Sacre impronte e oggetti - Università degli Studi di Torino

28
Michael Singleton
dha, Quo Vadis and Buzz Aldrin (but not as yet to the carbon footprints
our various life styles stamp more or less disastrously on the environment).
It could be that the marks in the rock near Tabora had already
given rise to thought amongst the early hunter gatherers of the
area. But of this we possess… no trace! In living memory, though not
made by human hand, the eroded forms in question, had taken on
meaning for the local inhabitants, the Wanyamwezi. Slash and burn
agriculturalist, their ancestors had been around for at least a thousand
years. I was informed that the footprints 23 had been left by a barefooted,
elderly chief, long long ago, if not exactly at the dawn of time. Consequently,
the prints are not simply human, nor do they speak of a young
person and even less of a female peasant. They answer to the peculiar
sociohistoric choices of a particular culture at a given moment in space
and time when patriarchal authority was the best social bet possible.
A phenomenon such as footprints in rocks, though materially identical,
is thus susceptible of quite different meanings. In our culture, they
speak of the mysterious and often miraculous possibility enjoyed by
saintly personages or fabulous creatures to leave their mark in one go on
the hardest of realities – the prophet Mahomet on the temple rock in
Jerusalem, Bayard, the horse carrying the four sons of Aymon, fleeing
from Charlemagne, and whose hoof cleft the cliff near Dinant on the
Meuse in Belgium (the former still visited by pious pilgrims, the latter by
sceptical tourists). Whatever might have been the attitudes of their forebears,
perhaps more assiduously “religious” than their descendants, few
of the Wanyamwezi living in the vicinity showed much interest in the
prints and no one apparently (still?) paid them any ritual attention.
Does this mean they had sunk to the transcultural level of pure folklore?
Yes and No! “Yes” in the sense that these ancestral traces were no longer
(if they had ever been) central to the Nymawezi philosophy and practice
of the world. “No” because the notion of folklore can only be applied
equivocally to the understanding of cultures which ignore the axiological
asymmetry between the popular (religious) persuasions of the vulgus
plebs and the claims of hierarchical authorities to represent orthodoxy
or the convictions of aristocratic elites to incarnate enlightened opinion.
23 Petrosomaglyphs, to use the somewhat barbaric technical term, can “result
from” or represent other bodily members and even objects such as the butt end of
spears or the legs of stools.