4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

ethology and theater 251
the call comes, and what shamans do with the skills they acquire. The
one unifying factor is that the shaman after receiving the call in a flash,
a crisis, a sudden sickness, later learns through difficult detailed training
a specific technique which is a performance.
Earlier I mentioned “phatic theater,” a kind of performance where
the evocation and expression of a group mood is the most important
thing. La Barre defines “phatic communication in man as in apes” as
“the establishment of similar subjective states in a group of animals –
which is why the shaman’s message need not be notably rational
cognitively, and very often is not” (1972: 343). La Barre sees verbal
language developing from phatic cries, especially as humans improved
their hunting skills:
The greater complexity of hunting as compared with fruit eating, and
the swiftly changing contingencies of the hunt, also evidently favored a
change from closed, species-wide “phatic” ape cries – closed in the
sense that each monolithic one of these cries can serve to display in
the individual ape, and diffuse to the group, only one endocrine phatic
state each: fear, anger, amorousness, and the like – into the more
elaborated communications of merely group-wide articulate speech.
Hominid hunters need language. But not only in the hunt. The adaptive
necessity of intense group life among aggressive hunters also
demands better communication and management of both aggressive
and erotic drives in early man.
(La Barre 1972: 77) 6
La Barre underestimates the complexity of social life among the great
apes. The same cries and gestures, in different circumstances, can mean
different things. The multivocality of ape communication is close to
human phatic expressions. Shouting, laughing, sobbing, plaintive
whining, jumping up and down, foot-stamping, raising the fist, etc.,
are all communications emitted from that confused area between culturally
specific expressions and universal human signaling. The cry of a
frightened child, the moaning of grief, the scream of pain, the gasp of
terror, and other phatic expressions – as well as the body configurations,
gestures, and facial displays accompanying these – probably
constitute universal signals; yet each culture, each family, each person