Twins, Birds and Vegetables: Problems of Identification in Primitive Religious Thought

Abstract

In recent years social anthropologists have paid much attention to trying to understand and to translate into western idiom the ways of thinking of peoples whom they have studied, especially in the religious sphere. One striking aspect of this has been the examination of statements by some 'primitive' people to the effect that certain things can be both themselves and something else. One of the most spectacular examples of this is the report by Godfrey Lienhardt (I954: 97-8) that he has often been told in parts of the Sudan (presumably by the Dinka) that some men not only turn themselves into lions but indeed are lions existing also in the form of men. He suggests that this is neither simile nor metaphor, nor a confusion, but a statement which lies between our categories of the figurative and the literal. It is rather that these people can think of a creature existing in more than one 'mode' at a time. For us the question arises whether such a creature is 'really' a man or 'really' a lion. For the people concerned, however, he argues it would seem that an animal's nature and a man's nature can be co-present in the same being.2 Assurances that 'some men are lions' are to be taken neither completely literally nor completely metaphorically. The anthropologist then has to give 'temporary assent' to such ways of thinking, suspending criticism until he learns what experience this kind of thought represents. Such modes of thought may not seem so odd, fantastic or nonsensical nowadays as they probably would have done fifty years ago. But they still seem to demand explanation, if possible. It is easy to agree that the specification of a thing necessarily implies the idea of its opposite or of something different from it; to agree to the assertion that some things are at the same time their opposites is not so easy. It is interesting to note what form anthropological explanation takes. We are not content to say that we are, dealing here with primitive notions of mystic participation, and, as Levy-Bruhl said for most of his life, that the mind of the savage is very different in this respect from the mind of civilised man. Now, as the title of Levi-Strauss's book La pense6e sauvage (I962a) clearly implies, we are prepared to consider certain primary elemental ways of thinking as characteristic of man in all states of society or culture. Primitive man is more rational, civilised man less so, than earlier views held. So, what anthropologists try and do in the face of improbable but apparently firmly held assertions, such as that some men are lions, is to uncover the assumptions which lie behind this belief. We demonstrate where possible that the thought processes involved in drawing inferences from, or in acting upon, such assumptions are not unintelligible to us. The assumptions may be non-rational but the thinking from them is not illogical. Anthropologists indeed are rather anxious to

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