What is the role of violence in the culture?
Is violence at the margin of civilisation, like an animal residue? Or the gesture of aggression or transgression, is it the secret cog that bases every culture? By bringing together the lectures and discussions of four anthropologists, Bloody origins illuminate the dark area of human progress. We find there is no single theory on the role of violence.
No dogma that monopolises each empirical evidence in its interpretative digestion, no truth in the third person.
We see here the researchers first-person transcribing the manufacturing process of the same ideas.
The process manifests its hazards, preferences, and enmities, finally its postulates, as rational than visceral. In other words, it is a manual dialogic anthropology. Either a theme: violence and the sacred.
A body of ethnographic data, mostly myths. Before our eyes unfolds the “power to do and undo the truths”. This concept is more significant to Paul Valéry than truth itself. Similarly, the subject of research.
Every anthropologist will offer differing theoretical perspectives. They do this by articulating and weighting the myths in several ways. Indeed, from this data proliferation, every anthropologist will offer differing theoretical perspectives. They will articulate and weight the myths in several ways.
Thus, the Amazonian myth Milomaki, namely the story of the boy who sang wonderfully and was killed because those who ate fish, made the soul.
For René Girard, is a sacrificial victim of history, referring to its persecutor theory behind all the myths.
Walter Burkert the other interpreter, gives critical weight to this passage. After the death of Milomaki, a kind of palm tree came out of the ashes. People have made huge flutes from the wood of this palm. These flutes have produced the same marks as those that had wonderful Milomaki sung.
Even today, men continue to blow into these flutes during the fruit harvest celebrations.
Burkert stresses the link between death and celebration. He chooses a perspective that trivializes the problem of the sacrificial victim. This perspective is essential for understanding the ritual dimension.
Jonathan Smith offers his variation on the theme of this myth. Concerned with the appearance of the flute, he made this story an answer to the important question for a culture:
How can something that did not exist come into existence?
Or: How appeared the flute? We need to understand how this object began to sing. We must do this by referring to a known original musical. The singing of man helps articulate the unknown to the known.
If the function of myth is to make the living world, it provides intelligibility and meaning. It brings order to what is not ordered in the cosmos of the mind. We are making the habitable world. We do this by multiplying attempts to think. This is what we are doing to these anthropologists offering their theories of myth.
Since Levi Strauss, we know that the dominant trait of the myth is its multiplicity:
Each story knows several versions and variations on these versions. Confront more idea.
On the role of violence in human culture is to fight against the unifying impulse of the mind.
Against this inevitable trend, that takes hold of myths. It imposes the same unequivocal truth. This book, by its very form, goes far from imposing the only theory of Girard. It takes us back to the multiple of the value.
In our opinion, the opposite effect is complete. Clausewitz, the Prussian theorist, is problematic. Armed conflict seems destined to contribute to the war effort of Girard’s theory.
René Girard is unfalsifiable and assumes totaling dimension of his theory.
This text is presented as an anthropological text of the present. According to the introduction of René Girard, it is actual. It is “a more or less explicit apology for Christianity” as “in all his books.”
Regrettably this mix, which tends to give the Christian faith the symbolic authority of a scientific discipline.
Presented as an open discussion and removed, the book is very accessible.
For the same reason, he does not provide strong arguments. This prevents the ideas presented from carrying the reader’s conviction. Of course, this does not apply if the reader is already convinced.
Walter Burkert, Renato Rosaldo, Z Jonathan Smith. ES 331S Flamman one.
By Baptiste Morizot
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The Role of Violence in Human Culture: An Analysis