Thread by @radicalanthro

Bonus 🧵(4a?) for #TheDawnOfEverything aka #Theteatimeofeverything on @davidgraeber and @davidwengrow 's notion of ritual 'property'. See what they mean first, then a case study with the Hadza!

https://twitter.com/radicalanthro/status/1457455556063633414?s=20

So G + W have section end ch.4, pp. 156-163, on ritual 'property' and the sacred, where property refers not only to things, but to knowledge, secrets, songs, dances... absolutely fine, these were often the most valued 'property' that people had to pay (in some way) to access
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And in their interesting accounts of North American h-g monumental sites, they suggest these were likely gathering places for dissemination of such ritual knowledge (likely within very bounded gender initiation groups).
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So this is right up RAG's alley because as researchers a number of us have worked in gender ritual, secrets and deceptions, with Hadza and BaYaka. Chris Knight has a brilliant analysis on the gender politics of the Rainbow Snake in 'Blood Relations'
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libcom.org/history/blood-…

So G + W (op.158-9) make a startling move aligning private property as formally similar to the sacred, invoking Durkheim's idea of the sacred as 'set apart'. So 'tabu', not to be touched, is just like owning your car, which only you have legal right to open with your key!
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Whoa! Now I'm staring into an abyss of contradictions on Durkheim. How did they jump from there to there?! In Dkhm's early essay on the origins of the Incest taboo, the paradigm of set apartness is a menstrual woman, set apart (not a possible sex partner) for her clansmen

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Dkhm's incest essay was super-perceptive. The almost surely ancient template of gender ritual (BOTH girls AND boys) is menstrual seclusion, setting apart in a state of tabu power. But can we understand that as rendering initiates 'private'? Surely the opposite? Or perhaps...
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..the spectrum of collective public celebration (typical African h-g) as against marginalized and private is a good barometer of gender relations and women's access to ritual power ('property').
I said yesterday if the first property was women owning their bodies and that's..
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..sacred, yes, I definitely agree. But how can we possibly think of this 'first' ritual as private? It really makes no sense in Durkheim's terms of experience of ritual, collective effervescence, collective consciousness, which nourishes the sacred.
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Maybe the best way to examine this is look at some real ritual property from the Hadza and see how ritual, sacred power, public and private (if that's a category for the Hadza?) intersect. Only first, validating Dkhm's old observation, we Radical Anthropologists predict
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..predict boldly ALL the sacred property G + W are referring to here are rendered sacred because they are 'menstrual' -- even especially the ones annexed by men. And the 'secrets' are describing how that came to be (how men got them etc).

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The work on Hadza 'power' objects comes from Thea Skaanes @SkaanesThea in her Ph.D and this key article. But with my student Elena Mouriki, I've seen them in action. They 'belong' to women but get mobilised in key collective rituals. And their gender..
researchgate.net/publication/28…
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..their gender is superfluid, with affinity to the opposite...

This thread will continue shortly after Jack 🐇gets his veggies...

Thea is a curator of the Moesgaard Museum, Aarhus, and she reasoned brilliantly that, because the Hadza are traditionally mobile, they carry very little with them. So whatever they do carry and keep must be of real significance, and that would be her point of enquiry.

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Three objects are NOT mundane or practical but 'ceremonial, personal..cherished'. They may be inherited and are not circulated. Described by James Woodburn in the context of the epeme dance as 'children' who would be danced for, these objects are treated as people.
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First is a narichanda stick, c. 1.2 m long, straightened (like an arrow) and incised with decorations. The stick is made for a newborn girl, by her father, when she is named. A group of male relatives, who would be able to dance for her in epeme join in decorating the stick
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The stick bears her name, the name of a woman from an earlier generation, yet it is a 'male' object. Rubbed with fat from the special gourd (see below) to bring out the decorative marking, it is kept in the twig walls of her hut, to be smoked with a patina from the fire.

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The prime use of narichanda is as the girl's weapon during maitoko female initiation when the girls run, chase and beat up young hunters. We can see here flexible whips and the straight narichanda. There are ferocious stories of ancient maitokos who speared the men!
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But narichanda also has a role in the boy's initiation to epeme, called maito. Epeme men choose the narichanda they think suitable to accompany the boy in this liminal phase -- it is male, with a female relative's name. When a woman dies, the stick passes down with her name
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Second object is a calabash gourd containing fat. These come in female, round and male, long, thin versions called a'untenakwiko and a'untenakwete, again decorated. Thea's photo shows both types here. The fat they hold is only used in ritual, extracted with the narichanda
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They are used to smear powerful fat onto initiate girls and the boy. Gendering is really interesting because the female gourd a'untenakwiko, holding fat of epeme animals, is only used for the epeme initiate -- and is most powerful -- while girls get fat from the male gourd.
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Identified with a woman herself, the a'untenakwiko will be broken on her grave.

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Third are mud dolls, called olanakwete (m) or olanakwiko (f), made from a special termite earth, baked with blood and ash, then decorated. The dolls are made for young women who have not yet had a child, given the name of an appropriate relative...
(pic from Elena Mouriki)
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and then treated just as if the olanakwete/kwiko was the child itself. The woman wraps it, carries it, places it to sleep, breastfeeds it. If a doll should break, it would be buried.
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Thea reads these objects as past, present and future of the woman they belong to. Narichanda is the name from a forbear (passed on down). The gourd full of life and fat is the woman herself, while the doll is her future child. These objects are not meant to 'walk about'...
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They should stay back in the hut. So are they 'private'? They certainly are personal, but they travel between the sexes, participate in initiations, are invoked and danced for at epeme regularly in her name, as 'children'. Thea looks at them as 'branching nodes of relations'
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they form a nexus of relations in the epeme night dance, when men dance as epeme and women sing, the major ritual configuring Hadza society (each dark moon). Specific ties and relationships are embodied in the dances for her 'children'.

So, summing up. Is it a really western imposition to talk about these objects as 'private'? They are treated differently from other Hadza things (there exists a very secret 'menstrual' item in relation to men's Epeme we can't discuss).

The 'power' objects are 'secluded' -- though not really taboo for others to touch, Hadza pretty relaxed on that. But they create and anchor relationships through time and space.

And that is because they are the names of the women themselves who create and anchor those relationships. Worth remembering that Hadzabe, collective noun for Hadza people, is feminine plural.

Seen from that POV, men's Epeme society looks much less like a ritual attempt to dominate and control women than means for men to hold their place and tie themselves in to the net of women's names.