Darwin’s theory of natural evolution opposed the theological view of creation and even today there are groups of religious fundamentalists who refuse to teach the doctrine. But ideas on evolution did not begin with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species which was first published in 1859. In ancient Greece both Anaximander and Empedocles had had some thoughts on the subject in the 5th century bce and J. B. Lamarck had proposed a comprehensive theory of natural development including the adaptation and transmission of acquired characteristics, in his Zoological Philosophy of 1809. Lamarck, for example, supposed that the efforts of giraffes to reach the leaves of trees caused their necks to gradually lengthen until they reached their present size. The French biologist, Georges Buffon (1707–88) considered “transformism” possible and even Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had included a chapter on transmutation in his Zoonomia of 1794–96.
Darwin, however, proposed a mechanism for evolution. He believed it happened by means of chance variations (mutations) which, if they were adaptive, survived to give new species. He was influenced by the parson Thomas R. Malthus’ 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population which he read in 1838. Malthus drew attention to the fact that the population increases faster than the food supply, creating a stimulus for adaptation and self-improvement if one is to survive. The theory of individualism which such a notion implies is in many ways repellent (it influenced 19th-century notions of poverty being the fault of the poor and was indirectly responsible for non-interference in the Irish potato famine in which millions starved). Nonetheless, it helped Darwin formulate his thesis that animals had to compete to survive; the inadequate would be killed off and those better suited to their environment would persist and breed. Savage competition would lead to the survival of the fittest.
Unlike his predecessors, Darwin provided a body of evidence to support his theory. His first evidence came while he travelled the world on a voyage that began in 1831 as a naturalist on the survey ship, the HMS Beagle. The Beagle sailed down and up the coasts of South America, through the Galapagos Islands and across the Pacific to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Mauritius, Ascension Island and South Africa. He noticed the variety of species and their adaptations, collected fossils of recently extinct animals and compared them with living specimens. He returned in 1836 and began a series of investigations to see whether a natural mechanism of transmutation was possible and in 1838 he first conceived the idea of natural selection. Curiously, Alfred Russel Wallace was working on a very similar theory to Darwin’s and in 1858 offered it to the Linnaean Society where it was published along with extracts of Darwin’s model.
The Origin of Species aroused enormous controversy. In arguing that God was unnecessary (and that humans were descended from an extinct species of ape), Darwin antagonised many theologians and scientists, although the more enlightened among them could accept his views. Charles Kingsley humorously remarked:
We know of old that God was so wise that he could make all things; but, behold, he is so much wiser than even that, that he can make all things make themselves (Tolstoy, p. 204).
But the opposition was vocal. A clergyman in the British museum pointed Darwin out as “the most dangerous man in England” (Bowler, p. 3). Bishop Samuel Wilberforce came up with anti-evolutionary arguments at the British Association meeting in Oxford in 1860. In sardonic mood, Wilberforce asked Thomas Henry Huxley, who was defending Darwin, whether
was practised to “purify” the “Aryan race”. The mentally ill, criminals and those considered “racially impure” were sterilised or killed while selected “perfect” couples were brought together for procreation. This chilling experience has been a salutory lesson and has made eugenics a taboo topic.
In 1865 Gregor Mendel published reports of his experiments on heredity in peas and it was Mendel’s experiments which became the foundation for modern genetics. The existence of genes – information carriers that exist within the nucleus of each cell – provides a key to understanding the mechanics of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. At the beginning of the 21st century a new controversy has arisen over the morality of genetic engineering – though it may help eliminate hereditary conditions and benefit agriculture, the cloning of humans (just as Dolly the Sheep resulted from cloning in Scotland) bestows upon mankind superhuman powers. If Darwin’s Origin of Species argued that God was unnecessary for evolution, the ability to modify genes has given man a God-like role.
References
Bowler, Peter J. 1990. Charles Darwin: The Man and His Influence. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Numbers, Ronald L. 1998. Darwin Comes to America. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: Harvard University Press.
Rose, Michael R. 1998. Darwin Spectre. Evolutionary Biology and the Modern World. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Tolstoy, Ivan. 1990. The Knowledge and the Power: Reflections on the History of Science. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Tobacco
There are seventy-four species of the genus Nicotiana or tobacco; some, such as Nicotiana rustica and the less potent N. tabacum were cultivated hybrids (the latter is the progenitor of the modern, commercial varieties) while others, including N. attenuata, N. bigelovii and N. trigonophylla, initially grew wild. Tobacco is viewed now as a pernicious, addictive substance, incontrovertibly linked to such medical conditions as lung cancer and respiratory diseases. Smoking in public places is increasingly prohibited, advertisements for cigarettes banned in many Western countries and the act itself considered anti-social. Yet in other cultures tobacco has the seal of the sacred, and is believed to have been bestowed upon mankind by benevolent gods. It has played a central role in North and South American shamanism and in purification ceremonies and supernatural healing. The tobacco may be smoked in pipes, rolled into cigarettes or cigars, chewed, eaten, drunk as tobacco juice, sucked or sniffed. This ritual use of tobacco goes back a long way; in Mexico the earliest clay tobacco pipes date to Olmec times (ca. 1200–900 bce) but conical stone pipes have been excavated in California that are probably over a thousand years older.
The ethnologist Johannes Wilbert has spent considerable time conducting field research among the Warao tribe of the Orinoco Delta in eastern Venezuela, for whom tobacco is a vehicle of shamanic ecstasy. Warao shamans smoke it in enormous “cigars", fifty to seventy-five centimetres long, to induce a trance in which they visit the Supreme Spirits (Kanobos) who inhabit the mountains at the end of the world and who need nourishment in the form of tobacco smoke. If provided with the gift of tobacco which they crave, the Kanobos will ensure health and abundance on earth. If denied it, they will spitefully send invisible pains and death to humans. Although now most of the Warao population smoke tobacco, in the past they were wary, fearing a dangerous encounter with tobacco-craving spirits. Even today the long “cigars”, rolled leaves of black tobacco mixed with a fragrant resin, remain the preserve of the shamans, taboo to all others.
into balls and burnt as incense. When it was smoked, it was mixed with other herbs and intoxicants.
Certainly tobacco had an apotropaic function in pre-Columbian America. It averted witchcraft and the malevolence of the dead. The Totonac of Papantla de Olarte offered it to the guardians of the forest and Mazatec healers would make a paste of powder and lime to protect pregnant woman from witchcraft. The Tlaxcalan presented it to their war god, Camaxtli, and the cacique (chiefs or pinces) of Michoacán declared war by sending bowls of tobacco, along with eagle feathers and blood-stained arrows, to their enemies. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1569–82) described a further use of tobacco: when hunting snakes, the Mexicans would aim powdered tobacco at the reptiles to render them powerless.
Even when, as is commonly the case, a society combines the use of tobacco with other intoxicants, it retains its sacred character. The Huichol Indians of Mexico are known for the sanctity which they attach to the hallucinogenic cactus known as peyote. But during the pilgrimage to collect the peyote, the potent native tobacco, Nicotiana rustica, is indispensable. The tobacco is carried in gourds; it is sacred, said to impart visions, and is only used ceremonially when all the men smoke in unison. It belongs to Our Grandfather, the Fire Shaman, who led the first peyote hunt and cured the participants of their afflictions with its help. Native American groups in California combine tobacco with Datura inoxia, a plant with powerful psychotropic and narcotic properties. In lowland South America, shaman initiates take infusions of liquid tobacco as a prelude to inbibing Banisteriopsis Caapi, an hallucinogenic plant, also known as yajé; in eastern Bolivia Tacana shamans employ Banisteriopsis to induce trances and rely on tobacco to keep the demons at bay; and in northern Peru tobacco is combined with the San Pedro (Trichocereus pachanoi) cactus, which contains hallucinogens, in folk healing.
It is clear that traditional societies have not treated tobacco as a profane substance. However, like anything that is believed to be powerful and sacred, it is not without its dangers and its use is carefully circumscribed. Among Europeans, who were introduced to the substance through the travels of Christopher Columbus, tobacco has served no religious ends and European influence has resulted in the increasing secularisation of tobacco among Native Americans. Nevertheless, when tobacco reached Siberia, probably towards the end of the 16th century, it was quickly adopted by Siberian shamans who recognised its potential as a pathway to the stars.
See also
Cannabis Sativa L.
References
Arents, George. 1937–1952 Tobacco. 5 vols. ed. Jerome E. Brooks. New York: Rosenbach Co.
Furst, Peter T. 1987. “Tobacco”. In The Encyclopedia of Religion. Vol 14. ed. Mircea Eliade. New York: Macmillan.
Hultkrantz, Åke. [1967] 1980. The Religions of the American Indians. trans. Monica Setterwall. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Paper, Jordan. 1987. “Cosmological Implications of Pan-Indian Sacred Pipe Ritual”. In Amerindian Cosmology. ed. Don McCaskill. The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. VII, no. 2, p. 297–306.
Robicsek, Francis. 1978. The Smoking Gods: Tobacco in Maya Art, History and Religion. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.
Wilbert, Johannes. 1972. “Tobacco and Shamanistic Ecstasy Among the Warao Indians of Venezuela”. In Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens. ed. Peter T. Furst, p. 55–83. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Wilbert, Johannes. 1987. Tobacco and Shamanism in South America. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
Tortoises
lang diaw (tortoise with a single stripe on its shell) is tabooed in Phraan Muan village in northeastern Thailand. Those tortoises with more stripes are readily eaten but the taw phii, associated with the spirit of the swamp and symbolising water, is forbidden by the intermediary (cham) of its guardian spirit. It may be the sacred nature of the turtle that saves it from being eaten or it may be its association with sex, for the shell of the tortoise (daung) is identified with the female sex organ. In Bangkok the word for tortoise, “taw”, also means “vagina” but this is not the case in Phraan Muan (where the shell is more significant).
The shell is also used in corrective rituals, for example when second cousins marry. Marriages between second cousins are discouraged within the village (being seen as too close), especially if there is a great disparity in age between the betrothed. To avert the terrible consequences that could ensue from such a union, a rite is performed in which the couple are made to eat rice from a tortoise shell. The underlying idea is that dogs commit incest and ignore age differences, therefore by also eating like dogs the couple will mislead the punitive moral agents into thinking that they are not humans but animals. S. J. Tambiah explains how this works on a linguistic level. The term for marriage ceremony is kin daung with kin meaning “to eat” and daung referring to the tortoise shell and, both literally and metaphorically, to the vagina:
The words and metaphor which are normally associated with acceptable marriage, are now used instrumentally in an unacceptable marriage. The ritual implies that the couple are eating from (born of) the same tortoise shell (the same vagina), and in thus themselves eating together (having sexual intercourse) they are behaving like incestuous dogs (Tambiah, p. 428).
See also
Food Taboos
References
Tambiah, S. J. 1969. “Animals are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit”. Ethnology, no. 8, p. 423–459.
Trade
Embargoes on trade are a common feature of contemporary life, established for economic, political or moral purposes – because a particular country is out of favour or for reasons of narrow protectionism. They are not new and neither are they limited to western, industrialised societies. At the end of the 18th century, a Hawaiian chief named Kamehameha placed a taboo on the selling of pigs to foreigners. The animals were only to be exchanged for guns and ammunition. Kamehameha and subsequent chiefs also used taboos to monopolise their trade with Europeans, denying commerce to their own commoners:
Trade goods received from foreigners might be seized immediately by the chiefs’ enforcers, or a taboo placed on commerce so as to reserve the trade for the chiefs. The chiefs’ taboos could be quite selective and were employed both to deter the commoners and to pressure the shippers (Linnekin, p. 161).
In 1786 a trader by the name of Dixon described how he had had his ships tabooed by the chief, Kehekili, who had built a storehouse:
for such articles as the natives might obtain in the course of their traffic with our vessels: when this was completed, he caused the bay to be tabooed … [and directed the inhabitants] to bring whatever trade they had got, that it might be deposited in his new-erected edifice. This being effected, he found means … to appropriate one-half of these stores to his own use (Linnekin, p. 162).
and in Hawai’i, like elsewhere, the term “free trade” came to be something of a misnomer as not everyone had the freedom and power to trade.
References
Linnekin, Jocelyn. [1990] 1993. Sacred Queens and Women of Consequence: Rank, Gender and Colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Transvestism
Transvestism, or cross-dressing, is condemned in Deuteronomy which emphatically states that “A woman must not wear men’s clothes nor a man put on women’s dress” (22:5). The prohibition still exists among Orthodox Jews and certain Christian sects like the Amish. During the 13th century, at the time of the Crusades, the Church began a campaign against cross-dressing as a reaction to what it considered an Islamic practice of using feminised boys for sexual gratification (Bolin, p. 22–51). In 1620 King James I ordered the clergy to condemn the donning of male clothes by women; this was common practice during female protests against enclosures and food restrictions (Ramet, p. 1– 21). In past centuries, women have also donned the garb of men as a disguise so that they could participate in activities that were forbidden to them: they became soldiers, surgeons and pirates. The Dutch social historians, Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, found that female transvestism was particularly prevalent in Europe from the late 16th century to the 19th century. One 17th-century Spanish woman, Catalina de Erauso, joined the Spanish army and, after her discovery, was granted a license by Philip IV of Spain to wear male clothes. Less fortunate was the Dutch woman, Catherine Rosenbrock, who, after spending twelve years as a sailor and soldier, was imprisoned by her own mother. In recent times, cross-dressing has been seen as a sign of sexual deviancy and treated with ridicule or used for entertainment: performers in British pantomime cross- dress and make sexual innuendoes, and role reversal is a common feature of carnivals. The Hungarians, Romanians and German Schwabs celebrate a women’s carnival (asszonyfarsang) which frequently involves the wearing of male attire, the singing of bawdy songs and the performance of male dances (Kürti, p. 148–163), and in Javanese drama a male transvestite commonly adopts the social role of a female in the plays. Transvestism can also play a vital role in rituals.
Ritual transvestism
Ritual transvestism, performed on specific occasions as a group activity, has been a favourite study of anthropologists who have searched for its underlying causes. Max Gluckman sees the primary function of the transvestism and assertive behaviour of Zulu women of the Bantu tribe, during the Nomkubulwana festival, as a means of catharsis. During the “little ceremony”, the women wear men’s clothes and herd and milk the cattle which are normally taboo to them. Any passing male is derided and mistreated. Gluckman thinks the festival offers an opportunity for open rebellion for the women, suppressed as they normally are by a rigid patriarchal society. The festival acts as a “safety valve” to release pent-up frustrations but the dissent is circumscribed and does not disturb the status quo (Gluckman, p. 112–123).
Inconsistencies in Gluckman’s theory are criticised by Edward Norbeck; for instance, during the Wiko circumcision rites both females and males cross-dress but Gluckman does not think that male transvestism constitutes rebellion. Male transvestism occurs in initiation ceremonies in many parts of Africa. Among the Turkana, boys from “conservative families” wear their hair like women. During the period of recovery from circumcision, the Masai youths dress like women and Nandi boys at initiation to manhood wear some article of
Lang, Sabina. 1996. “There is More than Just Women and Men: Gender Variance in North American Indian Cultures”. In Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. ed. Sabrina Petra Ramet, p. 183–196. London; New York: Routledge.
Leach, Edmund. 1965. “Two Essays Concerning the Symbolic Representation of Time”. In Reader in Comparative Religion. ed. William A. Lessa. New York: Harper and Row.
Nanda, Serena. 1994. “Hijras: An Alternative Sex and Gender Role in India”. In Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. ed. Gilbert Herdt. New York: Zone Books.
Norbeck, Edward. 1967. “African Rituals of Conflict”. In Gods and Rituals. ed. John Middleton. Austin, Texas; London: University of Texas Press.
Peacock, James, L. 1978. “Symbolic Reversal and Social History: Transvestites and Clowns of Java”. In The Reversible World. ed. Barbara Babcock. Ithaca, New York; London: Cornell University Press.
Ramet, Sabrina Petra ed. 1996. Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. London; New York: Routledge.
Ramet, Sabrina Petra. 1996. “Gender Reversals and Gender Culture: An Introduction”. In Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, p. 1–21. London; New York: Routledge.
Rigby, Peter. 1968. “Some Gogo Rituals of Purification: An Essay on Social and Moral Categories”. In Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology. ed. E. R. Leach, p. 164–171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, Victor W. 1977. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
Twins
Taboos on twins have arisen because, among humans, twin births are an anomaly. Anything that deviates from the norm is traditionally accorded a special status, as either auspicious or dangerous. Twins of different sexes have been considered especially hazardous because, sharing the same womb, they are thought to have an almost incestuous relationship. Another reason for the anxiety of twins is related to the fear of the “double”; it was believed that one of the twins may have incarnated the spirit of a dead person