ON CONTAINERS: A Response to Daniel Lord Small

The building that was created for Meadville/Lombard UU seminary was sold and not just repurposed but also totally renovated to house the Neubauer Collegium, which supports scholars and other thinkers in their work.  One of the recent thinking guests was  Daniel Lord Smail whose current work is "On Containers."

  

http://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/events/uc/on_containers/

This abstract but “felt” concept is developing at the intersection of “deep time,” which is the effort to understand very very early humans combined with what we are now learning about how the brain forms concepts, metaphors, cultures out of human lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6-zVNiItxs   Here is a video of the talk Prof. Smail gave last month in the Meadville/Neubauer building.

The following is a blog post, but also a first response to this powerful but elusive field of study.  Professor Smail’s main formal study is in Mediterranean cultures and history.  But I’m adapting his ideas to what I know about Blackfeet.

___________

The first container was the human hand.

This hand made it possible to create containers from whatever materials were in the environment.

Containers represent wealth because they make it possible to isolate, order, carry and store useful materials such a foodstuffs or fuel.

Containers make “wet cooking” possible by holding the food where it can be boiled even if the container is flammable, so long as it hold water.  Closely watching containers beginning to cook gives us concepts: “will this idea hold water?”  This is called “lattices” of thought -- a structuring that allows progress of ideas.

Cooking causes people to gather to eat, maybe in a shelter, and the bringing and sharing of food reinforces communities and families so that they become containers of relationship and a meaningful unit which can be linked in interaction with others.

Hunter-gatherer uses of containers must be light, convenient for carrying, like sacks made of hides, maybe small enough to attach to belts.   Even a shelter, like a tipi or other kind of tent, will be a “soft container.”  Hard-sided boxes don’t appear until people stay in one place, maybe because of agriculture or possibly because of fishing.  In the Pacific Northwest the people make houses out of easily split cedar boards, so there were boxes there, and the people lived on local fish.  They created canoes that were containers. 

In the Mandan villages, the people make houses out of reinforced earth mounds.  On the prairie along the Rockies, the Blackfeet cut lodgepole pine to make a skeleton on which to arrange a cover of skin.  In marshy land the people may bundle reeds into units of building.

The Blackfeet moved constantly and seasonally according to the sources of food.  When the Camas roots were ready to gather, they camped there to process them: burying them in a hole, building a fire on top and keeping it hot long enough to bake the roots.  People still do that by putting potatoes under a campfire to bake.  Though so far no animals have been observed making containers, some recognize natural containers and will, for instance, put a nut into a stone hole that will allow the shell to be cracked open without rolling when pounded.

baking camas roots

Much more elaborately, Blackfeet used “found” containers, opportunistic formations.  When using the technique called a “piskun” or buffalo jump, the people created a pop-up factory. Part of repeating the use of a certain place was not just the cliff that the animals could be driven over, but a cliff that had on the high side enough of a grassy valley (natural container) for a group of buffalo to linger there, grazing.  On the low side there needed to be another meadow where pits could be dug to throw in bones to cook the fat out of the marrow.  The meat was sliced thin, dried in sun and over smoky fires, sewn into sacks of skin, and stashed in caves high enough in the cliffs to keep the sacks dry.  

All of these strategies depend upon close observation and experience.  This makes human beings containers of knowledge for the others.  In that sense, animals who live in groups store knowledge of place and action.  Often it is a female, like a cow elk, maybe because they are not so likely to be killed young, so she remembers the migrations of the seasons, where the water sources are, and the good places to calve.

A responding use of hands is with tools.  A Plains Indian woman carried a digging stick because so much of the food was roots and rhizomes.  It is an humble object and usually overlooked by young male anthropologists.  This was the valuable object considered sacred because of its meaning at the Sun Ceremonies.  Tools -- in our relentless gender-role binaries -- are for men who must keep hands free for the instruments of hunting and war -- bows and arrows, or atl-atls and their use of containers corresponded:  quivers or small belt sacks -- but because everything was made of local materials, it was simpler to go where the supplies were than to remove them to carry along.  When metal knives, awls, needles arrived through trade, they were small and valuable, so the people of both genders made custom containers and sheaths for them.  For materials like hides, the container was likely to be a parfleche -- a rawhide folded envelope that lent itself to decoration, one of the few square objects in a camp.

parfleche

In places with reeds or straight withy branches, like willows, baskets and woven shapes became containers.  In places with the hard obsidian glassy stones, the people learned flint-knapping, chipping the material into sharp points for knives and arrows and then those could be carried in a sack.  Other special materials that needed containers were paints: red iron ochre, yellow from certain fungi, special charcoals,  or aromatic smudges from dried sweet grass, balsam fir (sweet pine), sage.  No doubt there were medicinal leaves and roots.  The little fossil stones, iniskim,  that look like tiny buffalo were carried along and the advice was to make a little cushion of bison fur to protect them in their bundle.

So, if containers are women’s objects (womb) and tools are men’s objects (like penises) then the two must be brought together in order to create a culture of daily interface with the work of hunting, cooking, and gathering.  Then there are children who can mature.

In the course of this talk called “containers,” Smail presented lists of belongings made for purposes of taxation or inheritance.  On the short lists of poor households, some things were designated as “sad,” which in that area (Tuscany) means something like “tristesse” which means used, worn, shabby, or what in translations from Blackfeet are called “scabby.”  One whole tribal group was called “Scabby Robes” because their tanning was spotty for some reason.  They were a group who did a lot of trading, which meant they were vulnerable to disease from contact.

horsehair bridle

A category of objects that are “restrainers” rather than containers but can do the same work of linking, sorting, keeping at hand, carrying along, is that of the rope.  I once watched a man separate out vegetable fiber by taking tall green weeds between his two hands and vigorously rolling them until the soft green stuff was pulverized and fell away, leaving the tough supporting fibers that could then be twisted together.  Once horses were around, their tail hairs were excellent for fine braiding into beautifully patterned bridles.  Vegetable and sheep fibers are the basis for clothing and linens.  In the Pacific Northwest there was a kind of woolly dog that was kept for its coat, which could be a kind of knitting wool.  That area still produces characteristic sweaters.  

All of these land-based objects, so intimately felt by hands and so constantly in use -- storage is a kind of use -- are a relationship with place that is lost by the kind of urbanization that is made of concrete and plastic.  “Don’t touch,” is a childhood barrier to understanding the world.  

Around “basic” people -- maybe called “paleolithic” -- there is a lot of time in the day to sit doing daily occupations, making and preparing materials, and talking all the while: telling stories, explaining where to find materials, remembering events and who did what, gossiping and criticizing.  In the “anthropocene” the urge is to hurry, to focus on one partial work (one cooks, one sews, one manages money, one makes furniture) and to trust that others are doing their part of the work well.  Relationships are often not intimate, long-term, or in any context but their one duty.

I came to this body of thought (contained) through reflection on designed spiritual experience as in religious ceremonies.  I’ll continue in another post.  It was the subject of my doomed Master’s Thesis at M/L which stalled out in part because this kind of thinking was not done except by Eliade.  But also in part because this new dawn of neurological research had not made a “way in.”  The building itself has become the container that links and preserves my work.

WHO CAN CONTAIN BOYS?

A child should be embraced in loving arms as the first container of life outside the womb.  This is a given of survival.  Even before birth the child is experiencing and creating the contents of his own brain/body which are interwoven through the process of being alive, centered in the bony chalice of the brain, flickering chemical/electrical neurons weaving patterns that are the floor of the rest of identity.  By the time the baby gets to language, the patterns are entrenched and unconscious.

What the circumstances of birth and the ensuing years will establish to the rest of society is what category to put you in.  The first decision will be “like me” versus “other”.  Then “others to be feared,” and “others who should fear you.”  What all that means in terms of attitudes and behaviors is the source material for novels and psychotherapy.  Some distinctions are so subtle they are hard to understand for those outside the system: can you tell a Hutu from a Tutsi?  Even they had to resort to documentation.

The attitude of separation ends in differences in survival and encourages the polarizing of continuums into binaries.  Lately we’ve been challenging the binaries of gender identity, not least because such dichotomies underlie prejudices that damage the whole culture and destroy lives, even entitling murder directly by violence or indirectlys by withholding the basic needs for life, not excluding meds, but including food, shelter from weather, basic cleanliness, safe sleep.

I’m talking about the category of “boys.”  

Big and little, blonde or black, thin or thick, cheerful or morose, “nice” or “wicked.”

There is another set of binaries that controls how we react to these differences. Among a myriad of reactions is the idea that we will kill the bad ones.  Or we will “save” them by taking them home and making them be like us.  We will use them for our own purposes, whether chimney-sweeping or as sexual objects.  We will consider them toys, playing with them so they are made fools or maybe in "good" play so that they pass small hurdles that improve their skills.  We can teach them to belong to us or to belong to themselves.  But they are not belongings.

We are slow to realize that it’s possible to be a mix of boy/girl -- anatomically. hormonally, psychologically.  A “boy” can feel he is really a “girl” or a “boy” can actually have the nuclear DNA code for “girl”.  More than that, there are many dimensions to being one gender rather than another:  physically, boybrain-shaped (yes, there are differences), and testosterone-powered boys might nevertheless be disinterested in what the culture thinks a male should be, which is to say:  physical to the point of violence; competitive; scientific; dominating; tolerant of grease, dirt and pain; indifferent to aesthetics and nurturing; constantly “up” for sex.  All these are arbitrary markers for the cultural container we call “men” or “boys.”  Conan the Barbarian fits, but the man who invented the character of Conan does not.

A certain kind of man -- obviously an aggressive, powerful, competent person -- might have a son who is thoughtful, even poetic, slight, better at reading than manual labor -- and might interpret that son as “girlie.”  Using the only tools he has, he might try to shape the boy as a blacksmith shapes metal:  hot rage, steady pounding.  Since boys are not horseshoes, the result might be a smashed container for a life.

Now that we’re beginning to accept the container we call gay, we still have a lot of sorting to do in terms of other sub-aspects.  Consider the possibilities.

A boy who is physiologically an outlier on the spectrum of possibilities: an “elf” or an “orc.”

A boy who simply doesn’t match the culture that contains him.

A boy who reaches adolescence and -- when his hormones turn on -- finds his desire is atypical or low-powered or uncomfortably high-powered. 

A boy who realizes that his sexual desire is focused on his own sex instead of the opposite, but not other gays -- only straight guys.

A boy who is abused so much that he is confused about whom to love, how to love, how desire is different from love, which is different from the expectations of the culture.

A boy who desires sex with one gender but prefers forming bonds/attachments of intimacy with the opposite gender.  There are other ways of dividing up the dimensions of gender distinctions among different cultural “containers.”  Aggressively physical in dance instead of sports; delicately creating porcelain objects instead of welded steel public art.

Some aspects of this will be considered transgressive by the culture, at least one culture, and may be punished.  For instance, drug-taking or sexwork.  The punishment may be overt, like confinement by this incarceration-crazed society, the ultimate idea being that containing is what imposes order.  Or it can be exclusion from all containers, even locking the dumpsters that are a source of food for street people.  Like other feral and wild mammals, these boys are forced to find or make burrows, nests, out of the debris of a culture so rich that it cannot help excreting, dumping, trashing -- people as well as objects.  People forced to BE objects in solitary confinement that empties their bone chalice skull, snuffs out the fire that burns there.

Then there are the diseases, but none of diseases is specific to males.  NONE.  (Maybe sperm diseases.)  Microbes don't care about human sex.  They are opportunists of skin, blood, bone and flesh.  TB, Hep C, Herpes, and, of course, HIV.  

Containers can be protective or destructive.  Most are unconscious and managed by metaphor, but if those metaphors are examined -- often through art -- they can be brought up to the surface for moral reflection.  Which assumptions are necessary?  Which walls need to be taken down?  Why do we think a wall will keep people from migrating or smuggling in the first place?  Why do we think that a walled community will guard us against trouble when we are most endangered by those inside with us?  Like our families.

What Lakoff and Johnson try to get us to “see” is that in order to change these categories that punish boys for who they are, we must EXPERIENCE who they are.  More than that, we need to see what they see.  Luckily -- as organizations like Real-Stories Gallery, Smash Street Boys, and Show Me Your Life -- have discovered, there is a container that can do this: digital screens.  Forsaking words as too many levels removed from raw sensoria, the boys themselves are able to take you into their worlds -- both internal and of the streets.

Boys who desire males and identify with that.  (Gay, one style or another)

Boys who do sex work because their bodies are all they have. 

Boys who have been so abused and confused that they are drifting, letting anything happen.

Boys with infected and deprived bodies.

Boys stigmatized, marked as victims and constantly in mortal danger.

Boys who have lost the boundaries of behavior that signal to the larger culture that they are    safe to others.

Boys who challenge and try to smash every attempt to contain them because all of them have meant confinement, torture, invasion.

Why should we embrace them?  Because we are the ones who made them that way and because we know what we need to do.  We just don’t want to.  Asking the reason for the refusal is the most dangerous question of all.  The answer has to be action, resources.  From ALL of us.