̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - folklore

Witchcraft accusations an ‘occupational hazard’ for female workers

fpjl2 — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 08:53:54 +0000

Women’s working conditions increased the odds of them being suspected as witches, according to a new analysis of an English astrologer’s case files from the early 17th century.

Man v fish in the Amazon rainforest

amb206 — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 08:00:00 +0000

Hunting brings us close to our prey but the blood of a dying animal, spilling on to our hands, reminds us of our own mortality. Trapping, the use of technology to entice and capture, distances us from the act of killing. But, in their making and their function, traps connect our minds and bodies to the animals we pursue.

Each year, the Enawenê-nawê, an indigenous community in the Amazon, construct monumental fishing dams to harvest migrating fish vital to their diet. Social anthropologist Dr Chloe Nahum-Claudel carried out her PhD fieldwork with this community, learning a dialect spoken by fewer than 1,000 people. She spent six weeks living alongside a group of 12 men as they constructed a dam.

She says: “I’m interested in the relationship between people’s practical economic lives and how they see the universe. My research with the Enawenê-nawê suggests that their dams are much more than a means to obtain food. ̽��ֱ��process shapes their minds, bodies and relationships with one another, with their prey, and with spirits and ancestors. My research was timely because these technologies are threatened by the construction of hydroelectric dams in many of the Amazon’s tributaries.”

̽��ֱ��process of making traps became a particular focus for Nahum-Claudel when, as she explains, she realised that we touch on our own vulnerability every time we catch another living creature and subject it to our wishes. She recently convened a conference to consider trap-making and how these activities can be used to approach the relationship between humans and other species.

“To trap an animal you have to be very knowledgeable about its habits, its preferences and its weaknesses, and then you have to put all this knowledge into the making of an effective trap, and the placement and disguise of your equipment. That’s why traps offer an interesting way to approach practical encounters between ourselves and other species,” she says.

“I also realised that this was a neglected field of research. There’s been a lot written about hunting – and trapping is one method of catching prey. But unlike hunting, trapping doesn’t have to be fatal; ornithologists studying bird migrations have to trap birds and camera-traps are used to monitor tigers in India. I was interested in bringing people together to see if there were overlaps in the practice of trapping in such diverse contexts.”

Nahum-Claudel’s conference paper, which will form the first chapter of her forthcoming book, describes the Enawenê-nawê’s fishing technology and how it shapes them. ̽��ֱ��Enawenê-nawê are pescatarians who employ a variety of fishing techniques depending on the seasonal opportunities.

̽��ֱ��most impressive and unusual of these technologies are fishing dams built to coincide with the downstream migration of shoal-living fish, which spawn in the flooded forest during the rainy season. Each year teams of fishermen leave their large village while the fish are busy feasting and spawning and set to work building dams to trap the fish as they try to return downstream, once the river levels start to fall.

These dams are two-part technologies. In the first week or so, the men make a weir across the river using timber, bark and lianas from the surrounding forest. Men float the logs downriver and then dive into the fast flowing water to anchor them in the river bed. Frail, elder men later make nets to catch jumping fish. Ideally, the weir closes off the entire river so that not one fish can escape.

Once the weir is complete, the team turn their attention to making 100 or so man-sized traps which are crafted from cylinders of bark and basketry woven from the ribs of palm fronds. ̽��ֱ��special bark cylinders, which are said to resemble men’s thorax are prised off of tree trunks like waist coats, and must not snap. ̽��ֱ��completed trap is man-sized and phallic-looking.

In her paper, Nahum-Claudel explains that the activities of weir-building and trap-making demand different kinds of effort and imply contrasting kinds of sociability for the community. As the men construct the weir, moving vigorously between the forest and the water, they liken themselves to the creator deity who built the first dam as he made the world. Like him, they are masters of the boundary between land and water, which, as fisher people, is the crucial one in their universe.

She says: “What I mean by mastery is clear in the expression men use to describe the fish’s demise. They say that the fish ‘drown in the traps’. Men create the conditions in which the fish drown in their own watery dominion and, what’s more, the fish bring about their downfall by entering the traps out of their own curiosity and desire. When the men make traps, the seated handiwork makes them more contemplative. As anyone who does craftwork knows, the activity of making something with your hands encourages a mood of reflection and brings about identification with the object crafted.”

While weir-building is physically demanding and highly organised, tending the traps is more restful and is described by the Enawenê-nawê themselves as ‘lying down to rest’. Camped downstream of the dam, the men may be physically absent but their thoughts and actions are understood to have an impact on their traps’ ability to capture fish – precisely because the trap never loses its bond with the man who has crafted it.

“ ̽��ֱ��men live for the traps, devoting themselves to animating them so that they will catch plenty of fish,” says Nahum-Claudel. “They whisper to their traps and utter magical incantations. Sweet-smelling leaves are rubbed on the mouths of the traps to make them enticing to the fish. ̽��ֱ��team self-consciously strives to create a joyful atmosphere which the traps ‘desire’. There is much sexual banter – it’s locker-room talk all the time – and I was constantly reminded that I should not be grumpy, argumentative or stingy so as not to sour the mood.”

These practices seem to be about ensuring the traps’ efficacy and protecting the men themselves. Both of these aspects are thought of in terms of fertility. ̽��ֱ��traps are said to enter the weir ‘like a penis penetrating for the first time’ and the fish are seduced into entering their fragrant openings. As soon as they set the traps in place, the fishermen say that they become like virgins who have had sex for the first time.

“It is as if the traps were their own penises,” Nahum-Claudel says, “because their insertion thrusts men into the same state of vulnerability as teenage boys experience after they have had sex for their first time and their partner bleeds”. Through sex, men become open to the blood of women and they must exercise care in what they eat and in the activities they undertake when their wives menstruate or give birth. ̽��ֱ��first time this happens to a teenage boy, the restrictions to his activity and diet are strict – he lies down to rest and fast in his hammock for several days.

When the traps enter the weir the team of fishermen act in a very similar way, they fast and they say that they are now ‘lying down to rest’. This suggests that men are open to the blood of the fish caught in the traps – traps which are connected to their own bodies – just as they are open to the blood of women. Nahum-Claudel suggest that the dam fishing endeavour is about mitigating the risks involved in shedding blood while, at the same time, using the channel that exists between traps and men to promote the traps’ fertility. A theme that crops up repeatedly in Enawenê-nawê mythology is that the tables can easily turn and predator can become prey.

“Traps are all about hubris,” says Nahum-Claudel, “men build a deadly dam and drown fish in their own dominion. This activity is playing God, but everything about the men’s behaviour suggests that they are acutely aware of how risky this is, that it could – like a tragic play – end in their own downfall. What they stress as they trap the fish is not their Deity-like mastery but rather the subjection it implies. This feeling fits with the experiences of hunters and fishermen around the world. ̽��ֱ��proximity of life and death brings into focus human vulnerability so that hunting is rarely a question of unalloyed heroism. Enawenê-nawê dam fishing takes this to extremes because it is based on a monumental technology and entails intensive subjective and social involvement by the fishermen.”

Inset images from top: men harvest fish from their traps at Olowina River’s dam; the traps are ready to be inserted into the upriver face of a dam at Maxikywina River; a man dives down to pull up his trap from its position near the river bed. All photos: Chloe Nahum-Claudel, 2009. Nahum-Claudel's book is now available.

̽��ֱ��Enawenê-nawê people of the Amazon rainforest make beautifully engineered fishing dams. Living alongside this indigenous community, Dr Chloe Nahum-Claudel observed how the act of trapping fish shapes their minds, bodies and relationships. ̽��ֱ��proximity of life and death brings human vulnerability sharply into focus.

̽��ֱ��men live for the traps, devoting themselves to animating them so that they will catch plenty of fish.

Chloe Nahum-Claudel

Enawenê-nawê men check basket and bark traps for fish before reinserting them into the weir’s upriver face

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Opinion: Frankenstein or Krampus? What our monsters say about us

Anonymous — Fri, 04 Dec 2015 00:15:36 +0000

Two new monster movies are being released in the lead-up to Christmas, and each sports a very different kind of beast. There’s the man-made creation of Victor Frankenstein in the latest rendition of Mary Shelley’s gothic tale, a grotesque creature cobbled together from “the dissecting room and the slaughter-house”. And then there’s Krampus, an American re-working of the evil Austrian counterpart to Father Christmas.

̽��ֱ��word “monster”, as this shows, covers all manner of things. Man-made, such as Frankenstein, folkloric demons such as Krampus, and then there are also the classical images of exotic peoples with no heads or grotesquely exaggerated features, or the kinds of impossible chimerical beasts inhabiting the pages of medieval bestiaries.

̽��ֱ��etymology of monstrosity suggests the complex roles that monsters play within society. “Monster” probably derives from the Latin, monstrare, meaning “to demonstrate”, and monere, “to warn”.

So monsters, in essence, are demonstrative. They reveal, portend, show and make evident, often uncomfortably so. How they have been created over the centuries is much more indicative of the moral and existential challenges faced by societies than the realities that they have encountered. Though the modern Gothic monster and the medieval chimera may seem unrelated, both have acted as important social tools.

Victor Frankenstein. Fox UK

Early modern monsters

Until relatively recently in history, monsters close to home, such as deformed babies or two-headed calves, were construed as warnings of divine wrath. Monstrous depictions in newspapers and pamphlets expressed strong political attitudes. Traditional monstrous beasts such as basilisks or unicorns, that were banished to distant regions in maps, represented a frightening unknown: “here be dragons” effectively filled cartographic voids.

̽��ֱ��‘sea-elephant’.

Simultaneously, however, monsters represented the wonderful diversity of divine creation, a playful “Nature” that produced a multitude of strange forms. Exotic beasts brought to Europe for the first time in the 16th century, such as armadillos or walruses, were often interpreted as “monstrous”. More accurately, they were made into monsters when they were defined as such: as things that did not fit into the accepted natural categories. An armadillo became a pig-turtle, while a walrus was a sea-elephant.

Beasts that subverted what was expected in some way actually reinforced categories by clarifying the defining criteria for these groups. By transgressing, they helped to determine boundaries. Because to define a deviant form, such as a “deformed” baby or calf, or a “monstrous” exotic creature, you have to define “normal”.

For example, the simple definition of a “bird” was something that had two legs, two wings, could fly and walk. Then two new creatures arrived in the 16th century that seemed to violate this definition. First, birds of paradise were brought to Europe in 1622 as trade skins with stunning, colourful plumes but no legs or wings. Their limbs were removed by the hunters who supplied the birds in New Guinea. ̽��ֱ��birds were interpreted by European naturalists as heavenly creatures that never landed, inhabiting the boundary between the avian and the angelic.

Some legless birds of paradise. Johnston

At the other end of the avian spectrum, Dutch sailors landing on Mauritius at the end of the 16th century encountered dodos. Though rarely brought to Europe physically, the descriptions and detached parts of dodos were used by naturalists to depict ungainly, fat birds. Not only did dodos not fly, they could hardly walk.

̽��ֱ��dodo was therefore depicted as vast and gluttonous in late 17th-century accounts. It greedily consumed everything it came across, even hot coals. It was described as nauseatingly greasy to eat: one bird could apparently feed 25 men. This image was created by writers who had never seen the bird, and is not supported by current paleobiological evidence. ̽��ֱ��idea of the avian glutton embodied European anxieties about the rapacious colonial trading activities in the Indian Ocean, which brought a surfeit of riches to Europe. ̽��ֱ��engorged dodo became a scapegoat for the European sin of gluttony.

̽��ֱ��monstrous dodo.

Monsters, therefore, are not self-evident; they are created to serve certain roles. Making things monstrous also added value. They became commercially lucrative things: oddities, curiosities and rare things were very marketable.

̽��ֱ��market for monstrosity further motivated the literal creation of monsters: “mermaids” were assembled from pieces of fish, monkeys and other objects while “ray-dragons” were created from carefully mutilated and dried rays. These objects could be sold to collectors or displayed in menageries and freak-shows. Writing about and portraying virtual monsters helped to sell books and pamphlets.

Modern-day monsters

So how do we use our monsters today? One of the two monsters set to hit cinemas displays the dangers of hubristic human enterprise (Victor Frankenstein); the other provides a dark embodiment of Christmas-spirit gone awry (Krampus). Such monsters are images that embody the cultural or psychological characteristics that we as a society find difficult to acknowledge. By excising them, through fantastical narratives, we rid ourselves of the undesirable attributes they are perceived to carry. ̽��ֱ��cathartic consumption of monster-culture provides us with a safe, removed space to explore and excise social anxieties.

It also offers the illusion of absolution from them by externalising anxieties into ridiculous figures, such as Krampus. Monsters such as this proffer us pastiches of moral messages in easily-swallowed forms that both highlight their potential threat, and soothe us by defusing it.

Though it may not seem so, this has always been the most important role that monsters have played: they horrify us, yes, but ultimately their function is to remove what we find horrifying about ourselves. So we can recoil at the gory construction of Frankenstein’s monster, or shriek at the toothy maw of Krampus for a few hours, then leave them happily behind when the credits roll.

Natalie Lawrence, PhD Candidate, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Natalie Lawrence (Department of History and Philosophy of Science) discusses the history of monsters, and what they say about the people who invent them.

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Nikolaus and Krampus in Austria

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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From beyond the grave

bjb42 — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It has become something of a newspaper commonplace that men and women of the modern West share an unusual aversion to death. Where once it was subject to intimate ritual among neighbours, and kin gathered around the domestic deathbed, it is now hidden, hospitalised and a ‘modern taboo’. Even less has been said about the dead themselves and their changing place in the imagination. Yet, as medieval historian Dr Carl Watkins is finding, an exploration of cultural change in attitudes to death over a long span provides a fascinating means of understanding how ordinary people relate to the dead and conceive of their fate.

Dr Watkins’ research requires consideration of obvious otherworldly places – heaven, hell, the cleansing fires of purgatory, the idea of judgement at the end of time – but also the less travelled byways. How have people related to their ancestors? How have they imagined the ancient dead whose traces (from saints’ bones to megalithic monuments) lie in their midst? Through tracing attitudes from the middle ages to the dawn of modernity, recorded in parish records and church archives, the research is showing that debates about the dead and patterns of thinking about their place have proved durable down the centuries.

Defining purgatory

One recurring theme is the fate of those deemed too sin-stained for immediate transit to heaven but not wicked enough for hell. ̽��ֱ��perennial problem posed by this spiritual ‘middling sort’ was solved by the medieval church when it gave purgatory sharp definition as the place where traces of sin might be cleansed in fire before the soul entered paradise.

Although, in the mid-16th century, Protestant reformers abolished purgatory as unscriptural, niggling questions remained about the fate of the majority. Could they really be consigned to hell’s fires? Still queasy about this, some Victorian churchmen reinvented the concept: worried by a loving God who still sent some into eternal fires, they ‘emptied’ hell entirely by arguing that universal salvation was possible. This even led the former Prime Minister William Gladstone to fear an epidemic of social disorder if the deterrent of hell was, in effect, abolished.

But did the saved not become complacent about their blissful condition? From indications in the New Testament that the saved and damned might see each other’s fate, an idea was spun out in lurid medieval visions in which the elect were briefly shown hell to redouble their own joys. Even as late as the 19th century, preachers were still drawing on the same idea, although modified for refined Victorian sensibilities: smoke from hell’s fires would waft discreetly through heaven to remind its inhabitants of their blessed estate.

Back from the dead

Popular beliefs about ghosts are perhaps the most tenacious aspects of ‘death culture’. Of course, deciphering these beliefs entails taking folklore seriously as a historical source. Folk stories were lovingly accumulated by collectors from the second half of the 17th century onwards, and the reactions of these learned observers can be as telling as the tales they set down. Although usually sceptical and detached, they sometimes slip in autobiographical comment on their own hopes and fears about death and the dead, and sometimes betray how stories in which they are immersed then infiltrated and shaped their own beliefs.

What this research is beginning to suggest is that many beliefs about the dead and debates about their fate were perennial ones, transcending some of the great cultural and religious changes wrought in the medieval and early modern worlds.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Carl Watkins (csw14@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of History.

Tracing popular beliefs from medieval to early modern times is highlighting the durability of debates about the dead.

Folk stories were lovingly accumulated by collectors from the second half of the 17th century onwards, and the reactions of these learned observers can be as telling as the tales they set down.

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