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

Hindsight discredits Hoffman as a predictor of political trends in the
USA. But he is an accurate reporter of the phatic sense of things circa
Woodstock 1969. And the “concept of the ‘we’ ” he describes may
not be limited to humans. In chapter 5 I discussed the chimpanzee
“carnivals” V. and F. Reynolds observed in the Bundongo Forest of
Uganda. These
“carnivals” consisted of prolonged noise for periods of hours . . .
stamping and fast-running feet . . . howling outbursts and prolonged
rolls of drums (as many as 13 rapid beats) shaking the ground. . . .
Although it was not possible to know the reason for this unusual
behavior, twice it seemed to be associated with the meeting at a common
food source of bands that may have been relatively unfamiliar to
each other.
(Reynolds and Reynolds 1965: 409)
The meeting of bands at a time when there is an abundance of fruit fits
nicely with Woodstock and other human celebrations: theater so often
occurs when divergent groups assemble to share food.
LYING AND PRETENDING
ethology and theater 257
A great difference between human and non-human performers is the
ability of humans to lie and pretend. There is plenty of deception in
the animal world: mimicry, camouflage, and the like. But most, if not
all, of these body modifications and behaviors are hard-wired, genetically
determined. A chameleon can’t choose not to change colors
anymore than a parrot can decide not to mimic certain sounds. What
marks human behavior is its lability, its unfinishedness. People can
choose to do, or not do; to adorn or transform their bodies, or not
to; to wear masks, or to go bare-faced. Hamlet’s very basic “to be or
not to be” is a question only humans can ask – and answer in the
negative if a person so decides. But lability does not equal liberty.
Often enough people get drawn deeply into schemes of their own
construction. There probably isn’t any over-riding human destiny;
each person, mostly unconsciously, constructs a destiny for her/
himself. Take Quesalid, a Kwakiutl whose story Claude Lévi-Strauss