rivalry (or nuanced cooperation) is needed alongside cooperation (or nuanced rivalry). Twoness is the key to it, but a Twoness whose law is: “More than One, yet less than Two.” That is to say, neither Two external to one another, nor Two subsumed under a totalitarian One, but Two in alternation with one another, or in permanent negotiation: a law of strict reciprocity.
In other words, the intelligence of extra-modern peoples consists – if you wish – in their refusal to opt between Hobbes (irresolvable rivalry) and Rousseau (commonality), on which we shall write another day; this, moreover, will give us a chance to discuss the mathematics of any exclusive or inclusive universalism, where Oneness substitutes for Twoness, as well as the mathematics of any conceptual anarchism, where unrelated Many-ness reigns over the remains of a dethroned, defeated One.
(✢) André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge [MA] and London: The MIT Press, 1993), pp. 245-246.
(⭐︎) Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage) (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 90.
(✻) Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, p. 334.
(❄︎) Ibid., xvii-xviii.
(✥) Mark Mosko, Quadripartite Structures: Categories, Relations and Homologies in Bush Mekeo Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). But see also Lucien Scubla, Lire Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1998), pp. 167-179.
(✺) See e.g. Lévi-Strauss, The Story of Lynx (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 63, 230-231, 235, 238-239.
(✕) See further Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Radical Dualism: A Meta-Fantasy on the Square Root of Dual Organizations, or a Savage Homage to Lévi-Strauss (Kassel: dOCUMENTA [13], 2012).
Mekeo kapkap-type ornaments in auction (as of Sept. 22, 2019) at invaluable.com. Notice, in particular, the geometric design of the piece in the upper right corner: symmetrically-opposed straight lines converge in the centre, from which symmetrically-opposed curve lines diverge in turn, with a rotatory-like dented circle encompassing the two movements.