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- Convenors:
-
Camilla Power
(University of East London)
Morna Finnegan
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Cognition and evolution
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 10
- Start time:
- 20 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Did morality evolve through Bakhtinian cultures of laughter expressed through the collective (female) body? Is the 'morality' of hierarchical societies in fact anti-morality for egalitarian societies, a result of - and attempt to justify - the failure to share properly?
Long Abstract:
This session invites papers across disciplines to connect to the Bakhtinian theme of "cultures of laughter" in which "the drama of bodily life" privileges sex, growth, birth, blood, eating and defecation. We aim to consider what role the "material bodily principle" played in the evolutionary emergence of morality. What did such an original morality feel like arising from the subversive power of this collective body?
We take it that, if the body is not sacred, nothing is. How is morality seeded in the body from birth as infants begin to experience the shared contact valued by adults? How is this inculcated subsequently as children grow up through corporeal metaphors and practices like ekila, moadjo, epeme and n/om? The community dances of egalitarian hunter-gatherers reinforce the collective body, through which the moral necessity of sharing power - not just food - is vividly expressed.
The communal labour of distributing social power done by 'speaking bodies' in a Bakhtinian ritual dialogue invokes kinetic interchange of bodily fluids and sexual energies. Typically, African hunter-gatherers resist shrinkage to the private, isolated and narrowly individual through ritual cultures of laughter, ribald and antiphonal, provoking the sexual opposition. What may be obscured by a 'moral' veil in hierarchical cultures - protective especially of male dominance and dignities -is let loose resoundingly by female collective and polyphonic signals of bawdy resistance. Is it possible that the 'moral' values of a hierarchical world, in its failing to laugh, is in fact an anti-morality attempting to justify the failure to share properly?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Morna Finnegan
Paper short abstract:
What connects cognitive and somatic intelligence? What drives the extraordinary human interest in sharing and caring? I use the Mbendjele and Ju/hoan terms "Ekila" and "N/om" respectively to propose that morality is fundamentally a corporeal element: it must be experienced in order to remain live.
Paper long abstract:
Corporeal morality is premised on contact. The continuity of the person from birth onwards with a larger, socio-kinetic body guarantees the felt morality in which one is able to connect by having experienced the other. Real morality is both painful and empowering. Less about abstract rights and wrongs than issues of trust and respect, it registers somatically, affecting the gut, the stomach, the lungs. It is visceral, a kind of heightened sensitivity to the feelings and needs of others, and a desire to be similarly known, which Hrdy convincingly argues must have underpinned all subsequent cultural and linguistic developments. Egalitarian hunter-gatherers such as the Mbendjele offer a striking example. These are societies known for their continual working against the privatisation of things, food, and people. Both Mbendjele and Ju/hoan refer to an embodied source of power or heat located in the gut area and cultivated through various cultural and ritual practices. This core power, expressed for the community through spirit or healing dances, flows out of and into the person simultaneously. "Ekila" and "N/om" belong to individuals but are inseparable from the collective body. By keeping the experience of the body public, and by ritually fuelling reproductive claims and counter claims, they epitomize what Bakhtin called "the great generic body of the people": an intensely political moving force which breathes sociality. This is corporeal morality, where the chemistry of the system - its heat and velocity - is stored in and remains accessible to the body.
Chris Knight (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
Laughter is best conceptualized as the reverse image of primate-style aggressive mobbing -- mobbing under relaxed, tension-free social conditions. Its emergence was bound up with the overthrow of dominance and its replacement by sexual-political reverse dominance.
Paper long abstract:
African immediate-return hunter gatherers are not only egalitarian but gender-egalitarian. In these societies, pressure to conform to egalitarian norms is applied through derisive laughter aimed at miscreants, using techniques of mimicry and ridicule most effectively deployed by grandmothers and other senior females. In this paper, I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of current Darwinian approaches to the paradoxes of laughter and its evolutionary emergence in our species. I will argue that laughter is best conceptualized as the reverse image of primate-style aggressive mobbing -- mobbing under relaxed, tension-free social conditions -- and that its emergence was bound up with the overthrow of dominance and its replacement by sexual-political reverse dominance.
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Elena Sims Fejdi (University of East London)
Paper short abstract:
In the environment of direct sales cosmetics collectives of women in contemporary Slovakia created and maintained their morality of sharing through uproarious collective cosmetic rituals - an expression of the Bakhtinian 'culture of laughter'.
Paper long abstract:
In the environment of direct sales cosmetics small groups of Slovak women forged cosmetic coalitions through costly bodily rituals. These energetic, emotionally intense and highly expressive Bakhtinian rituals were the necessary precursor to rigorous sharing amongst the women who participated in them. This sharing centred on careful equalization of their access to beauty products and ability to use them through collectively monitored demand sharing.
In these rituals collectivizing female sociality emerged characterized by energetic assertive loudness, uproarious laughter, lewd jokes, exaggerated feminine behaviour and bonding. The social hierarchies among the women relaxed and ritual egalitarianism with the specific morality of sharing, cooperation and reciprocity emerged inhibiting any dominance hierarchy. This morality was represented amongst the researched women as bonds of kinship. In their bonded collectives women shared 'like sisters'.
The carnivalesque cosmetic rituals routinely accompanied by outbursts of shared laughter fostered the emergence of a temporal collective culture of reversal that subverted the individualism, isolation, competition and modesty of the expected everyday feminine behaviour in favour of loudness, joking, sharing, cooperation, immodesty and commitment to the coalition. It reversed the economic logic of direct sales and replaced it with the moral economy of sharing. The collectively expressed ritualized female agency resisted the existing hierarchies between men and women. In ritual mode coalitions of women reversed the relationships of dominance and appropriated the ritual time and space for themselves.
Camilla Power (University of East London)
Paper short abstract:
Laughter and rough bodily provocation during maitoko initiation is crucial for Hadza women and girls in asserting gender egalitarianism. As girls 'hunt' men over several days of sport, they re-present an earlier 'matriarchal' moral order.
Paper long abstract:
Among about 1000 Hadza speakers in northern Tanzania, perhaps one to two hundred still maintain a hunting and gathering lifestyle in bush camps. Hadza women are known among neighbouring groups for their robust and vocal resistance to attempts at male domination. Woodburn (2005) has highlighted ritual as a pathway for incipient hierarchy in immediate-return egalitarian societies, with attention to Hadza epeme, under the control of men. Yet he acknowledges that men gain no effective day-to-day control over women by these means. Men's ritual claims over epeme are countered in vivid, hilarious and dramatic performance during the female initiation maitoko. Over several days of sport, women and girls reverse gender relations by 'hunting' the hunters. The girls of maitoko bleed, run, hunt, hit, fight, dance and sing together to reclaim time and space from the men and youths. The mood of laughter and rough playfighting - mimicked by small girls' and boys' playfights - is underpinned by serious intent. The younger reproductive generation emerges militant - an armed body of women - to reprise the story of women's original ownership of epeme. Evolutionary anthropologist Boehm has argued that collectively exerted 'reverse dominance' is the source of the moral community. Maitoko initiates act as a reverse gender dominant moral community.