MY BROTHER, MY CASSOWARY

Honey-hunters in New Guinea welcoming a new "man"

Humans are meant to live in cooperating groups of fewer than a hundred people and did that for so many millennia and epochs that our bodies and brains have been shaped into what works for that context.  And yet the group and the individual are both constrained by the ecology of their existence.  Early peoples who lived on grassy plains organized themselves differently than those who lived where there was forest because they were hunter/gatherers and different strategies worked if the prey were different.  Fishermen were quite different from buffalo hunters.

Lately there has been a lot of reflection about the change made possible by agriculture and domestication, which meant that people didn’t have to travel around to find food, esp. in places with seasons, and also meant that they could store grain.  But now the energy that went into moving around had to be devoted to walls for defense or a kind of military specialization for raiding other group’s bins.

In the original basic group, the people knew each other and their skills and temperaments.  Specializing was results-oriented: the best hunter was the go-to guy for bringing in some meat; the best weaver of baskets was the chief of baskets.  But staying in one place caused other kinds of sorting that created what in a flock of chickens is called “pecking order,” meaning who can dominate which others, beak to beak.  One big alpha chicken can peck all the others, while some poor little moulting poultry is on the receiving end of every other bird’s ire.  This is the origin of stigma, based mostly on appearance.  Of course, it’s a loop because the hen that got the most food was the biggest and glossiest. The upshot is that the Big Pecker makes the most new chickens and the little limpies get weeded out.  Until the terms of success change -- maybe the climate or maybe the intervention of humans.

A much more subtle version of both these forces -- skill and appearance -- also shape human communities.  Soon a village begins to sort itself out into best families and those who can be pushed around.  Parallel, the original naively spiritual folks (the ones who loved the dawn, the ones with empathy) begin to form institutions, often around promises of success embodied in sacrifice (bribes).  In the fiercer and more primitive places, the sacrifice might be human, a loser.  Or an enemy.  

Pyraethi: a version of priesthood that suggests the flaming chalice.

In the villages who are prosperous enough that not everyone has to go into the fields or arm-up for fights, a class of people might develop who seem to know more, to be charismatically and then later institutionally entitled to think their way to a priest-like status.  Maybe when writing develops, they are the keepers of the book (er, scroll) or the ones who pray on behalf of all the others.  Of course, it’s good to have an impressive building for them and natural for people to gather -- maybe to engage them with arguments, ask for their help with the gods, or share some kind of experience led by them.  This is so natural it feels like the only way to understand religion.

There are few places on the planet that have not been settled to some degree by humans, but there are edges where they can barely survive.  It is never by being independent individuals and yet it is, because if someone hadn’t been pushed out or cranky enough to want territory of his or her own, the place would never have had founders.  One of those nearly impossible places is the New Guinea Highlands where tectonic drift has pushed the land into high sharp ridges and deep narrow valleys, so separating the people that those whose village are on one ridge, barely know the people on the next ridge, and keep their morale up by aggressively hollering insults across the difficult-to-cross valleys.  The Umeda are one of the most isolated tribes, which made them attractive to an anthropologist who lived with them for a while and tried to psychoanalyze their felt concepts about the world.

Umeda world view

Everything was food, exertion, and children.  The staple food was the pulp of the sago palm which is poisonous unless it is washed and pounded for a long time: hours.  This is done with a big section of wood pounding the starch in a sort of canoe.  The Umeda do not miss that the action of mortar and pestle are like the sex act.  Nor do they discount the apparent similarity of breast milk, semen, and ready-to-eat sago mush.  They wear gourds over their penises, not out of modesty but to make sure no semen escapes.  When it dries into powder, they sprinkle it on food as a condiment.  They think that ejaculate feeds babies before they are born, so the men increase their efforts when a woman is pregnant.

The rest of the menu is yams grown in small clearances, fenced to keep out the elusive pigs (walking feasts), and whatever living protein is in small creatures like fish, lizards and insects.  Some tribes are cannibals.  But the king of the jungle is the cassowary, huge bird we now conceptualize as descendants of dinosaurs, and a very convincing bit of evidence they are.  Very hard to hunt, they live as solitary animals in the highlands, a state that is appealing to old men who have spent their lives in hard labor and combat.  A man too old to work will go into the jungle and built a little hut where he spends his time meditating and dozing.  People bring him food and might even say he was a cassowary.

"Felt meaning” ceremonies were hard to perceive at first. These ceremonies are strung out through a whole year but climax at about nine months, the period of a human pregnancy.  At the intense liturgical time of eventfulness, song and dance prevail, but the dances are separated according to age classes indicated by animal metaphor masks: very large, scary, and heavy.  For men, the periods of ceremonial dance are ordeals.   Women dance in place, defining the circle of the dance arena, and the male children stay in mobs, like flocks of birds or schools of fish, rushing in and out.

At the very end of the days of exertion, there is a solemn climax that is said to be two cassowaries, two old men who hold hands while dancing.  They are considered to be brothers.  The anthropologist, who is the only solitary human present in the village, interpreted all this in terms of the child rearing pattern for boys.  Babies are carried in a net on the mother’s back until they are toddlers.  Then girls stay around the village near their mothers, but the boys are carried on their father’s shoulders, on-lookers at the times the men sit together considering plans or walking through the jungle to look for animals or signs of sneaking enemies.

Papa and his boy

When the next boy comes, the father puts the older son down and takes up the younger one.  If there have been girls in a row, then the de-shouldered dethronement will be harder because the riding son has assumed an entitlement.  When the set-down boys see each other, they form a group and begin to imitate what they learned from fathers by mock-hunting small creatures, sometimes with success.  They get better and better at it until they begin to hunt with the men, and pretty soon are old enough to be pressed into marriage, which means swidden clearing and sago palm pounding.  The transitions between stages are psychologically painful, as they mean going from comfortable dependence to a scary and perhaps starving status.

To the anthropologist (who has been accused of projecting his own issues), the key to the cassowary dance is the reconciliation in old age between the two resentful brothers.  One of his clues was that the villages were encircled with palm trees, each -- planted at the birth of the boy -- was considered the birth tree of a specific man.  The men and their trees were so closely connected that if a man’s tree were cut down, he would be very sick and maybe die.  The two dancers in cassowary masks didn’t look at all like cassowaries; they looked like the palm trees.

There’s a lot more to the story, but this particular ceremony says nothing about God or Gods, is not linked to a specific historical event, is not verbal, and comes directly out of the lifeway forced by the ecology.  Is this religion?  Not if you think “religion” has to have a book, a bell, an altar, a priest, a building, a candle, a lot of rules.  This is the human substrate of felt meaning out of which formal religions develop.  The key is always survival, that of the tribe (the group) and that of the anthropologist’s career (the individual).  

The book I'm drawing on here is called "The Metamorphosis of the Cassowary" by Andrew Gell.

WIRELESS BRAINS

Matthew Lieberman -- want him in your group?

One of the main premises of the book called “Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect” by Matthew Lieberman is that physical pain and social pain (from rejection and attack) are the same somehow.  This comes from fMRI studies of people who play a game called “Cyberball” in which they are little surrogate figures playing three-cornered catch with a dot until the other two inexplicably stop throwing the ball to the guy in the fMRI tunnel.   It’s a conspiracy, but the left-out one doesn’t know that.  The same connectome systems lit up as the systems that show when when people physically hurt.  Indeed, people report that being rejected “hurts” in much the same way as trauma.  Of course, the point of pain is to make you stop doing things that don’t help your survival.  

But the point of science is that hypotheses are welcome but that they must be confirmed by other kinds of tests and by retesting.  Many times the original tests don’t pan out, but the pop media generally grabs them and runs with them into Fantasyland before there is any confirmation or before the raw results can be digested.  I’m afraid that this is true of “Social.”  Here’s an abstract from one of the other related studies.

Article: Physiological stress reactivity and empathy following social exclusion: A test of the defensive emotional analgesia hypothesis.

Ellyn Charlotte Bass, Sarah Josephine Stednitz, Kevin Simonson, Tori Shen, Ethan Gahtan

ABSTRACT: Experiences of social exclusion elicit social pain responses. The current study examined the ability of social exclusion to activate physiological stress responses and adaptively modulate affect and empathy consistent with "defensive emotional analgesia." Measures of affect and empathy, and saliva samples for cortisol and alpha-amylase (sAA) analysis, were collected before and after subjects participated in a computer game ("Cyberball") designed to manipulate feelings of social exclusion. Contrary to our hypotheses, social exclusion was associated with a reduction in cortisol, and social inclusion with an increase in cortisol. Both Cyberball groups showed increases in sAA and decreases in both positive and negative affect, with the greatest drop in affect occurring after social exclusion. Empathy did not differ between the social exclusion and inclusion groups and was not correlated with cortisol or sAA levels. These results support the presence of a defensive response to social exclusion in which central stress pathways controlling cortisol release are inhibited. Cortisol and sAA were shown to have distinct patterns of responses to psychological stress, with sAA responding more rapidly. Related methodological concerns for the use of these physiological stress markers and of Cyberball in social neuroscience research are discussed.

I had never heard of alpha-amylase, but it turns out to be pretty interesting.  It’s an enzyme.  (unattributed from Wiki:   Enzymes are highly selective catalysts, greatly accelerating both the rate and specificity of metabolic chemical reactions, from the digestion of food to the synthesis of DNA. Most enzymes are proteins, although some catalytic RNA molecules have been identified.”)  People in hunting cultures have fewer genes for this stuff than people who eat starches, so it is thought to be a mutation associated with the development of agriculture.  It’s not tested by analyzing blood, but rather from spit which makes a test both cheaper and less painful.

Human beings seem to need to form groups, which is logical enough since it’s an excellent survival strategy for a species that is partly herd (prey) and partly hunting party (predator).  The forces that draw the boundaries are both those of ostracism because of people who make trouble, are contagious, or don’t seem to fit (stigma), and those of inclusion which may be because of affinity or merit, a shared goal or because no one else will have them so they band together.  Now and then I check back to some group where I was once included (even my family) and find I just don’t fit anymore.  Some -- not all -- are sorry to see me go.  Some are just astounded that anyone would care to leave.  Mostly the catalytic enzyme for departure has been education, but maybe lack of education would do the same thing.

By birth I belong to Portland, OR, by location I belong to Valier, by history I belong to Browning, by education I belong to Chicago in two ways:  south side university intellectuals (a group slow to change) and north side Method-based theatre (now pretty much dispersed).  The Portland where I grew up does not exist anymore.  There are other groups that are covert, either because I would have to invoke Thumper’s law (“if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all”) and others because it would endanger them to be exposed.

The kind of groups I prefer are not inclined to huddle but more like nomads who need a point of return in order to regroup and go out again.  The groups I avoid are dangerous, either because they try to capture members through fear or reward or because they develop interior hierarchies that sacrifice the least powerful for the benefit of the most powerful.  Others are endangered because bigger and better armed groups target them and try to eliminate them.

Actually, though I probably “count” in the periphery of a hundred Venn diagrams and in the overlap of a few, I’m a satellite to most orbits because of conflicting sociology -- I move in terms of intellectual inquiry, while staying put in a high prairie village, one of the least known of all American contexts.  What difference does it make?  Mainly I can forget about publishing, my “home” denomination has already forgotten about me and anyway has changed away from my values, and though the internet has been a home and a joy, it is clearly about to be commodified to exclude me.  If I dress down, I am ignored and put down.  If I dress up, I am treated with respect.  Typical.  Predictable.

by Valentino Korokov

Since I write for myself as Ariadne’s thread of thought that I follow through the days, how I dress doesn’t really take the value out of what I do.  That day when the government tries to force me to get a “writer’s license” that dictates what and how I write (don’t be shocked -- it’s bound to come) I’ll just do it quietly at home as a guerrilla scribbler. Some are very experienced at this and can write in plain sight, because the authorities are not smart enough to recognize the markers.  Inquire about South American magic realist novels.  Look into the deeply hidden underculture of dictator-ruled countries whether Soviet or African -- the message might be music or painting.  In fact, one of the uses of prudery in America is to criminalize defiance and transgression.  But oppression is always a catalyst.

Lieberman’s book insists that brains “are built to make sense of other brains and to understand everyone’s place in the pecking order.”  Hidden in his work is the need to categorize humans as “better” than animals and some humans as “better than others.”  He is fond of sci-fi and therefore closes with a paragraph about Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi novel called “Foundation.”  I haven’t read it but it’s supposed to describe “a new branch of mathematics called “psychohistory”, in which principles of psychology are used to predict how many psychopolitical events over the next several decades will materialize and be resolved.”  He’s talking algorithms.  He’s talking statistics.  He’s assuming that pecking orders are unchanging.

He’s prioritizing groups as defined by some survey -- NOT individual choice or self-description -- and ASSUMING that everyone else is just like him.  He speaks of “unprecedented quality of of life” as measured by the stock market.  It’s not that he doesn’t want to help the impoverished and suffering, it’s that they are not part of his consciousness.  He’s a pinhead playing catch with pixels.  He’s no more useful than the Netflix experts who can’t figure out what movie I want to watch.

TWO EMBEDDED GENOME CODES

If poultry is descended from dinosaurs -- and I have no trouble at all accepting that, esp. considering the Tyrannosaurus Rex roosters still strutting around -- then there are two things that are deep, deep in our genome.  Both recently showed up in little stories on the internet.  One was an account by Ellen Chase, reposted by Nick Kristof, about some adopted chickens, one of which went blind.  Most of the chickens kindly guided and even fed the unfortunate hen, but the chicken at the bottom of the pecking order saw it as an opportunity and often attacked the blind chicken.  Sometimes the rest of the flock intervened and sometimes they didn’t.  Bullying is not just for bulls.  And it is not the strong alpha creatures who are bullies -- rather losers trying to improve their status.

The other was a video clip that shows a turkey hatching, sprawling on the table top totally disorganized, hearing the biologist cheeping at it (which he had been doing all along while the chick was still in the egg), recognizing the voice, pulling itself together, staggering over to lean on the man’s cheek, and going to sleep.   http://video.pbs.org/video/2165688049/   The poult was imprinted and from then on would yearn for and rush to him, just as it would have to its turkey mother.  Babies need moms, but they needn’t be biological or even female or even the same species.

These two behaviors are so deep that they are described as “instincts,”  hard-wired into the brain, which means controlled by the genome by producing protein molecules.  The genes, so old, are still there, no doubt pre-mammal code that promoted survival. (Maiasaurus, the “good-mother” dino laid her eggs in nests near Valier.)  These two coded behaviors were deep enough and protective enough that the mammals preserved them in their own cells.  (No animal was coded for surviving asteroid hits -- that was just situational, literally once in a lifetime or even many lifetimes.)

We are in a time when we are just now looking at the excessive amount of “bullying” behavior in humans and wondering whether that’s really a survival tactic after all.  It certainly is for the immediate success of the individual, but what does it do for the whole community?  Is it a force for consolidation or does it undermine every possibility of human progress by sowing fear, distrust and forced compliance -- which is always an energy and resource burner.

Konrad Lorenz and his imprinted geese

Clearly the imprinting phenomenon is useful and charming.  Mostly.  My mother taught us as small children to hang onto her skirt because there were three of us and she only had two hands, even if she wasn’t carrying something.  On the other hand, when we were needy we followed her around bleating like bummer lambs, which got in her way and drove her nuts.  For an individual trying to get things done, having been imprinted upon is not always pleasant.  When one imprints on a therapist, that worthy will keep it under control with appointments and a closed door.  It might be called a form of transference.

Feral dogs and boys will attach to each other -- dogs with dogs and boys with boys or even dogs with boys -- sometimes in communities (packs, gangs).  But if the pecking order within that community is unstable, then bullying will thin the group.  What is the proper balance between attaching to each other and dominating each other?  What is the best trade-off between the individual and the group?  Can we replace bullying with nurturing in some constructive way?

The news this morning is that scientists have learned how to insert DNA code into the genome -- not at random by infecting with a virus, but deliberately in a specific place as though with tweezers.  So now all we need is to build the right gene (we’ve made simple ones) and put it in the right place (a little trickier).  That neglects issues like the epigenome and methylation, but at least we know the latter exist.  They might be easier ways to affect behavior than inserting or deleting genes.  The genome operates like a symphony orchestra, so one flat note or timing lag can throw the whole composition into trouble.  Genes are interactive and there is no sheet music to hand out.

In the meantime, what are the changes to our health care, our government, our classrooms, our marriages/families that would support nurturing instead of bullying?  In some families, children not capable of forcing their way will be destroyed, if only by exclusion.  This past week a young teen boy, wearing only trunks, was thrown out of the house in sub-zero weather because he was aggravating his parents.  People talk of “survival of the fittest” and define fitness as dominance.  But were these adults "fit" to be parents?

Some mammal mothers, if frightened or disturbed, will eat their babies.  (Mink are notorious for doing this, which is why mink ranchers get nervous around noise and disorder.)  Is this the interaction of the protein molecule that controls T.Rex behavior with the protein molecule that controls Maiasaurus behavior?  (“I love you to death!”)  Is cannibalism a form of over-nurturing? (“I wanted to make him part of me.”)  If humans have both genes, is modern “civilization” somehow making them interact dissonantly?  

So many manufactured molecules are out there in the ground water, and no one knows how to remove them.  Some are coming from meds in the pee of humans who will die without them -- should we be filtering and recycling urine?  Filtering them from the water supply would be formidably expensive, but nowhere near the cost of inserting manmade genes into human cells.  (The cost of getting a readout is now advertised at a little less than a hundred dollars, without specifying the quality, extent or usefulness of the document.)

Above is a still from a horror movie called “Splice” that addresses the mixing of genes from different species by scientific means, one -- naturally -- being human.  Here's the link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pIeSYhipUs  In discussing the film, the director, Vincenzo Natale, astutely says that horror films are one way of thinking about the scientific edges of human life and suggests that this specific film has an undertow of incest.  How can one address genes without sex?  And who can love us more than we can love ourselves -- if we ever get around to it.  Once a person is in forbidden territory it all turns up at once, even our longing for our missing prehensile tails.  (Wings are a different issue --  see Nicholas Cage in “Michael.”  Tails belong to “Alien.”  Then there’s feathers vs. leathers.)

Luckily, we can explore the culturome and the memes of individuals much more easily and quickly, though perhaps not more safely considering how some people survive.  I mean, it upsets them to be investigated, much less interfered with.  Still, it is a counseling truism that if one changes oneself, everything around one will also change.  To understand such atrocities as battering and trafficking, it’s necessary to look at both sides PLUS the larger context.  Is the survival value of being beaten up worth the survival value of belonging to someone powerful?  Is the survival value of beating up one’s partner somehow a kind of self-nurturing, sucking power out of women and children like a Skeksi extracting life from the Pod People peasants?  Some people seem to think so.  I think we need to risk interfering or else lose all our best evolved culturomes.  We are neither dinosaurs nor poultry, but we’re not proving it.

Skeksi from "The Dark Crystal"