Local Knowledge (Text Only). Clifford Geertz
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Название: Local Knowledge (Text Only)

Автор: Clifford Geertz

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Прочая образовательная литература

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isbn: 9780008219451

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СКАЧАТЬ Pahang, with a large suite of princes and nobles. After them came the . . . high priest, carried upon an open chair, round which was wrapped one end of a coil of cloth, made to represent a huge serpent, painted in white, black, and gilt stripes, the huge head of the monster resting under the [priest’s] seat, while the tail was fastened to the [tower], which came immediately after it, implying that the deceased was dragged to the place of burning by the serpent.

      Following the large [tower] of the dead king, came three minor and less gorgeous ones, each containing a young woman about to become a sacrifice. . . . The victims of this cruel superstition showed no sign of fear at the terrible doom now so near. Dressed in white, their long black hair partly concealing them, with a mirror in one hand and a comb in the other, they appeared intent only upon adorning themselves as though for some gay festival. The courage which sustained them in a position so awful was indeed extraordinary, but it was born of the hope of happiness in a future world. From being bondswomen here, they believed they were to become the favourite wives and queens of their late master in another world. They were assured that readiness to follow him to a future world, with cheerfulness and amid pomp and splendour, would please the unseen powers, and induce the great god Siva to admit them without delay to Swerga Surya, the heaven of Indra.

      Round the deluded women stood their relatives and friends. Even these did not view the ghastly preparations with dismay, or try to save their unhappy daughters and sisters from the terrible death awaiting them. Their duty was not to save but to act as executioners; for they were entrusted with the last horrible preparations, and finally sent the victims to their doom.

      Meanwhile the procession moved slowly on, but before reaching its destination a strange act in the great drama had to be performed. The serpent had to be killed, and burned with the corpse. The high priest descended from his chair, seized a bow, and from the four corners of the compass discharged four wooden arrows at the serpent’s head. It was not the arrow, however, but a flower, the champaka, that struck the serpent. The flower had been inserted at the feathered end of the arrow, from which, in its flight it detached itself, and by some strange dexterity the priest so managed that the flower, on each occasion hit its mark, viz. the serpent’s head. The beast was then supposed to have been killed, and its body having been carried hitherto by men, was now wound round the priest’s chair and eventually round the wooden image of the lion in which the corpse was burned.

      The procession having arrived near the place of cremation, the [tower] was thrice turned, always having the priest at its head. Finally it was placed against the bridge which, meeting the eleventh story, connected it with the place of cremation. The body was now placed in the wooden image of the lion; five small plates of gold, silver, copper, iron and lead, inscribed with mystic words, were placed in the mouth of the corpse; the high priest read the Vedas, and emptied the jars containing holy water over the body. This done, the faggots, sticks striped in gold, black, and white, were placed under the lion, which was soon enveloped in flames. This part of the strange scene over, the more terrible one began.

      The women were carried in procession three times round the place, and then lifted on to the fatal bridge. There, in the pavilion which has been already mentioned, they waited until the flames had consumed the image and its contents. Still they showed no fear, still their chief care seemed to be the adornment of the body, as though making ready for life rather than for death. Meanwhile, the attendant friends prepared for the horrible climax. The rail at the further end of the bridge was opened, and a plank was pushed over the flames, and attendants below poured quantities of oil on the fire, causing bright, lurid flames to shoot up to a great height. The supreme moment had arrived. With firm and measured steps the victims trod the fatal plank; three times they brought their hands together over their heads, on each of which a small dove was placed, and then, with body erect, they leaped into the flaming sea below, while the doves flew up, symbolizing the escaping spirits.

      Two of the women showed, even at the very last, no sign of fear; they looked at each other, to see whether both were prepared, and then, without stopping, took the plunge. The third appeared to hesitate, and to take the leap with less resolution; she faltered for a moment, and then followed, all three disappearing without uttering a sound.

      This terrible spectacle did not appear to produce any emotion upon the vast crowd, and the scene closed with barbaric music and firing of guns. It was a sight never to be forgotten by those who witnessed it, and brought to one’s heart a strange feeling of thankfulness that one belonged to a civilization which, with all its faults, is merciful, and tends more and more to emancipate women from deception and cruelty. To the British rule it is due that this foul plague of suttee is extirpated in India, and doubtless the Dutch have, ere now, done as much for Bali. Works like these are the credentials by which the Western civilization makes good its right to conquer and humanize barbarous races and to replace ancient civilizations.

      I have little more that is interesting to tell of Bali. . . .

      I

      This powerful, beautiful, and (not to neglect my own métier, which is supposed to be some sort of science) superbly observed passage was written in the 1880s by a Dane, L. V. Helms.1 As a very young man Helms had apprenticed himself to a white rajah type merchant-adventurer straight out of The Heart of Darkness named Mads Lange—he played the violin, dashed about on half-broken horses cutting down enemies, had various complexions of native wives, and died suddenly, quite likely poisoned, in his late forties—who ran a port-of-trade enclave in South Bali between 1839 and 1856, a time when he and his staff were the only Europeans on the island. I quote Helms at such length not because I intend to go into Balinese ethnography here, or even, very much, into cremation rites. I quote this passage because I want to unpack it, or, better (because it is a bit hermetic and my interests a bit diffuse) to circle around it as a way into what I take to be some of the central concerns of Lionel Trilling as a literary critic, if one can confine so various a man in so cramped a category. These are concerns which, from a somewhat different perspective, but no less cramped a category, I share with him.

      If Trilling was obsessed with anything it was with the relation of culture to the moral imagination; and so am I. He came at it from the side of literature; I come at it from the side of custom. But in Helms’s text, portraying a custom which possesses that mysterious conjunction of beauty when it is taken as a work of art, horror when it is taken as actually lived life, and power when it is taken as a moral vision—a conjunction which we associate with such a great part of modern literature, and over which Trilling, in his cadenced way, so conscientiously agonized—I think we can meet. It does not really matter much in the end whether one trains one’s attention on Joseph Conrad or on suttee: the social history of the moral imagination is a single subject.

      Single, but of course vast. As any particular work of literature brings out certain aspects of the general problem—How does collective fantasy color collective life?—so any particular ritual dramatizes certain issues and mutes others. This is, indeed, the particular virtue of attending to such exotic matters as the splendid incineration of illustrious corpses and dutiful widows on a remote island some years ago. What is thereby brought to immediate notice is so different from what is brought to immediate notice by attending to what Trilling once called the shockingly personal literature of the talkative and attitudinizing present, that whatever deeper perceptions emerge to connect the two experiences have a peculiar force.

      My task in sufficiently focusing matters so that something circumstantial can be said is powerfully assisted by the fact that Professor Trilling’s last published piece—on the problems of teaching Jane Austen to Columbia students in the seventies, a heroic enterprise apparently—addressed itself to what is surely the central issue here.2 It has always been, he says there, “the basic assumption of humanistic literary pedagogy” that the similarities between ourselves and others removed in place or period are so much more profound than are the surface differences separating us from them that, given the necessary scholarship СКАЧАТЬ