Medusa's Hair

An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience

Gananath Obeyesekere

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226189215
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The great pilgrimage center of southeastern Sri Lanka, Kataragama, has become in recent years the spiritual home of a new class of Hindu-Buddhist religious devotees. These ecstatic priests and priestesses invariably display long locks of matted hair, and they express their devotion to the gods through fire walking, tongue-piercing, hanging on hooks, and trance-induced prophesying.The increasing popularity of these ecstatics poses a challenge not only to orthodox Sinhala Buddhism (the official religion of Sri Lanka) but also, as Gananath Obeyesekere shows, to the traditional anthropological and psychoanalytic theories of symbolism. Focusing initially on one symbol, matted hair, Obeyesekere demonstrates that the conventional distinction between personal and cultural symbols is inadequate and naive. His detailed case studies of ecstatics show that there is always a reciprocity between the personal-psychological dimension of the symbol and its public, culturally sanctioned role. Medusa's Hair thus makes an important theoretical contribution both to the anthropology of individual experience and to the psychoanalytic understanding of culture. In its analyses of the symbolism of guilt, the adaptational and integrative significance of belief in spirits, and a host of related issues concerning possession states and religiosity, this book marks a provocative advance in psychological anthropology.

Part One

Introduction

I will introduce the theme of this essay with a discussion of Leach’s influential paper “Magical Hair,” where he analyzes the matted hair and shaven heads of Indian ascetics, which he treats as public symbols. Leach argues that, contrary to psychoanalytic thinking, public cultural symbols have no unconscious motivational significance for the individual or the group. By contrast, private symbols may involve deep motivation, but they have no cultural significance. I take this to be the standard social anthropological position regarding symbols—an inadequate one, I believe, since there are grounds for assuming that custom and emotion are often interwoven. I will then present case studies of three female ecstatics to show how cultural meanings are articulated to personal experience. At this stage in my analysis I focus on one symbol—matted hair—and the relation of that symbol to critical personal life crises. The complex personal experiences of the individual are crystallized in the (public) symbol. Thus symbols like matted hair operate on the psychological and cultural levels simultaneously; ergo, a naive psychoanalytic position is as inadequate as a naive anthropological one. Personal symbols must be related to the life experience of the individual and the larger institutional context in which they are embedded.¹

Thus, from a critique of the antipsychological stance of social anthropology, I move to a criticism of the anti-institutional stance of psychoanalysis. One weakness in the psychoanalytic theory of symbolism is its assumption that all psychological symbols have motivational significance.² I argue that psychological symbols can be broken down into a minimum of two types: personal symbols where deep motivation is involved, and psychogenetic symbols where deep motivation does not occur. Psychogenetic symbols originate in the unconscious or are derived from the dream repertoire; but the origin of the symbols must be analytically separated from its ongoing operational significance. This is often the case in myths and rituals: symbols originating from unconscious sources are used to give expression to meanings that have nothing to do with their origin.

Hence it is wrong for us to assume, as psychoanalysts often do, that all psychological symbols are linked to deep motivation; psychogenetic symbols are not. I will deal with psychogenetic symbols only briefly, to contrast them with personal symbols. It is in relation to the latter that the distinction between private and public symbols makes no sense. There are obviously other areas in social life where this distinction does not hold, but I do not deal with them in this essay.

Private and Public Symbols

Let me begin with my criticism of Leach’s influential paper “Magical Hair,” where he argues with Berg, a psychoanalyst, about the symbolic significance of matted locks and the shaven heads of Hindu and Buddhist ascetics. The thrust of the debate has to do with the relationship between symbol and emotion, between public and private symbols. Leach argues, rightly, I think, that the essence of public symbolic behavior is communication; the actor and the audience share a common symbolic language or culture. The problematic question is not the logical status of public symbols as communication, but rather the nature of communication. For Leach all public symbolic communication is devoid of emotional meaning or psychological content. He clearly recognizes the importance of individual psychology; but he adopts the classic social anthropological position that individual psychology cannot have cultural significance or that publicly shared symbols cannot have individual psychological meaning. If public symbols are devoid of emotional meaning, this is not true of the radically different category of private symbols. “In contrast the characteristic quality of private symbolism is its psychological power to arouse emotion and alter the state of the individual. Emotion is aroused not by appeal to the rational faculties but by some kind of trigger action on the subconscious elements of the human personality” (Leach 1958, p. 148).

Note that Leach, unlike many British social anthropologists, does not deny the validity of psychological analysis; but he thinks it is relevant only for interpreting private symbolism, not for understanding public culture. This position introduces a radical hiatus between public and private symbols, as it does between culture and emotion. “Public ritual behavior asserts something about the social status of the actor; private ritual behavior asserts something about the psychological state of the actor” (Leach 1958, p. 166).

Nevertheless, Leach says public symbols may originate as private ones. Thus, while a private symbol may originate in the individual psyche as a result of intrapsychic conflict, it somehow or other ceases to have emotional meaning once it becomes publicly accepted culture. Leach poses the problem of transformation of private into public symbols; but he does not explain how such a transformation occurs.

In a sense, how the transformation occurred cannot be answered by Leach or by the tradition of social anthropology he represents. For, ever since Radcliff-Brown’s castigation of cultural evolutionism, social anthropologists have eschewed the study of the origins of cultural items as a worthless task, since it does not help us understand ongoing behavior. This position seems to me to be indefensible philosophically and methodologically. Philosophically viewed, many disciplines—from ideographic ones like history to nomothetic disciplines like astronomy—have been interested in origins. What would have been the fate of biology if Darwin had not been interested in the origin of species? Yet for contemporary social anthropology the search for origins is near heresy. In this sense we are more primitive than those we study, for, right through human history, imaginative men in almost every culture have sought the origins of their society and institutions and, often enough, the origins of life on earth. The difficulty of anthropological studies of origins is well known; origins land us in the despised area of pseudohistory. Unfortunately, our fear of pseudohistory has inhibited us from developing techniques for studying origins. If we could project imaginatively into Darwin’s time, we would realize that Darwin’s daring endeavor would have seemed a species of pseudohistory to our naive social-anthropological minds.

There is perhaps an even deeper philosophical issue involved here. How things come about is often associated with cause, and causal analysis is currently in disfavor. A few years ago it was fashionable to castigate functionalism; nowadays it is causal analysis that gets the stick. Many anthropologists eschew causal analysis for a variety of well-known reasons: the chicken-and-egg question (now no longer relevant, owing to cybernetics and communications theory); the problem of infinite regress; or more realistically the rootedness of causal analysis in British empiricism, especially Mill’s. When used in contemporary social science, Mill’s empiricism leads to generalizations or statistical correlations that are often theoretically meaningless, though they sometimes provide valuable information of the sort “cigarette smoking causes cancer.”³

Though I hold no brief for atheoretical empiricism, it would nevertheless be folly to rule out causal analysis from social science. Causal analysis has an important role in history and in historical sociology such as that of Max Weber. Such historical causality is indispensable for the analysis of historical change and for understanding the evolution of the present from the past. The problem of infinite regress and the choice of what cause or causes should be selected is largely an empty philosophical issue, since the relevant causes, among a theoretically infinite number, are easily decided by the nature of the research problem, the form of the research design, and the exercise of one’s intelligence.

Nevertheless I agree that causal analysis, especially the relationship between events, has severe limitations. Causal analysis can be meaningful if causes can be derived from a larger theory—that is, by the manipulation of concepts to account for the observables, rather than the manipulation of observables per se (or empirical causality, as in “cigarette smoking causes cancer”). In the former a causal relationship in nature (or culture) can be derived deductively from the theory; alternatively there is the reverse process, by which an empirical causal relationship can lead to a formulation of an abstract theoretical statement or conceptual formulation. If I say an apple fell from the tree because of the action of the wind, this is a true causal statement (empirical causality), but it is a trivial one. But if I relate the observation to an abstract statement—gravity—then we have begun to explore the phenomenon in theoretical terms. If I say that X’s depression was caused by his mother’s death, I have formulated a trivial causal explanation; whereas if I say that X’s depression is due to “oedipal fixation” or “guilt,” I am manipulating theoretical concepts to account for causal events (however imperfect these concepts may be in the above example). Empirical causality per se is theoretically valueless, unless it is deducible from the theory or can lead to theoretical thinking.

Now to come back to an even more practical issue. Inquiry into origins in sciences as disparate as biology and astronomy helps us understand the world as it exists today; it seems obvious that this would be equally true, or even truer, of culture. If we consider the whole question of private versus public symbols, then inquiry into origins, or even causal analysis, would obviously be relevant to the problem that Leach himself poses—the process by which a cultural item comes into existence; or to the transformation of a symbol from one type of symbolic form (private) into another (public).

Leach’s argument is based on a silly book by a psychoanalyst, Charles Berg, on the unconscious significance of hair (Berg 1951). Berg analyzes—to Leach, quite plausibly—the unconscious significance of hair for the individual: hair = penis. Thus cutting hair is symbolic castration. From here Berg goes on to assert that the meaning of hair-cutting in public symbols and ritual (e.g., tonsure, head-shaving by monks) has the identical unconscious meaning of castration. Even more preposterous is his assertion that when all of us shave or trim our beards we are expressing deep-rooted castration anxieties.

Leach quite rightly castigates this kind of analysis. However, his criticism is not a new one; anthropologists using psychoanalytic theory have stated this before, and some like Hallowell have done so in even more detailed and critical terms (Hallowell 1955a). Furthermore, Leach deliberately ignores the fallacy of using one work in psychoanalysis to castigate the discipline as a whole. One bad book does not damn a whole discipline; a weakness or inadequacy in a theory does not render it totally worthless. If this were the case, practically all social science would be of little value.

If some psychoanalysts treat both public and private symbols as belonging to the same qualitative order, Leach commits the identical fallacy. He sees all public symbolic and ritual behavior (and culture in general) as “rational,” devoid of psychological or intrapsychic significance. The handshake is for him the ideal-typical case. The meaning of the symbolic action here is, “We are of the same standing and can converse with one another without embarrassment” (1958, p. 157) (even though such a handshake may be at variance with the actual social reality, since enemies and unequals shake hands). We may invoke common sense (which Leach also does) to point out the obvious fallacies of this position—that public symbolic communication can evoke rage or hostility (in war, in race riots, in language conflicts); that the ethnographic literature has plenty of references to communal orgies, cathartic and expressive rituals where the emotional feel is obvious and readily apparent. Much of social anthropology assumes that all symbolic communication is of a piece, rational and abstract. It ignores the obvious fact that this is one type of communication; emotions also may be communicated. If we assume that emotional messages may be socially communicated, we may also legitimately infer that the public symbol used as a vehicle for communicating that message may become invested with an affective load.⁴

Not only can group emotions be generated and sustained in this manner, but shared cultural symbols may have personal meaning to the individual. Weber pointed this out in his discussion of theodicy, as did Evans-Pritchard in exploring the meaning of witchcraft for the Azande.⁵ The process whereby a public symbol becomes infused with personal meaning seems relevant for anthropology. Basically I am here expressing my dissatisfaction with the idea that culture is all of a piece. The anthropologist works on the assumption that cultural forms derived from Western thought—magic, ritual, myth, and so forth—are part of an integrated symbolic order we call culture, and that all of it can be analyzed in the identical manner. Furthermore, note that terms like myth and magic are labels from popular Western thought; these categories are not found in most non-Western systems. The presumption that such labels have a cross-cultural validity, helping us to isolate certain symbolic domains, is simply unsupported. Even if cultural forms could be analyzed as if they were all of a piece, it is sheer dogmatism to assert that this as if position excludes other methodological assumptions and theoretical positions.

The Problem

The immediate problem I want to investigate pertains to the matted hair of the Hindu ascetic. Leach summarizes Iyer’s argument: “The sanyasin’s freedom from social obligation and his final renunciation of the sex life is symbolized by change of dress but above all by a change of hair style. According to the mode of asceticism he intends to pursue a sanyasin either shaves off his tuft of hair or else neglects it altogether, allowing it to grow matted and lousy” (Leach 1958, p. 156; Iyer 1928, 2:383; 1935, 1:332–34). This statement is not as simple as it sounds, for the crucial phrase is according to the mode of asceticism. Some ascetic styles require a shaven head; some require the reverse: matted locks. The two kinds of symbols, as I shall show later, indicate two different modes of ascetic religiosity, on both the sociocultural and the psychological levels. For the moment, however, let us focus on the matted hair ascetic.

Berg interprets this cultural phenomenon thus: “Fakirs simply ignore altogether the very existence of their hair (cf. the ascetic tendency to ignore the existence of the genital organs). It grows into a matted, lice-inhabited mass and may almost be as much a source of unremitting torment as the neglected penis itself. Apparently it is not permitted to exist as far as consciousness is concerned.” (Berg 1951, p. 71; Leach 1958, p. 156). Leach finds this an ethnocentric (psychoanalytic) and biased view, since the hair is a public, not a private, symbol. “Dr. Berg’s assumption is that the sanyasin’s behavior is a compulsive one, welling from some hidden springs in the individual unconscious. And no doubt if a European ascetic were to start behaving in this way it would be indicative of some complicated neurotic compulsion. But in the Indian context, the sanyasin’s detachment from sexual interests and the fact that the matted hair is a symbol of this detachment are both conscious elements in the same religious doctrine. The correct hair behavior—and also the correct sexual and excretory behavior of Indian ascetics was all laid down in the Naradaparivrajaka Upanishad over 2000 years ago.” (1958, p. 156). Leach goes on to say that the “matted hair means total detachment from the sexual passions because hair behavior and sex behavior are consciously associated from the start” (1958, p. 156).

In the case of the neurotic European pseudoascetic, the hair behavior has unconscious experiential significance: for the Hindu ascetic it is not so, because he performs a traditional customary form of behavior.

Both Berg and Leach are wrong, but in different ways. Both are wrong like many others who study symbols: we infer the meaning of the symbol from the symbol itself, rarely referring to the persons in the culture who employ the symbol. The bias is of course most apparent in semiological studies, including structuralism, which can analyze signs without reference to context, much as language may be analyzed without reference to the person, society, or culture in which it is embedded. This is theoretically a feasible thing to do (though it is one that is being increasingly questioned by anthropological linguists). Nevertheless, it would be futile to talk of the psychological significance, or lack thereof, of the symbol from this methodological perspective—in this case the matted hair of the ascetic—without reference to the ascetic himself and the group in which he lives, and to the people among whom he moves.⁶ I shall show that Berg is right when he deals with the unconscious emotional significance that hair has for the ascetic, though his statement about the tormented penis requires some qualification in my study of six female ascetics. Leach’s view is that the symbols are publicly and overtly recognized; they are laid down in sacred books; therefore they cannot have unconscious significance. This seems to me an illogical inference, since there is no intrinsic contradiction between custom and emotion.

It is indeed true that in some instances the sexual significance of a symbol is explicitly and consciously recognized. Other parts of the human anatomy—right hand: left hand, head: foot—and the body as a whole are consciously and explicitly used in cultural symbolism. So with the genitals; penis and vagina are often, along with the act of intercourse itself, employed as obvious symbols of fertility or generation. But the experience of sex in human society is a complicated one; it is therefore likely that the expe...