Abstract
This chapter deals with the impact, mentally and affectively, of the experience of transformation of a human into an animal. It considers that impact from two perspectives, one virtual and vicarious, through myth via the imagination, and the other real and direct, through the body. The former focuses on mythological protagonists whose reactions and emotions to an ontological transformation they are undergoing—such as a young woman and mother of an infant she nurses into a caracal or of a young man, playing a tune on his musical bow, transforming into a tree—are mediated by a storyteller. The latter considers a shaman’s lion transformation, either directly, through the body and senses, by the shaman, or, more accessible ethnographically, through first- or second-hand witnesses’ accounts. The latter includes an account by the author (expanded on in one of the appendices) of a leonine transformation he observed when conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the 1970s.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Lewis-Williams (2000: 271).
- 2.
In this respect the accounts by these Ju/’hoan informants of their transformative experiences seem more emotionally charged and more graphically and literally metamorphic than what is generally reported by other ethnographers working among San people. This may be a reflection of the research orientation of the two ethnographers, which might have influenced their informants’ accounts in subtle ways, as well as their transcription and translation by the ethnographers. As noted in Vol. I, a similar influence might have been at play—albeit in a different ideological register, moral rectitude as opposed to psychic states—when Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd collected stories from their /Xam informants, who might have “cleaned up their act” and removed the earthy elements from the stories they told (Guenther 1996; Wittenberg 2012). What is reported so fulsomely by the Kenneys is not unique; however, as seen from ethnographic snippets and vignettes by other writers (including the author; see Appendix 1), transformation is an intense experience for those undergoing it, as well as those witnessing it.
- 3.
See Vol. I, Chap. 5.
- 4.
There is a vast body of literature around this foundational question in anthropology that started with the Victorians and continued on from there: the modernist English (Evans-Pritchard) and French (Lévy -Bruhl, Lévi-Strauss) “alternate styles of rationality” debate, through its mid-modernist American variant around the emic-etic distinction and ethnoscience specifically the “God’s Truth-or-Hocus-Pocus” debate among some of its practitioners (Burling 1964, with commentaries by Hymes and Frake, in same issue, pp. 116–22) and its excesses such the Castaneda-triggered debate of the 1960s and 1970s around the actuality of shamanic flight and animal transformation. On it went, from the pre-postmodernist, postcolonialist exchange between Sahlins and Obeyesekere on “how Natives Think”, Hawaiian-style, about Captain Cook, to the postmodernist, phenomenologist and posthumanist New Animists and their ultra-relativist offshoots, with considerations of such questions as to whether trees actually think (Kohn 2013) or human centenarians grow tails as they metamorphose into animals in their dotage (Forth 2018; Lyons 2018). Much of what anthropologists have thought in these writings about “how Natives think” is relevant to my discussion of San thoughts and feelings about the experience of animal transformation and is worth a re-read. For insightful discussions of these issues especially germane to my take on them see Duerr (1985, especially pp. 126–200, 1987) and Young and Goulet (1998).
- 5.
And in Vol. I, Chap. 5.
- 6.
The South African film maker Craig Foster describes much the same experience, and backs it with quasi-Jungian depth-psychology, which he felt while shooting persistence hunting sequences among the !Kõ for his (and his brother Damon’s) film The Great Dance (2000):
we experienced strange things – this whole identification of the hunter to the prey is something that one is never really exposed to. What we experienced and actually saw in action was a hunter leaving his body and merging with the body of the animal he was hunting for very short periods of time. I personally experienced changing into an animal in trance, both witnessing and feeling that process. This is a common thing for any human being to experience while in trance. It seems like our bond with animals is deeply rooted in our psyches and we need them just as much as we need wild open spaces. We don’t just need them because they are pleasant – we need them for our survival. (Deacon and Foster 2005: 36)
- 7.
This evolutionist notion was recently resurrected by the Canadian cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald (2001: 262–69).
- 8.
Canetti distinguishes between different forms of transformation—“partial, or pseudo”, “failed”, “faked”, “false” and “clean”. The last is additive and reversible and does not dissolve the subject’s personality and original, single identity (See Brill 2006: 17).
- 9.
Here again, we see the complementarity of “same as” and “other than”, manifested through two opposite, natural environment-situated modes of experiencing being-human and being-animal, which Winthrop-Young, paraphrasing von Uexküll, dubs “web” and “bubble” (Winthrop-Young 2010: 214–17).
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Guenther, M. (2020). Experiencing Transformation. In: Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume II. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21186-8_4
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