̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - myth

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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Outlaws, trolls and beserkers: meet the hero-monsters of the Icelandic sagas

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:28:14 +0000

“I’ve come to kill your monster!” exclaims Beowulf in the 2007 film version of the epic poem. But how do his suspicious Danish hosts know that this monstrously huge stranger is actually a hero searching for glory? And, by the same token, how do modern audiences with no prior knowledge of the Marvelverse know that the Incredible Hulk is a “good guy”? At least readers of the Icelandic sagas had an advantage: they were used to their heroes being monsters – at least part of the time.

Iceland’s medieval literature is rich in many regards: in Eddas and sagas, it tells us about early Scandinavia and its expanding world-view, ranging from the mythology of the North, the legends and heroes of the migration age, the Viking voyages and the settlement of Iceland all the way through to the coming of Christianity and the formation of kingdoms in Scandinavia.

It also tell us about monsters – for the literature of medieval Iceland is also rich in the paranormal. In mythology, gods and men fight against giants. In the sagas, humans battle the forces of disorder, the trolls and revenants – think a cross between a vampire and a zombie – that inhabit the wild mountains and highlands of Norway and Iceland. Or at least that is what, on the surface, appears to happen.

Trolls won’t always be trolls

Monstrosity, however, is never clear-cut. Because of their hybrid nature, monsters cannot easily be categorised – instead, they demand to be approached and read in a more nuanced way. Such a reading will soon lead to the realisation that not all monsters are created equal, that they do not all pose the same threat. For trolls are not always trolls.

In fact, the word “troll”, which we now understand to denote some kind of mountain-dwelling ogre, was used for a number of different kinds of figures: witches, the undead, berserkers, but also people who were larger or stronger or uglier than ordinary humans. Which leads us to the monstrous heroes of the medieval Icelandic family sagas, or Íslendingasögur.

Half monster, half hero

In these texts, we encounter characters that are both troll-like monster and human hero – that both threaten and defend society and that therefore draw our attention to the fact that the boundary between monstrosity and heroism is not only thin but also regularly crossed.

While some of the creatures that are referred to as “trolls” – especially revenants, but also witches and even berserkers – are unequivocally monstrous, the characters that occupy the most ambiguous position suspended between monstrosity and heroism are outlaws. These, however, are also the characters that have captured the Icelandic imagination the most: there are three sagas that scholars agree to be major outlaw stories, the sagas of Grettir Ásmundarson, Gísli Súrsson, and Hörðr Grímkelsson.

There are also some sagas that draw on similar narrative motifs to tell the story of men who are outlawed for at least parts of their lives, like the saga of the Sworn Brothers (Fóstbræðra saga) or the saga of the people of Kjalarnes (Kjalnesinga saga). All of these marginal heroes border not only on society, but also on that which one encounters when one leaves the social spaces behind: the monstrous.

This has less to do with their physical location in the “wild”, and more with the way they interact with society: when Hörðr goes raiding with his outlaw band, he becomes a threat to the local community. And such a threat to economic growth and social stability has to be removed. However, if these characters were only threatening, only monstrous, they would not have their own sagas. They are not only monsters: they are also heroes, defenders of the society they themselves threaten.

Fringe dwellers

̽��ֱ��story of Grettir “the Strong” Ásmundarson is a particularly interesting example of this. In the 19 years Grettir spends as an outlaw both in Norway and Iceland, he constantly moves back and forth between human society and isolation as a “monster”, never fully belonging to either. When he steals from the local farmers or simply sits on their property and refuses to let go, he becomes a monster in the eyes of society. But when he fights against trolls and revenants, performing tasks no one else would be able to perform, he becomes a guardian of the medieval Icelandic galaxy that consists of farms and sheep.

In this duality, Grettir and Hörðr and other strong, troll-like men, are not too dissimilar from the monstrous heroes of the present day. Bruce Banner has clear anger management issues, but when he transforms into the Hulk, his strength enables him to perform amazing feats of heroism in defence of society. But the dual nature of his character can also make him turn against his friends and allies, just as Hörðr turns against his family when he wants to burn his own sister in her house.

This fluid continuity between monstrosity and heroism has been explored extensively in medieval literature: Beowulf or the Táin Bó Cúailnge, (the Cattle Raid of Cooley) – just like the Icelandic sagas – have their fair share of monstrous heroes. But it keeps fascinating us even today.

Shows such as Heroes have added a new shade to this exploration in recent years. Currently, even the humanness of zombies is on the cultural agenda in Warm Bodies or iZombie. Let us hope that, as this exploration continues, as we become more aware of the continuity between the monstrous and the human, we will eventually realise that, often, “the other” is just another “self”.

̽��ֱ��Avengers in the North, a talk by the author on the monstrous superheroes in the Viking Age, will be part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Rebecca Merkelbach, Doctoral Candidate, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

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

Inset images: An old Mountain Troll, 1904 (Wikimedia Commons); ̽��ֱ��Hulk (Ton Haex).

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

Rebecca Merkelbach (Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic) discusses the monstrous heroes of Scandinavian mythology and literature.

Wikimedia Commons

Manuscript of Beowulf, in the British Library

̽��ֱ��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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Herakles – a hero for all ages

sjr81 — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 15:32:43 +0000

Featuring works by New Zealand print-maker Marian Maguire, ̽��ֱ��Labours of Herakles makes unlikely bedfellows of classical myth and colonial history. Inspired by imagery from Athenian black-figure pottery, Herakles (known in the Roman world as Hercules), steps directly from a Greek vase and into the New World in a series of lithographs and etchings.

By relocating Herakles in a colonial landscape, these works question what it means to be a hero – in both ancient and more recent pasts.

Curator Dr Susanne Turner said: It is a real honour to host Marian Maguire's lithographs and etchings in Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��Herakles series is not just beautiful - it's rich, thoughtful and unique. They introduce a new way of looking at classical art and the ancient world, opening up new stories in a space which is already full to the brim with Greek (and Roman) mythology.

“In a sense, Marian's work reveals how very flexible our ideas about the ancients are and how so often the classical has played a role in making sense of more recent histories and events. But what we're most excited about is the opportunity to engage new audiences who might not otherwise think to visit us. With a full and varied programme of events covering both the Greek and Maori aspects of the exhibition, we hope we have something to tempt a wide variety of visitors through our doors this summer.”

Under Maguire’s gaze and keen eye for detail, the great Greek hero undergoes a transformation as he struggles to fill the shoes of a 19th century colonist. In Greece, he battled monsters and undertook gargantuan tasks. In New Zealand, he struggles to clear the land and till the soil.

Marian Maguire has built a reputation for using the visual language of Greek pottery to interrogate New Zealand’s history. Maguire has exhibited throughout New Zealand and explores narratives of colonialism through a classical lens in several other series, including ̽��ֱ��Odyssey of Captain Cook (2005) and Titokowaru's Dilemma (2011). ̽��ֱ��Labours of Herakles was first exhibited in 2008.

Set against the atmospheric backdrop of the classical casts, the exhibition contextualises the lithographs and etchings within a rich ancient tradition of representing Herakles in different contexts and artistic media. ̽��ֱ��exhibition will be accompanied by a series of events including talks exploring the ancient and colonial histories, activities for families and craft workshops.

̽��ֱ��Labours of Herakles is a touring exhibition, coordinated by Dr Emma Stafford ( ̽��ֱ�� of Leeds), and was first shown at Leeds City Museum. It is on display at the Museum of Classical Archaeology from April 17 to August 15, 2015.

An exhibition that reimagines Greek hero Herakles as a 19th century colonist in New Zealand will open at the Museum of Classical Archaeology tomorrow (April 17).

̽��ֱ��Herakles series is not just beautiful - it's rich, thoughtful and unique.

Susanne Turner

̽��ֱ��Labours of Herakles

̽��ֱ��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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