Have been studying up on zombies lately, owing to derrick jensen, and this led to a friend recommending The Serpent and the Rainbow, which has been exciting so far in its mix of anthropology and ethnobotany. Following is when the lead character is close to a group ritual in Haiti. I feel like scientists get a bit of a bad rap in this one, but i like the examination of the scientific belief system as a whole that ensues.
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I woke twice more before dawn, first to
a cobalt sky and moonbeams lapping the bushes, heavy with moisture.
In the moonlight the roots of the mapou were white, motionless, and
seemingly cold. By the next time the stars had faded and light
cracked the horizon. Venus had moved all the way across the sky, and
now it too dimmed. I followed it until my eyes ached. A gray cloud
crossed over its path, and when it was gone so was the planet. I
stared and stared until I couldn't even see the sky. But it was
hopeless. Venus was gone. It shouldn't have been. Astronomers know
the amount of light reflected by the planet, and we should be able to
see it, even in broad daylight. Some Indians can. And but a few
hundred years ago, sailors from our own civilization navigated by it,
following its path as easily by day as they did by night. It is
simply a skill that we have lost, and I have often wondered why.
Though we frequently speak of the
potential of the brain, in practice our mental capacity seems to be
limited. Every human mind has the same latent capabilities, but for
reasons that have always intrigued anthropologiests different peoples
develop it in different ways, and distinctions, in effect, amount to
unconscious cultural choices. There is a small isolated group of
seminomadic Indians in the northwest Amazon whose technology is so
rudimentary that until quite recently they used stone axes. Yet
these same people possess a knowledge of the tropical forest that
puts almost any biologist to shame. As children they learn to
recognize such complex phenomena as floral pollination and fruit
dispersal, to understand and accurately predict animal behavior, to
anticipate the fruiting cycles of hundreds of forest trees. As
adults their awareness is refined to an uncanny degree; at forty
paces, for example, their hunters can smell animal urine and
distinguish on the basis of scent alone which out of dozens of
possible species left it. Such sensitivity is not an innate
attribute of these people, any more than technological prowess is
something inevitably and uniquely ours. Both are consequences of
adaptive choices that resulted in the development of highly
specialized but different mental skills, at the obvious expense of
others. Within a culture, change also means choice. In our society,
for example, we now think nothing about driving at high speeds down
expressways, a task that involves countless rapid, unconscious
sensory responses and decisions which, to say the least, would have
intimidated our great-grandfathers. Yet in acquiring such dexterity,
we have forfeited other skills like the ability to see Venus, to
smell animals, to hear the weather change.
Perhaps our biggest choice came four
centuries ago when we began to breed scientists. This was not
something ancestors aimed for. It was a result of historical
circumstances that produced a particular way of thinking that was not
necessarily better than what had come before, only different. Every
society, including our own, is moved by a fundamental quest for
unity; a struggle to create order out of perceived disorder,
integrity in the face of diversity, consistency in the face of
anomaly. This vital urge to render coherent and intelligible models
of the universe is at the root of all religion, philosophy, and, of
course, science. What distinguishes scientific thinking from that of
traditional and, as it often turns out, nonliterate cultures is the
tendency of the latter to seek the shortest possible means to achieve
total understanding of their world. The voudoun society, for
example, spins a web of belief that is all-inclusive, that generates
an illusion of total comprehension. No matter how an outsider might
view it, for the individual member of that society the illusion
holds, not because of coercive force, but simply because for him
there is no other way. And what's more, the belief system works; it
gives meaning to the universe.
Scientific thinking is quite the
opposite. We explicitly deny such comprehensive visions, and instead
deliberately divide our world, our perceptions, and our confusion
into however many particles are necessary to achieve understanding
according to the rules of our logic. We set things apart from each
other, and then what we cannot explain we dismiss with euphemisms.
For example, we could ask why a tree fell over in a storm and killed
a pedestrian. The scientist might suggest that the trunk was rotten
and the velocity of the wind was higher than usual. But when pressed
to explain why it happened at the instant when that individual
passed, we would undoubtedly hear words such as chance, coinci9dence,
and fate; terms which, in and of themselves, are quite meaningless
but which conveniently leave the issue open. For the voudounist,
each detail in that progression of events would have a total,
immediate, and satisfactory explanation within the parameters of his
belief system.
For us to doubt the conclusions of the
vodounist is expected, but it is nevertheless presumptuous. For one,
their system works, at least for them. What's more, for most of us
the basis for accepting the models and theories of our scientists is
no more solid or objective than that of the vodounist who accepts the
metaphysical theology of the houngan (voudoun healer). Few laymen
know or even care to know the principles that guide science; we
accept the results on faith, and like the peasant we simply defer to
the accredited experts of the tradition., Yet we scientists work
under the constraints of our own illusions. We assume that somehow
we shall be able to divide the universe into enough infinitesimally
small pieces, that somehow even according to our own rules we shall
be able to comprehend these, and critically we assume that these
particles, though extracted from the whole, will render meaningful
conclusions about the totality. Perhaps most dangerously, we assume
that in doing this, in making this kind of choice, we sacrifice
nothing. But we do. I can no longer see Venus.
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