Dreaming the Future Closer

The structuralists make a very good point about human societies: they tend toward increasing differentiation.   They develop and fix categories that orders the world in which they find themselves.  Moreover, once established, such categories become generative: they are extended to deal with new (in an absolute or relative sense of the term) and in doing so tend to become even more intensely differentiated.

The understanding they provide also forms the basis for action, and especially within the cultural world.  Those actions form habits, not just for individuals but for groups, and so the categories become the basis for introducing new things into the environment.  The habits ‘justify’ themselves (sometimes in a very strong sense of ‘justify’).

All this is mostly well and good.  What it means, though, is that given time, individuals will tend toward over-schematization rather than under-schematization.  They will seek to tidy up the categories as much as possible, eliminating unnecessary overlap.

Right now, there are two big modes of differentiation that I have in mind.  There are probably others, I’m not being entirely systematic.  They are differentiation by specification and differentiation by hierarchy.

By specification, I simply mean that you can differentiate two things by adding enough specifics to them that they no longer seem to be identical.  Thus, one might differentiate a pair of identical twins by way of their spatial coordinates, their names, differing life stories, etc.

By hierarchy, I mean that you assign a trait as belonging more properly to one thing, other things having access to that trait in some derivative fashion.  Platonic forms, of course, are a classic example of this since they possess a quality ‘more properly’ than any object that derives it from them.  But there are more mundane examples to be found.

Social hierarchy emerges, in part, out of this process.  How do you distinguish between two people who have equal social claim to some action or object?  You make one of those two people the ‘owner’ or ‘boss’ of that thing such that the other person must now ask permission of the first to use an object.

Let’s get specific and religious.  Imagine a number of related cultural groups who have become increasingly more integrated (whether by choice or curcumstance).  Conceptually, they are going to share a lot of distinctions, and probably even share a focus on a fairly similar set of spirits.   They might, for example, all of them might worship a river spirit.  They don’t think of it as the river in general, but rather the spirit of their respective rivers.

So long as the cultural integration is fairly loose, the spirits, too, will remain relatively unintegrated.  They will likely be grouped together as having a family resemblance, maybe even laying the groundwork for rituals and prayers to pass between groups.

Each of these cults probably have their origin in the noumenal experiences of their respective founder(s).  They emerge from an intimate personal encounter with a being that is not easily categorized.  The ‘founding’ of the cult occurs as the founder begins the process of categorization, establishing a loose schema for interacting with the spirit.

Now, as the cult becomes a proper cult, the schematization is likely to intensify because the individuals who make up the cult will find it easier to think about the divinity in schematic terms than by some more direct, nouminous encounter.  Divination, paraphrenalia, prayers, all begin to take shape.

But what happens when the different cults are forced together in an environment where there are limited resources for memory?  More likely than not, the cults streamline their schemas even more, beginning to create what look like fairly orderly pantheons.

If the spirit remains the center of the cult’s activity, you will likely see behavior that is not easily mapped onto the schema.  You’ll expect people to come to gods or very specific reasons tied to the pantheon’s schema (and you’ll see some of that), but you’ll also see people coming to them for seemingly unrelated concerns.  Those concerns could be rooted in past associations that the pantheonizatio obscures, or just be the result of a more personal way of interacting with a spirit.

Let’s get really specific.  Look to West Africa and take three riverine goddesses—Yemaya, Oya, and Oshun.  They all have connections to the water, to maternity, to rivers.  Add the slave trade, which transplants their worship across the Atlantic.  In this new situation, the practitioners don’t have the resources to sustain the full cults of each riverine goddess.  The seeming overlap becomes a problem that needs to be resolved in some way or another.

What happens? Yemaya assumes a hierarchical superiority over the others in relationship to waters and maternity (Yemaya’s importance to West African creation myths makes this reasonable).  She becomes owner of the waters, not just of rivers.  Because of this emphasis on being the source, Yemaya acquires a close association with the ocean rather than with rivers directly.

Oshun acquires power over the rivers,the sweet waters.  Again, given her borader associations in the lore, this is a reasonable decision.  Oya, neither proper owner of the ocean or rivers, loses a lot of her riverine associations in the New World.  Instead, her association with the ancestor cults gives her primacy over the cemetary.*  Though, interestingly, a new pataki shows up in which we find Yemaya ‘tricking’ Oya into the cemetary so that she can have the ocean.  This seems like a memory of the historical elsions necessary to sustain the religion in the New World.

Yemaya and Oshun are differentiated from each other through hierarchy and specification, while Oya is distinguished from both by dispossession (sort of a limit point of hierarch-ization) and specification.

Is this a loss?  Yes, the concept of each spirit is whiddled down to a more ‘human-scale’ understanding.  The contradictions that a spirit can sustain are lost as the individuals try to hone in on particular elements of each.

It’s also a gain, though, because it becomes easier for individuals to form a relationship with the divinities.  The whiddled down concepts are like doors and windows, clear entrypoints into a mystery much more immense.  The mystery of the divinities remain, regardless of the human conception.

*Lucas’s account of Oya could complicate this acocunt significantly if he is right in distinguishing two different Oya’s in Yorubaland.  One the riverine wife of Shango, the other the mistress of the ancestor cults.