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

30
actuals
Cooked food “comes after” raw food. Cooking is something that is
done to raw stuff to change it into food and, perhaps, to purify it. All
cooked food was once raw; all raw food is cookable. Some fruits and
vegetables are “food” raw or cooked, but most meats need to be
cooked before they are considered to be food. The process of cooking is
irreversible. There is no way for raw food to “come after” cooked food.
So it is with art and life. Art is cooked and life is raw. Making art is the
process of transforming raw experience into palatable forms. This
transformation is a mimetic, a representation. Such, at any rate, is the
heart of the mimetic theory. In non-mimetic art the boundaries
between “life” and “art” – raw and cooked – are blurry and permeable.
The hot interest in anthropology over the past generation or so has
not been all good. Artists and theorists alike have, in their yearnings,
constructed neo-Rousseauian fantasies of “primitive” peoples. As
Charles Leslie wrote:
There is . . . a fashionable modern conception of “primitive man” as
inhabiting a “mystical” world of “timeless,” “cosmological,” “metaphorical”
and “magical” presences. Costumed in the “archetypal”
masks of tribal art, and possessed of a special “primitive mentality,”
this phantasmagoria is said to perform “ritual dramas” of “mythic
reality.” This particular conception of primitive man enjoys greatest
currency in artistic and literary circles [where] primitive cultures are to
modern thought what classical antiquity was to the Renaissance.
(Leslie 1960: xi)
Although anthropologists have mostly cured themselves of such illusions,
soft-headed artists continue to look afield, hoping to find in the
Other a finer version of what their own self might be.
But it is no better to think of the Tiwi as the guys next door. Leslie
thinks the counter-current attributing an urban pragmatism to people
like the Tiwi an apologia for a kind of rationality which many anthropologists
feel is in jeopardy. What makes The Savage Mind so satisfying is
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ability to uphold the claim of what is special
in “primitive” peoples while not denying what is common to all.
Aristotle’s particular brand of logic is not universal, but, Lévi-Strauss
says, an appetite for classification is. Peoples think differently, but every