11.2 History
Being an anthropologist is intrinsically different than being a historian. Historians, to be facile, see one damned thing after another, cause and effect and correlation and coincidence. In most ways their work does not embrace the genuine mystery of human suffering. The anthropologist, if she has any poetry in her soul at all, sees the ways humans live as only partly linear, and that mainly because there is a somewhat verifiable beginning and ending to each life in a particular body. It’s what happens to each body along the way that confuses the issue. Culture is the eruption of the human tendency to try to make sense of the pain - and intermittent pleasure - of bodies caught in cycles of birth and death, joy and sorrow, hunger and satiation, growth and loss. Repetition makes time irrelevant, because we’ve been here before and we’ll be here again. Very little changes except perhaps our internal landscape: scars, mutilations, calluses, blooms and decay. Our wounds make our world.
There’s this great essay by Walter Benjamin called Theses on the Philosophy of History. It’s not really an essay, but rather a collection of more or less interconnected observations and thoughts. Benjamin, who was neither a historian nor an anthropologist, was the particular type of thinker who emerged in Germany between World War I and World War II. They watched the end of the world approaching with the same surety that prophets of the Bible had, but unlike those prophets, they knew that there was nothing they could do to change anything. The world rushed on. Benjamin and those like him bore witness. Many of them were destroyed for their trouble.
I like to think of him as a shaman.
Anyway, what he said: "A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
I think an anthropologist would call the storm tradition. Tradition is what allows us to live in a world of cyclic time rather than linear, a world that never changes. There is no progress when history repeats itself. There is no progress when love is always destroyed.
Part of my training - as a bruja, not as an anthropologist nor as a historian - was to learn the names of all my ancestors, generations of direct ascent back to the beginning. I did this and can still do it. It takes three days to recite the names, partly because there are many generations, partly because the names are very complicated. They aren’t just labels that were attached to the people, they were codes for the shapes of each individual tonal. This is the part that lives on, in some respect, even after there is nobody who directly remembers the person. The point of the ceremony, the recitation, is not remembrance, as such, but remaking. If I sit for three days, say all their names in the correct order and tempo, and do all the associated necessary tasks, I learn who I was meant to be as the result of this procession of creation through a series of human bodies. They live again and tell me who I was born to be.
As you might imagine, this is exhausting. It can also be discouraging, because it becomes obvious how easy it is to betray one’s potential and to fail the promise that each generation made to the next when it created it. In that sense, history is a millstone. I didn’t ask to be here.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I think the way I do because I have a foot in the old ways myself. I know how they work and what they do for their people. Anthropologists want to understand, but what they really want to understand is themselves, not the Tupi, nor the Yanomamo, nor again the Quechua, the Ticuna, nor even the Paumari. Somewhere along the way, some of the anthropologists learned the danger of speaking another person’s most dangerous secrets, the ones they can never understand, because what you write, what they write, is always about themselves and the failure of their world view to make sense of the tragedy of time and history. In the end, some of them at least learned that what they were doing was only navel-gazing. The Tupi already know what they need to know about themselves. Anthropologists are irrelevant except as autobiographers.
Anthropologists are the neurotics of the social sciences.
I used to be an anthropologist. But I’ve lost my resilience. Now I’m just waiting. Waiting, watching, dying more and more all the time. My life is in ruins at my feet, and while I’m no angel, it’s hard to see how it could be anything but inevitable, whatever it is that comes next. One damned thing after another, but little that I can see that is worth living for.
Of course, if Benjamin is right when he says that even the dead are not safe, then there isn’t much worth dying for, either. Or much value in being dead. You’re just part of the tragic pile at the feet of the Angelus Novus. Welcome home.
I’ve done a pretty good job this time about not talking directly about my feelings or my relationship, haven’t I? Just let it be said that the angel of history is powerless to change anything. She can only watch and watch and never look away.
Today’s secret: Every single day I make a conscious decision about whether to live or die.
Client’s name: Ynez Castillo
Fandom: Original character
Word count: 1000ish (not counting Benjamin’s words, of course)
Partner: Darius on_holy_ground