Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond

Y. Musharbash, G. Presterudstuen, Y. Musharbash, G. Presterudstuen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137472793
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137448651
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Offering a dialogue between anthropology and literature, culture, and media, this book presents fine-grained ethnographic vignettes of monsters dwelling in the contemporary world. These monsters hail from Aboriginal Australia, the Pacific, Asia, and Europe, and their presence is inextricably intertwined with the lives of those they haunt.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Monsters, Anthropology, and Monster Studies

Yasmine Musharbash

Every field-site has monsters—spooky, menacing, terrifying beings—who lurk in the shadows and the dark, under beds, in caves and lakes, beyond the line of sight, and in the imagination. Some cause mischief, others protect, a great number of them instill fear, many terrorize, and a few may even kill; all provide substance for conversation and, importantly, for action. Monsters are bloodcurdlingly potent of meaning and anthropology has engaged with them since its inception.1 Yet, and curiously, anthropology has not substantially joined in with the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of monster studies. This is a relatively young field; Cohen’s (1996) Monster Culture (Seven Theses), while by no means the first endeavor, constitutes something of a foundation to the concerted interdisciplinary effort of studying monsters. Over the last decade or so, monster studies has mushroomed as a cornucopia of recent articles, edited volumes, journals, and books about monsters attests (including two new compendia, see Mittman and Dendle 2012; Picart and Browning 2012b; and an encyclopedia, see Weinstock 2014).2

The genesis of this book is impelled by our (the contributors’) desire to open a dialogue between anthropology and the other disciplines interested in monsters: literature studies, media studies, cultural studies, history, ­gender studies, geography, architecture, philosophy, among others. I here briefly sketch, and in the remainder of this chapter, expound some of the ways in which anthropology can contribute to monster studies, and how it, in turn, can benefit from and engage with the potent and thrilling interdisciplinary debates about monsters currently taking place.

By choice of field-site and methodology, anthropologists are familiar with monsters above and beyond those we know from fiction, television, and the movies. This book is a step toward bringing analyses of locally specific monsters into conversation with research more commonly concerned with vampires, werewolves, Frankensteinian creations, and other members of the folkloristic and textual monster genealogies of the West.3 Through in-depth case studies and deep ethnography, our book introduces a number of monsters to monster studies (Mamu, Kaji, and Anito, to name a few) and others that relate to but unsettle otherwise well-established monster bloodlines through their different socio-cultural positioning (e.g. ghosts in a rural Aboriginal mission or in Fiji).

Not only are our monsters different, they are also real in different ways. From an anthropological point of view, much of monster studies can appear somewhat narrow in its prevailing ideas of monsters’ realities, being heavily focused on the gothic novel, film, and TV. The monsters that anthropologists encounter in their field-sites prowl the real world, not across the pages of books or on television and cinema screens. The question of how “real” monsters are (for our interlocutors, for ourselves) has long stimulated anthropologists, and we can draw on a rich repertoire of theoretical frameworks for conceptualizing alternate realities. This same question has only recently begun to emerge in monster studies (Luckhurst 2002; Poole 2011; Dendle 2012), and anthropological analyses of monsters in this vein can contribute significantly to a currently evolving interdisciplinary debate.

Most importantly, our monsters deeply affect the lives of those they haunt (as all contributors to this volume demonstrate). Taking seriously how the monstrous manifests locally and documenting the socio-culturally specific ways in which people relate to monsters reveals how people understand themselves, their world, and their position within it. In monster studies, such analyses tend to be diachronic, as exemplified in Stephen Asma’s (2009) On Monsters.4 He charts how in the broadly defined West, different monsters served different ages, sketching a monstrous genealogy from ancient Greek via biblical monsters, on to witches and then freaks, mutants, zombies, and cyborgs. Anthropology can contribute locally comparative understandings of monsters and thus show the global diversity of contemporary understandings of power relations, crises, inequalities, anxieties, and traumas.

In turn, the most revelatory element of monster studies to anthropology, I would suggest, is the concern with monsters and the monstrous as a broad umbrella under which to consider a plethora of gruesome beings and their workings. While monster studies gainfully bring together, say, zombies, Cthulhu, and Freddy Krueger, more often than not anthropologists focus their efforts on distinct monsters—they work either on witches, or spirits, or the devil—but make little or no reference to an overarching theorization of monsters as a phenomenon. As anthropologists are interested in, and concerned with, local manifestations, geographically confined paradigms have flourished (e.g. witch in Africanist anthropology, malicious spirit in Oceanian anthropology). As a result, pan-geographic conceptual engagement with monsters as a category has been stymied.5 Why it is worthwhile rectifying this will be my main concern in this introductory chapter.

In the following, I elaborate on these themes with a view to informing both audiences (the anthropological, and that of the interdisciplinary monster studies) of what the other has to offer, and outline how the contributors to this volume take up the matters in various ways. I proceed by first delineating the meanings of the term “monster” itself. This is followed by four sections concerned, respectively, with:

1. the indeterminacy of monster realities,

2. the particularities of the monstrous body,

3. how monsters are contingent on the humans they haunt, and

4. monsters and change.

In a vein similar to Cohen (1996, 4), these are offered as “a set of breakable postulates” in an attempt to find some common ground of monster traits relevant both to anthropology and to interdisciplinary monster studies. I conclude by summarizing what the study of monsters may do to benefit anthropology and by detailing the organization of this volume.

The Meaning of the Term

Etymologically, the term “monster” originates from the Latin monstrum. It has a twinned meaning, assimilating the two verbs monere (to warn or admonish) and demonstrare (to reveal, show, or indicate), to create a sense of an embodied omen or portent.6 Monsters were indicators of strangeness and danger, hybrid marvels revealing distance from the familiar and the safe. They populated the extremes of the known world, as described for example in Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder ([1601] 1949) during the first century AD: dragons, giants, mermaids, and any number of marvelous beings, some one-legged, with feet so large they can be used as umbrellas, men with dog-heads, beasts of unimaginable size and of fantastic form, their bodies hybrid, with the wings of a bird, say, and the scales of a reptile.

These monsters were “unnatural” not in the sense of not existing (not being part of the world), but by being too big, too different, or too strange. They were something other than that which is familiar, which is why they dwelled at the margins. This idea of monsters persisted long into the Middle Ages (see, among many others, Cohen 2000; Asma 2009). This is evidenced, among other things, in medieval mappaemundi, the emergent maps of the world (which incorporate knowledge about the world by Greek and Roman writers). Here be dragons, or HIC SVNT DRACONES, it says on La Fleur des Histoires (1460–1470), and on other maps hic abundant leones, or hic grifes. Always, the most fearsome monsters are allocated in the greatest numbers at the furthest reaches of the world. As Van Duzer (2012, 431) puts it:

implicit in most accounts of local monsters is the idea that the region near the teller is normal, and the knowledge from the experience of everyday life that monsters are known to be a small percentage of the overall population, whereas at the edges of the world, we hear of little except monsters.

Monsters lurked at the borderlands between the known and the unknown, heralded peril through their very presence, and signified ­jeopardy through their abnormal bodies. They truly were portents of danger in the original sense of the word. Since then, the world shifted and transformed many times over, and with it transmogrified its monsters, as well as their very meanings (for a comprehensive history of monsters in the West, see Asma 20...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Monsters, Anthropology, and Monster Studies
• Chapter 2: Cave Men, Luminoids, and Dragons: Monstrous Creatures Mediating Relationships between People and Country in Aboriginal Northern Australia
• Chapter 3: Monstrous Transformations: A Case Study from Central Australia
• Chapter 4: Specters of Reality: Mamu in the Eastern Western Desert of Australia
• Chapter 5: A Murder of Monsters: Terror and Morality in an Aboriginal Religion
• Chapter 6: Burnt Woman of the Mission: Gender and Horror in an Aboriginal Settlement in Northern New South Wales
• Chapter 7: Demons Within: Maleficent Manifestations in the Hare Krishna Movement
• Chapter 8: Ghosts and the Everyday Politics of Race in Fiji
• Chapter 9: Entanglements between Tao People and Anito on Lanyu Island, Taiwan
• Chapter 10: When Goblins Come to Town: The Ethnography of Urban Hauntings in Georgia
• Chapter 11: The Workings of Monsters: Of Monsters and Humans in Icelandic Society
• Chapter 12: Afterword: Strangerhood, Pragmatics, and Place in the Dialectics of Monster and Norm
• Notes on Contributors
• Index