shamanism, phosphenes,& early art

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Shamanism, Phosphenes, and Early Art: An Alternative Synthesis Author(s): Derek Hodgson Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 41, No. 5 (December 2000), pp. 866-873 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/317415 . Accessed: 29/11/2013 20:23 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 200.26.133.57 on Fri, 29 Nov 2013 20:23:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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  • Shamanism, Phosphenes, and Early Art: An Alternative SynthesisAuthor(s): DerekHodgsonSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 41, No. 5 (December 2000), pp. 866-873Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/317415 .Accessed: 29/11/2013 20:23

    Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

    .

    JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

    .

    The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaboratingwith JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology.

    http://www.jstor.org

    This content downloaded from 200.26.133.57 on Fri, 29 Nov 2013 20:23:42 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

  • 843

    Reports

    Fig. 1. Edith Turner, 1997.

    An Interview with Edith Turner1

    matthew engelkeDepartment of Anthropology, 101 Brooks Hall,University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va. 22903,U.S.A. 9 ii 00

    Introduction: The following interview is taken from amuch longer life history conducted over the course ofseveral months in 1997 as a project sponsored in part bythe Historical Archives Program of the Wenner-GrenFoundation for Anthropological Research. The originalmotivation for that project was to explore the life andwriting of Edith Turner, her marriage to Victor Turner,and how the dynamics of gender and marriage affect theproduction of anthropological work. This interview hasbeen framed to touch briefly on the issues raised in thelonger work. In a few instances it has been necessary towrite transitional paragraphs in order to give this inter-view a more coherent form, but an effort has been madeto keep the tone, ideas, and progression of the originalconversations intact.

    ME: When did you and Victor Turner meet?

    ET: In 1942, at Carfax in Oxford, which is the main cross-roads, right in the middle of Oxford. Thats where Vicand I arranged to meet, an arrangement made by mybrother Charlie.

    ME: Was it a blind date?

    ET: It was through Charlie, but it didnt have the feelingof a blind date. Charlie had been at university in Oxford,and then he was drafted into the army, into the sameunit as Vic. In this unit there was lots of lifted literarytalk and talk about politics. The unit consisted entirelyof men who were conscientious objectors to the war.Nevertheless, they were drafted and doing noncombatantwork of various kinds. My brother Charlie said, Youought to meet Vic, meaning something like My God,hes interesting. Hes the most interesting guy in thisgroup, and you should meet him.

    ME: So it was out of an interest in conversation andliterature.

    ET: Yes, thats right. It was so fascinating. But I dontthink we even thought of ourselves as being literary, you

    1. q 2000 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearch. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2000/4105-0006$1.00.

    know? I was busy doing Land Army work, and Charlieand the other conscientious objectors were all readingas fast as they could. I was doing the same sort of readingat the gardens where I worked. I would read at lunchhour and get in trouble with my workmate for not talk-ing to her. It was just a spontaneous thing. We werentbeing literary or anthropological, or trying to find lovers,or anything like that.

    ME: What were you reading?

    ET: I had been reading Bernard Shaw and Henri Bergson.Vic had been reading Kierkegaard, and he was also read-ing the symbolist poets of France: Baudelaire, Rimbaud,Verlaine, and Marlarme. I was reading stuff I used to get

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  • 844 F current anthropology

    out of the library. There was a whole series of Penguinbooks out, the New Writing group of writers. We werereading those like mad, in addition to the new poets.There was a conscious effort to keep poetry and the artsgoing in the war. In fact, a little later a group from Vicsarmy unit was formed to publish our writing. It wascalled Oasis because we were an oasis in the desert.We regarded the war scene as a sort of great patrioticdesert.

    Rimbaud called what he was doing the reasoned de-regulation of all the senses. We didnt go that far, butwhat Rimbaud saw was the immense beauty of the worldif you werent hedged in by conventions. This is moreor less what it was like for us. My mother-in-law latercalled me a bohemian.

    Vic and I married in 1943, six months after we met.For me, finding him was like the discovery of poetry. Soit hadnt been a blind date but I fell in love anyway. Andlater he said that after two weeks he knew I was the one.After the war Vic went back to University College, Lon-don, to resume his studies where he had left off on beingcalled up. But during the war we had discovered anthro-pology through the books of Margaret Mead and A. R.Radcliffe-Brown, so after the war Vic changed his coursefrom literature to anthropology, which was under DarrylForde at the time. We moved down to Hastings, southof London, to where Vics mother, Violet, was living. Heused to take the train into London for his seminars.

    Vic used to read out all of his assignments to me whileI was doing chores around the house, and so I was gettinga course under quite an interesting person who was abudding professor himself. Though now I feel Id havegiven anything to have gone in and written papers my-self, I could not because I had three young kids on myhands. But at home it was one long seminar all the time,day and night. We were thinking of anthropology all thetime.

    And then, Vic came back from London University oneday and said, Ive met Max Gluckman, and he wantsme to put in for the Rhodes-Livingstone grant. He wantsme to get my Ph.D. at Manchester. Vic was very en-thusiastic about this offer. Max was a bit of a Marxistand was interested in the Hegelian dialectic, which wasa new thing in anthropology. Any kind of idea whichcould encompass change was new at the time, becauseBritish structuralism was the fashion. Max was an in-novator, and Vic could see this. With all the politicalwork wed been doing, we thought it was a great chanceto do research into the very heart of human society inAfrica. It looked just right.

    A lot of good things did indeed happen in Africa, anda lot of them happened because Vic was the kind of per-son he was and just ate up hard work. Vic worked for ayear as a research assistant in Manchester, attendingseminars, and I also audited seminars occasionally. Lateron in Manchester, Max would show his delight that hedgot Vic around.

    ME: When you were preparing to go to Africa, how wereyou feeling about your role in the whole trip?

    ET: Vics getting a grant and going to Africa and mygetting travel money to go, too, simply confirmed thatwe would go on doing this collaboration. I knew I coulddo fieldwork among the women, taking for granted Iwould do so. I was extremely hopeful. It was a matterof not even wondering if I would fit in. I dont rememberthere ever being any question or doubts or fears or any-thing like that. It was a matter of Now we have a chanceto do our proper work. We knew how important field-work was in anthropology, and, well, I had this marvel-ous husband, so I wasnt nervous.

    ME: What did you expect as a family and as anthropol-ogists in this first trip to the field?

    ET: I think we had the old fieldworkers guide, Notesand Queries [Royal Anthropological Institute 1957].Yeah, we had that. Max [Gluckman] didnt run fieldworkpreparation classes. In fact, I still dont think they doenough of that in anthropology.

    Vic plunged into his research with vigor, at a tremen-dous rate, and grew familiar with the little enclave ofvillages around the rest house where we stayed for thefirst three months. I made friends with a woman calledFatima, who took me to rituals. I saw the girls ripeningceremony, Nkanga. We saw the girl coming out danc-ing. I was writing rapidly. I had a clipboard, and Vic hada clipboard. We were at it as hard as we could, with notape recorders. We just simply wrote down rapidly ev-erything that happened. And I was taking a lot of pho-tographs, being the main photographer. At night wewould write up the fieldnotes. Sometimes I typed outVics fieldnotes for him. Sometimes we just collated nu-merical material of various kinds.

    ME: In The Spirit and the Drum [1987], you write aboutyour research assistant, cook, and friend Musona/Ka-sonda a lot. He also appears in some of Vics early work,especially Schism and Continuity [1957]. Did he alwaystravel with you?

    ET: Yes, he did. He regarded it as his labor migration.We never really went that far from Mukanza [his homevillage], and we kept on going back there because it wasa center of ritual activity. Musona brought his threewives and children with him wherever we were.

    ME: Did you talk to the women more than the men?

    ET: Yes, on the whole, although there wasnt a lot of sexsegregation. I often used to go to the gardens, and wedtalk there. I used to ask the women what it was like tobe in a polygamous marriage. The first wives would say,Its great, its a good life. And the second and thirdwives said, No, its not a good life. More or less wedont get much of a look-in. And the young third wives,who were usually kankanga [having just gone throughthe puberty ritual], would be married off to wealthy oldermen whether they liked it or not. In one case there was

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  • Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 845

    a man about 50 or 60 years old whose young wife ranaway. I thought that she ran away because she found himdisgusting, but she ran away, you see, because hecouldnt get it up! And I liked to hear that, because thesegirls were really glowing with sexuality. They were su-perb young women. That was where I caught on to themarvelous sexuality of African life. The Ndembu lovedsex. The most pleasant and cheerful conversations wereabout sex, and their only fears were of witches who werehot in their sex livestoo fast and sudden. The womenliked it chovu, which means gently and quietly. Theyliked sex to come up gently. Boy, they loved it.

    ME: How did having children in the field influence thedynamics between you and the Ndembu?

    ET: What do you think, for heavens sake?

    ME: Well, I would think it would make things a loteasier.

    ET: Yes, of course! Obviously! Freddie, Bobbie, and Reneall got along with the Ndembu children. Freddie andBobbie would run off in the afternoon with theirgangshunting for little animals or just playing around.We would spend each morning on lessons from a cor-respondence course that I sent away for in Salisbury, butthese lessons always seemed to get sidetracked. For Vicand me, having our children made us more human inthe eyes of the adults.

    ME: So what was the Rhodes-Livingstone plan of study?

    ET: One year in the field and one year back for findingout what you dont know, then one year in the field againto fill in what you dont know, and then one year forwrite-up.

    ME: Im curious to know what you were reading at thetime and what types of issues from the first field tripstuck out for you and Vic as needing more explorationduring the second.

    ET: Well, we were reading a lot of Meyer Fortes. Thiswas the big thing then. Vic was also reading MarcelGriaule around that time. We were interested in whatthe French were doing, but Vic was very critical becausethey didnt have a sense of social interactions and socialcontexts that the British always had. And he was then,as always, very proud of what the British were doing. Hethought French anthropology was superficial because itwas not alive in human interaction, and that is what Vicwas talking about. His version of political anthropologywas local-level politics and the actual political rivalries,like those he was to write up later in Schism and Con-tinuity. We were also both reading Henri Junod, and Iwas very fond of his work.

    We were encouraged by conversations with Max in theManchester interim. There were several rituals going onwhen we got back [to Mwinilunga], and Vic was then

    fully able to put them in the proper setting of kinshipand political rivalries. As I said, Meyer Fortess work wasvery useful to us because we realized that those concernsoverlap each other and influence each other, just asMeyer had shown among the Tallensi. But we felt thiswas even more so among the Ndembu, because the con-cerns werent only kinship and clanship; they consistedof local political rivalries and illnesses and curative cultsand the new influences from the British government andthe march of colonial developmentall kinds of forceswere playing there, doing their work, creating a present,the now.

    So we went into the field again, and this time we ar-ranged to stay in Mukanza [Kajima] village for the wholeperiod because it was at the crossroads of many differentinfluences.

    This was when our trips out to the Mukanda ritual,the boys initiation involving circumcision, started. Itbecame clear that these rituals were performed by peoplewho had complex motivations and rivalries and conflicts[see Mukanda: Rites of Circumcision in The Forest ofSymbols (V. Turner 1967)]. Certain people had morepower because they were earning money building a newroad, and others were the old-fashioned type. In the endit was one of the old-fashioned type, Nyaluhana, whodid the circumcising. He just took it over and pushed byeveryone else as they laid the boys out; he was therewith his knife and did the cutting. They had to hold downthe boys because they were only six or seven years old,some of them, and they just wouldnt stay still. So themen played drums loudly to drown out the crying.

    Rituals quickly became the focal point of all that wedid. I remember that at the beginning of a twin ceremonyonce, my friend Nylakusa came out of her hut yellingcheerfully, Lets go! I can see her now. Ritual is fun,and her shout captured something. I dont know whatsthe matter with us anthropologists. For instance, as Vicanalyzed the twin ceremony in his writing, it was schol-arly and showed the detail of the symbolism. I myselfwould like to have described the ritual in a different way;to have shown something of the swing of the whole thingas a kind of a great event. Im interested in capturingwhat that woman felt when she said, Lets go! Youknow? And thats what I feel is missing in anthropology.Many people have felt it incumbent upon them to writewith deadly seriousness. It must be said that Vic wasneeding to write a foolproof Ph.D., because he had a wifeand three children to support. The blame falls squarelyon the coldness of academic demand.

    Spending a whole year and a quarter in Mukanza vil-lage was just the right thing to do. It was tempting tous to go from place to place as we had done in the firsttour, but the richness of the material was there in Mu-kanzathe intimate knowledge of personalities, people,the friendships. These were of the essence in this kindof fieldwork. Other disciplines regard much of anthro-pology as a string of anecdotes and dont think highly ofit, because they value statistics and think such resultsare the truth, produced according to the real scientificmethod. But when youre staying in a village like Mu-

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  • 846 F current anthropology

    kanza for a length of time, getting to know an intimatelittle place, even though its only a tiny spot on the mapof Africa, somehow or other you get in-depth documen-tation and understanding. Human sympathy with whatson the ground is what the anthropologist is talkingabout. The stuff of life is difficult to bring into relationwith a comprehension of the whole human scene, but Ithink we have to do it.

    When Vic went back to Manchester University withthese cases, with the Kamahasanyi Ihamba case, and soon, Max Gluckman said, Dont do the ritual first. Dothe social structure and make that your dissertation.Vic was, for better or for worse, linked irrevocably withManchester for his Ph.D., so he wrote Schism and Con-tinuity, which is in great part the statistical picture of amatrilineal people, including plentiful case material anda discussion of the implications of marriage locality. Maxhad thus set Vic an exercise in describing a social systemas a preliminary to his writing on ritual.

    So we built up these statistics. But there was an oc-casion in a pub in North Manchester, which Ive dis-cussed in the introduction to On the Edge of the Bush[V. Turner 1985], about the social drama. Vic was in thepub with Bill Epstein wondering what it was about an-ecdotes, episodes, and trouble cases that was so impor-tant. There was process going on here, and not justsocial process but a special form of ritual process.We had been thinking about what happened in the sec-ond field trip, when Sandombu/Samutamba had terriblerows in the village when he was drunk, blaming his wifefor not having any children and his mother-in-law forbeing a witch. Sandombu would roar out the frightfulwords Wanza weyi!(Dirt under your foreskin!). He wasfurious, and this was a real curse. That scene and thequarrels that followed and the trouble that came up inepisode after episode, as documented in Schism and Con-tinuity, meant that the very roots, the vital existence ofthe village was trembling and tottering all the time. Thiswas in front of our eyes during the second session in thefield. Vic couldnt look at these events as just anecdotesor mere trouble cases. He strung them together later inSchism and Continuity, but while still in the field hewas taking notes, massive notes, paying attention be-cause of this hunch which he hadnt yet articulatednotuntil the pub in Manchester with Bill Epstein. The hunchin Manchester was the concept of the social drama andits definable form: breach, crisis, redress, and reconcili-ation. After the pub conversation, Vic wrote it all downand turned it in to Max as the major chapter in his dis-sertation. And Max liked it.

    There are other stories important to that early work.Once during the second field period we were walkingover an old village site, a bit north of Mukanza village,just taking a walk. The old village site had ghosts becausepeople had died in those huts. You would hear voices,and they were talking about you, and they would tellyou not to eat the bananas. As Vic and I were walkingover this place we were talking, and we came on to thesubject of Sigmund Freud, whose work had become veryimportant to us in the field. Vic had got hold of The

    Interpretation of Dreams [Freud 1955] in the field, andit all came out in 3-D for him. During that walk I, too,saw the curious imagery in dreams as echoing every-where in Ndembu consciousness. We were both excited.Decades later I experienced dreams, as Native Americansdo, as truly prophetic. This time, however, the ghostsdecided Freud should rule! The Interpretation of Dreamspowered Vics work on symbolic analysis and was a realbreakthrough in the field itself. So this all came out atthat time and we discussed it night and day, and it wasmarvelous for us. I loved it.

    When we returned from the field, we had to get tobusiness and write, get this dissertation through. Wereckoned it was from the September term to the springthat Vic would have to do the work, while the grantlasted. We had all these figures to deal with and recheckand we also had to consider which tables would be use-ful, perhaps introduce some other ones, too. Vic was deal-ing with the field notes and the main series of cases, thesocial dramas. We were busy in our rented house inNorth Manchester, going in to the department very of-ten, and because the children were in school it was pos-sible for me to take part.

    Wonderful seminars were being held, and we had li-brary research to do. But we did a great deal of work athome. Vic kept all his main materials and his typewriterand books at home; he didnt have an office at the uni-versity. And we began to build up the dissertation, chap-ter by chapter, very carefully, starting with the geogra-phy, means of subsistence, political systems and history,etc. Nowadays, I discourage students who want to dotheir write-up that way. I tell them to start with some-thing which is at the heart of the topic, which begins tobreathe real life into the piece. But those were the dayswhen the old conventions still reigned, and you simplydid it this way. Vic handled the main writing. There wasonly one typewriter. I did the editing throughout, andthe tables and the photographs, working all the time.Max Gluckman, when he finally got a complete draft inhis hand, with great painstaking care went through everyword of it, copyediting in detail.

    I liked this work a lot because we used to talk aboutthe subject matter all the time. I did the maps for Vic.These details are important to know, but they dont getvery much regarded. Vics mother came up when Vic gothis dissertation, and it was quite an occasion. I was im-mensely proud, and I bought myself a new hat.

    ME: Is there any part of Schism and Continuity that youand Vic kept coming back to as something to argue over,agree on, or revel in?

    ET: Yeah, the social dramas were all of those. They werethe great events in the villages that affected us all. Andwe wrote it all down and took great pains to record themall in photographs in the dissertation. And yet I felt therewas no sense that there was a spirit being passed downin the book, but Vic said there was, because of the Chi-hamba ritual given at the end. I regarded that analysisof Chihamba as being tailored to fit the theme of the

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  • Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 847

    book as a wholeemphasizing the unifying effect of thecult of Chihamba throughout that vicinage. Its too so-ciological, although there are hints in the analysis thattheres more to Chihamba than whats written and it didlead on to Chihamba, the White Spirit [V. Turner 1962].So OK, there were these differences of opinion. What Iwas pleased about was the fact that in Schism you couldsee the Ndembu ritual system in action. It was set intime. And then of course there was my manuscript Ka-jima. I was writing myself while doing all this disser-tation work with Vic, because I couldnt not do it. Africahad such an effect on me, and I missed the people somuch. I had a vivid dream about them, and I just simplyhad to get the events down the way I personally sawthem and experienced them.

    ME: The manuscript Kajima has always fascinated me.It was eventually to become The Spirit and the Drum,some 30 years after it was originally written. But Ivealways wondered about how you thought of it when youwrote it. Did you think of it as anthropology? How didyou and Vic talk about it?

    ET: He was supportive about my doing this, but it wasnta part of the departments research. I never read any ofit in the department; it was private writing. I didnt ex-pect that anything I wrote would be given in theseminars.

    ME: Why?

    ET: Because no wives ever did this, unless they wereuniversity-trained. And that was that. Otherwise youwere just going to be a bother. As one professor at [theUniversity of] Chicago later said, We dont want allthese Hyde Park housewives around here. Thanks, youknow? Im very angry still. Such a dictum was taken forgranted in England at that time, and probably universally.I did go and sit in on the seminars, but the possibilityof my contributing simply didnt come up. But Man-chester was a comfortable atmosphere, and so muchwent on outside of the seminar setting. Elizabeth Colsonused to do her knitting at the seminars. It was very hu-man, and I was extremely glad to be there at all.

    The manuscript stayed in a drawer, and we were busythinking out what was going to come next. In the late1950s, a very important thing happened in our lives: wejoined the Catholic Church. It was at St. Josephs, inManchester. We had been knocking around in Man-chester for a few years after the field, a little depressedfor a number of reasons. The Communist party, whichwe had joined after the war in Hastings and which in-formed a good deal of our first fieldwork, had lost allappeal. African ritual had taken its place, and I supposethat for us there was something of this ritual fever inthe Catholic Church. It would be hard to fully ex-plainor understandthe reaction we got in the Man-chester department. A lot of our friends were card-car-rying members of the CP, and almost everyone inanthropology was a left-leaning atheist. Joining the Cath-

    olic Church was probably the worst thing we could havedone. It didnt end friendships, but it did cause tensionswith some people. In any case, we wanted to get out. Vicwas very devoted to Max but also wanted to get out fromunder his thumb, so in 1960 he accepted an offer fromthe Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sci-ences at Stanford to spend a year there. Soon after that,he got an offer from Cornell University to come as a fullprofessor, which was very rareespecially given his age.So in 1964 we moved to Ithaca, and Vic started teachingat Cornell.

    ME: It seems that when Vic was at Cornell your researchinterests began to expand. Im thinking here of the Mor-gan Lectures Vic gave at Rochester during that time.

    ET: The Ritual Process [V. Turner 1969], which was basedon those lectures, was the key to the Cornell period. Itwas partly a recognition of the developing hippie era andof the demonstrations and love-ins at Cornell. We hadtransferred the pub discussions of Manchester with thelikes of Bill Epstein to Cornell, although it was in ourhouse rather than a pub. We developed a liminal systemin our seminars. Somebody gave a presentationthiswas the structured part. Then the interval, the liminaltime, when we all got cans of beer and had a break. Thenwe came together afterwards for the reaggregation, tosay more on what wed been talking about in the beerinterval. We would have a discussion and people wouldbe able to hear each other. That system worked like atreat. At least 12 heads of departments have resultedfrom those seminars, and students with many, manypublicationsI cant count the number of books thathave been written by students who have been to thoseseminars.

    Within a short time the Chicago offer turned up. Thatappointment was for the Committee on Social Thought,with a joint appointment in anthropology, but Vic wasto be paid by the Committee. Without much hesitationhe said yes, because he liked some of the faculty a lot.He was also interested in the liberty that the Committeemight offer, because he could teach outside of anthro-pologycourses on Dante and Blake or whatever caughthis fancy. We had been at Cornell four years and felt thatwe could move on. We didnt necessarily want the beautyof nature and the quiet life that Ithaca offered. We wantedto be where the action was.

    At the time, Vics reputation was rising. He and I wereproducing a lot of work. These books were popping outlike mad, and people were reading his papers in differentcollections. Maybe if Chicago had been like the Virginiadepartmentif it had had the same ethosit would havebeen a permanent affair for us. But there was somethingabout the University of Chicagoa kind of tough, bittersteel from the city itself that had gotten into the fabricof the school.

    The first impressions in Chicago were of Hyde Parkitself. When we first arrived the place was in an absoluteuproar because of the 1968 elections and what was hap-pening at the Democratic Convention. The police were

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  • 848 F current anthropology

    so jittery, I thought, my Lord, this place is very upset.Very, very upset. Vic and I felt for the students a lot. Wewanted to be identified with them. Most of the facultyat Chicago didnt feel this way, and there were some uglyrows. But I always thought that the students were likeyour children, and how could you betray your children?Anyway, this is part of what we plunged into when wefirst reached Chicago. I know these events played a bigrole in how we thought about our work in anthropologyfrom then on.

    ME: Did you two carry the seminar format developed atCornell on to Chicago?

    ET: Yeah. That seminar went on. It was known as VictorTurners midnight seminar. It would start at eightoclock on Thursdays and just go on and on. The gath-ering just couldnt stop. Vic and I would wake up lateon Friday, about nine or ten, and go along to Walgreensand have some coffee and sweet rolls. And Vera, the wait-ress, would always come to our table, and wed feel to-tally at peace. We would walk around the Point, out nearthe Lake Michigan, and then come and have our coffee,talking about what had been going on in the seminar.Those were great days. It was the students who helpedus think through everything.

    The seminars were the heart of that Chicago period,but Vic also gave courses to students who were interestedin Durkheim. He gave lectures on Kierkegaard, WilliamBlake, Dante, and other figures. He was able to do thisin the Committee on Social Thought, you see, and herelished it because at University College, London, he hadgone deeply into literature. Besides, he and I were con-tinually exploring literature, the various Greek poets, theFrench symbolists, the American visionary romantics,and so on. It was a very busy time in Chicago, nine yearsin all.

    ME: Did faculty come to the seminars at your house aswell?

    ET: Some faculty, yes. I wouldnt say a lot. Maybe theywere there more than I realized. Fred Eggan was oftenthere. Not many anthropology faculty. Jamie Redfieldwas there sometimes. Who else? If there were SouthAsian themes, it would be A. K. Ramanujan and RalphNicholas turning up, depending on the topic on whicha student was presenting. The only regular was FredEggan.

    ME: At this point I wonder if we can talk about whenyou started to work on the journal Primavera. Im alsointerested in hearing about your experience of thewomens movement and how feminist sentiments werecoming into the university.

    ET: At the time I was more caught up in it than in any-thing else. I hadnt been totally aware of feminist issues.When I was a little kid I was kind of a feminist, but Ididnt attach myself to it because I was so busy with

    Vics work and his thinking. Primavera was actuallypointed out to me by Vic in The Maroon, the universitysstudent newspaper. He said, Theres this ad calling forpeople to work on a literary journal, why dont you doit? It was his suggestion that legitimized it for me. Iwould have loved to do it anyway, but since it was com-ing from him that meant, OK, thats a go-ahead.

    There were more than a dozen of us working on thisjournal. Some of us were associated with the universityand some werent. We published poetry and articles. Iwrote Girl into Woman for one issue, which was thefirst thing I published on the Nkanga ritual. I liked work-ing in a literary style very much. I worked hard on Pri-mavera, to such an extent that Vic started to feel hewasnt seeing much of me. But the journal work contin-ued right until we left Chicago. We had a break for oneyear in Princeton when Vic was at the Institute for Ad-vanced Study. He was there during the 197576 schoolyear and then back in Chicago until 1977.

    ME: I wonder about the progression of all this. You werewriting a lot in the 1940s, and weve talked about thework in Oasis. And then in the 1950s, after the field,you were writing both with Vic and on your own. In the1960s, when you got to America, you mention editingmore than writing, and then, in the 1970s, with thisliterary journal, writing comes up again. How do you seethis history? Were you always thinking as a writer?

    ET: On and off, yes. I can see the uneven developmentin any writers life. And incidentally, about the Oasispoetry: I much admired Vic, who was writing very pre-cise poetry. It was almost as if every line came out inbalance, and I liked that. Of course that was one of thereasons I fell for him. But I tended to regard my ownwriting as this kind of flyaway stuff. I admire Walt Whit-man because he has a free style. And I felt that probablymine was not gifted poetry because others had said itwas sort of wild. But the works of the hippie poets ac-tually encouraged me a lot; Alan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder,and the others. Ginsberg just let it all hang out, and thatwas encouraging for me.

    ME: This was also the time that you and Vic startedgetting into the pilgrimage work, which resulted in yourfirst officially coauthored book, Image and Pilgrimagein Christian Culture [1978]. That work strikes me asbeing of a very different nature from the Ndembu workand more a continuation of the later chapters in TheRitual Process. How did you do the work for that project?

    ET: It was different from standing with a clipboard inthe middle of the bush writing about medicines and rit-ual. For the pilgrimage work we did do traditional field-work in the sense that we went on pilgrimages our-selves, but a lot of it was textual analysis. We looked alot at writing by devotees, which was an important partof the project. And then of course the experience of goingon the pilgrimages as Catholics was personal as well asobservational. We were worshipping at the shrines; this

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  • Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 849

    did not get into the writing very much, but it did creepin a bit here and there. So, we used more historical ma-terial and less straight ethnographic material about whatthe pilgrims said to us. In hindsight, I feel we didnt haveenough time to do any consistent following-up of specificgroups of pilgrims. Thats why I went back to the fieldin Zambia after Vic died, because Id been missing thatsort of thingintegration with what the people were ac-tually doing.

    ME: Looking back on the course of your work togetherand trying to situate the different projects, how do youthink about the question of authorship?

    ET: Theres not much differenceis there?in what wedid together. It was just a matter of the political climateof the age. In the 1970s you could begin to say, OK, thiswas a collaborative effort, but it was about the samebefore. For example in The Drums of Affliction [1968],Vic had a big chapter on the girls initiation, Nkanga. Alarge amount of that was my material, and the ideas werefrom our collaboration, but it was a book by VictorTurner, published by Clarendon Press. So its a matterof the politics of the time. The fact that feminists in the1970s could raise these issues is very important, and Ido thank them. To a certain extent I wish there weremore of my stuff in the work, but then, in a way, thereis, indirectly. But, you know, its actually hard to col-laborate in writing. It requires you to slow, and we wereboth in full-tilt with what we were doing, you know?We liked it that way, and we liked the fast pace.

    ME: Youve mentioned to me before that when you twowent on your pilgrimage research trips, you started towrite fieldnotes in your own style, which was differentfrom how you approached fieldnotes with the Ndembu.I wonder if you can talk a little more about the processof writing fieldnotesfrom the early days with theNdembu to your latest work in Alaska [1996] and inIreland.

    ET: In Mwinilunga, my fieldnotes were not as academicas Vics, but they were running accounts of what peopledid as I watched rituals. I did not give any emotionalreactions of my own at all. I tried to get the accountobjectively, but my emotional reactions were runningthrough my head, and thats why I wrote Kajima [TheSpirit and the Drum]. I wanted to get it before the feel-ings disappeared. I didnt regard that as academic; I re-garded it as a narrative account that I wanted to do be-cause I liked doing it. So, OK, I was writing whathappened as a report of various rituals and so on, and Ialways reckoned that they probably werent as completeas Vics and that he would be aware of social processesgoing on that I wouldnt because of his training. He hada good eye for antagonisms in the village and the curioustangle of personalities that he wrote about in Schism andContinuity. I wasnt up to writing on the intricacies, orso I thought at the time. And so, OK, I wrote thesereports.

    ME: Did you think of yourself as an anthropologist inAfrica?

    ET: I felt that I was a junior anthropologist, yes, but astrange one because I hadnt been shaped in the mill atUniversity College. I was freewheeling a bit. My think-ing wasnt shaped in the professional way, although I hadbeen fairly close to it. And believe me, I had a deep re-spect for it, or else I wouldnt have helped Vic with allthose books. I was a sort of an anthropologist, and ananthropologists assistant 100 percent.

    ME: When you moved to Virginia in 1977 for Vic to takeup the Kenan Professorship in anthropology and religiousstudies, you delved even further into the realm of lit-erature by enrolling in English and creative writingcourses. I imagine this all fits into the trajectory youredescribing.

    ET: I found myself in this new place, and I was gettingmore and more interested in writing. I felt I could do adegree, and since there are extraordinary writers in Char-lottesville, people like John Casey and Greg Orr, andothers visiting, I felt I could take some courses in Englishand the symbolist literature. I was hoping and thinkingthat maybe one day I would learn how to write whatwas going to be The Spirit and the Drum, you see. Iwanted to do it right. Eventually, when I did take courses,John Casey helped me a lot. He looked at that manu-script, once I had done quite a bit more to it, and he gaveme a great deal of help.

    I eventually decided to enroll full-time at the Univer-sity of Virginia, in English. I was accepted to the M.A.program, despite the fact that I had never earned a Bach-elors degree. There was a question of whether I shoulddo it in anthropology or in English. Of course, Vic and Ihad been writing poetry and reading great literature,which is a kind of passion in our family. I felt that I didnot want to learn what Vic had been teaching me all thetime and take classes on what was prevalent then, whichwas solid structuralism. I felt that if I did, there wouldbe something slightly invidious about it, like nepotismor something. My hesitation was mainly because I hadbeen living in the element of anthropology all the time,and I had my own rather strong ideas about itaboutliminality not being subsumed under structure.

    ME: How did it feel being in school at 60?

    ET: Oh, fine. I could cope much better than most of thosegraduate kids because I had been with Vic doing a lot ofwriting. I was more mature. And they were trying, I felt,to get the grades with more or less the least trouble theycould. I guess it was a little strange to be in school be-cause I was older than the others, but as you get olderyou find things less strange anyway, you know. And Ifelt capable and experienced. One of the professors gaveus Henry Miller to studyyou know, Tropic of Capricorn[1965], real way-out stuffand I did the best of all onthat.

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    ME: And the administration didnt mind your not havingbeen to college?

    ET: Well, they counted my being a coeditor of Primaveraas pretty important. They also saw other pieces I hadwritten, and there was a very liberal attitude towardwomen at that time and women that came into studieslater in life. And they knew I had done the editing ofVics books and that I had been collaborating with Vicall this time.

    ME: Did you ever think about a Ph.D.?

    ET: Yes, obviously, but I was very involved in Vics workso it didnt seem possible. Of course, I remember theoccasion when the possibility came up, and in a way Iregret it, and yet I knew that I couldnt.

    After Vic died in 1983 I was appointed a lecturer inthe anthropology department at UVA, which was appro-priate, I think. It was only part-time, and I immediatelyhad a lot more on my plateit was as if a great deal ofwhat Vic was doing was suddenly put on my platesothe part-time lectureship gave me time to deal with allthis.

    ME: Many of your former students have told me aboutthe performance seminars at Virginia that you and Vicled, which is also something I want to touch on becauseit seems as if the move to performativity was carried outmost thoroughly at Virginia.

    ET: We were trying to convey an understanding of ritualin a way that reading and writing cant capture. This wassomething that Vic always talked about in hisworkthat a lot of ritual couldnt be put into words.Wed try to get the students in the spirit of it, and theyvery quickly couldnt resist. There were strategies to fa-cilitate this. In these settings, youre not getting thestructural relationshipshot and cold, or whatever itis. You have those as well, but you get a sense of theprogression, the process, the body. And one has to sus-pend disbelief, as old Wordsworth said, and flow withit. Flow is so importantthe actual pacing and sense ofbeing right in the thick of things. You can understandthrough the nonverbal. And when people go to the field,having done anthropology without having tried any per-formance, they see people fooling around and they dontknow what the hell theyre at. They write it down andget the structural relationships, but they remain on theoutside, because they would have to drop that criticalityto understand. If you go in the field and you haventperformed ritual before, and you see the natives actinglike that, you look for signs of the social constructionof reality and you find them, because you find whatyoure looking for. There are always people running thetemple and doing accounts, so to speak. There are alwayspeople at pilgrimage centers selling zillions of blue plas-tic virgins, plastic bottles with Knock Shrine printedon them, and so on. So then you have your social con-

    struction of reality and its workings and all, but thatisnt much, and it isnt always interesting.

    ME: This makes a lot of anthropologists uncomfortable.

    ET: Oh, yeah. It used to make me uncomfortable.

    ME: When was the switch for you?

    ET: Well, after we joined the Catholic Church. You see,there are various ways in which Vic wrote. Very hard-headed, but then sometimeswhats the word?experiential, and with an infinite respect for what wasgoing on. Such is the way he wrote in Chihamba, theWhite Spirit. And in not a very different era he wroteThe Drums of Affliction, in which he practically ana-lyzed away the true meaning of the Ihamba ritual. Thesetwo things were going on side by side. I was usually inthe same mode as he. I often saw him responding in thisdouble way to the anthropological material. To forestallthe critiques of this, he took a great deal of trouble withscholarship. This is what has kept the discipline in deeprespect of Vics work. I know Im not the scholar thatVic was, but still, Im perhaps even more of a maverickthan he. I dont give much of a damn, perhaps acting likethe naughty one of the family.

    ME: Thats your favorite role, I think.

    ET: Oh, yes, youve got it.

    ME: All of this brings us to some key themes in anthro-pology. Do you go native?

    ET: As much as I bloody well can! To me thats the point.There is a slight limitation, but human beings are ex-traordinarily pervious to each other. As Vic said, thereare these prepositional plugs in everybodyto, for, from,against, by, with, of, within, out. Everyone has theseplugs, and they plug into other people.

    Im a woman. In a bygone era, the man took the ini-tiative, and the woman would be trying to work alongwith the man. I knew this from the environment I wasin, and I had quite a lot of practice in it. A part of mewould say, Well, if Im going to be flexible and take onother peoples viewsa husbands or whateverIll takeon a lot of other peoples views. What the hell is thedifference? This is something of the way my mind ar-gued. I went the way of Vic being a Catholic. He got thesense of it first and I did afterwards, although when Iwas given the original sense it was very strong to me.So in whatever we did, I delighted in getting alongsideothers with their agenda. And getting it, if I could.

    ME: Thats an interesting connection, I think, and aninteresting crossover between the personal and the pro-fessional. Can you say more about how you approachedthe idea of a relationship with Vic in that sense? Mysense is that it was a very complicated mix. You and I

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  • Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 851

    have talked a lot about how you contributed to Vicswork and how it was very much a collaborative effort.And everyone Ive talked to who knew you both has saidthe same thing, without fail. And certainly the two ofyou had profound impacts upon one another about howyou wrote things up. Its this very complicated mix ofgive-and-take. There are moments when I think you as-sert your position within this all and make a point ofclaiming that partnership and a very active role. I thinkthis is important and an accurate sense of the give-and-take. But the way in which you just described itnowand this ties into other ways you have describeditwas taking on his mission, adapting yourself to hisculture. So its curious to me in what ways you see your-self adapting to Vic and in what ways you see yourselfas a point of reference.

    ET: I think I know what youre getting at. I think its todo with the fact that in my consciousness I understoodwhat Vics agenda was, and as it developed I understoodit. I dont think there was any point at which I didntunderstand it. Hes not here to ask, but I think hed sayhe was doing a lot of things in reference to me. He wastesting things off of me to a certain extent. He wouldframe things in a way that I could absorb, and this israther sexual, actually. Because I was there, he would dothings in a certain way, or frame things in a certain way.I didnt have to tell him what to say, I didnt have todirect. But he knew I was receptive to certain things, andhe knew how my mind was moving and was perhapstelepathic. So he would do this, and I would suggest tohim what he was thinking, too. You see? And then hewould develop it, and vice versa. This was thecollaboration.

    But then, when you look at the collaboration, as youveinsisted upon doing, you see this thing from his point ofview. And if he were here (which he isnt), he would beshowing this himself, you know? But I was very con-scious in this social world that I was not trained at Uni-versity College, London, and all the rest. Therefore, Ivalued very much this part of me that was interactingwith Vic, and looking at myself as the adaptable person.I was, in a way, determined to develop this like an artform. I would think about this. And therefore, well, Ithink he translated this into communitas. It was there.It was conscious, but he didnt look at it as a womanwould. It wasnt so personal to him, as it sometimes isntwith men. But he did know what communitas was, andhe loved it.

    So, I think this is how it was. And there is such a thingas being a woman and being a man. Its absolute rubbishto say there are just human beings, because one is verymuch sexualized. And true, this is structured in our so-ciety. Conscious persons know they have to live in thisworld and will adapt as they can. Thats what was goingon. Does that answer your question? Or is there some-thing more?

    ME: I think that gives me a sense of the connections yousee between the two of you and even going native.

    Lets talk more about these ideas of the man and thewoman and the different roles, perceptions, and atti-tudes. I think talking about these as concrete, essentialrealities is another strong characteristic of your work,something that you dont shy away from. Its also some-thing that a lot of anthropologists would be criticalofnot seeing these as categories that can be brokendown. You talk about religion in these terms, too. Itssomething thats not a social constructionwhich is avery nonanthropological viewpoint.

    ET: Absolutely. Im highly conscious of this. Ive beenworking away at trying to shift this from all kinds ofangles. Yes, Im quite aware of what Im feebly trying todo.

    ME: So tell me something about your latest work, fromThe Spirit and the Drum to what youve been doing inIreland over the past five years.

    ET: I got the manuscript for The Spirit under control inthe summer of 1985, when I was on my own and therewasnt anybody in the house at all. There were someplaces in it that I was bothered about, and I had a chancefrom that May onwards to have a look at it. And I sawthat what Id got was centered on four rituals; the boysand girls initiations, the Tukuka healing ritual, and theChihamba. In the 1980s, the material was more vivid tome. I was more convinced, for instance, that Manyosahad gone into trance. I was more sure of the symbols,more sure that these were a force in themselves in thissituationsymbols that were playing their own sym-phony, as it were. I didnt have any qualms about theway it was written. I cared if people read it, but I didntwant to put it into an academic frame, really. So I thoughtabout it in much the same terms as I had originally writ-ten it in the 1950s, but by the 1980s the material wasmuch richer to me. All the work that Vic and I had doneover the years confirmed what I wanted to do, confirmedmy own sense of the human story, and it is portrayed inThe Spirit and the Drum.

    ME: The reviews of that book are interesting becausemost of the reviewers obviously didnt know about thehistory of the bookthat it was first conceived and ex-ecuted in the 1950s. Im thinking particularly of GeorgeMarcuss [1987] review in Parabola, where he said thatit was a first-rate account of the postmodern approachto writing narrative anthropology. I thought this was awonderful instance of how the categories we use aretricks to define ourselves. Do you think of that book asa postmodern text?

    ET: I think of it, as well as Experiencing Ritual [E. Turner1992], as evidence that this is where anthropology mightbe goingthe richer the better. Human material is al-most impossibly rich, and so we have a mandate now togo ahead and unfold the full richness of humankind tothe best of our ability. Its there, and we should all tryto show it. Its a marvelous field, anthropology, and I see

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    Experiencing Ritual fitting somewhere into all of this.Whether its postmodern or not, I want to recount therelevant details to anyone who will listen. There shouldbe an accumulation of these pieces to engage the aca-demic stages of theory making.

    ME: When I read Experiencing Ritual I was struck bythe different ways in which you referred to Vic through-out the text. There are passages that create a sense ofintimacy, and there are passages that create a sense ofscholarly distance. In some passages its Vic or myhusband, and in others its as Turner argues, and soon.

    ET: The fat and the thin Vic, really. Its like Philip Kab-wita, who had a fat and a thin side. Vic had a lean andmuscular mind and rather a fat body! You had to respectthat lean and muscular mind in the writing and also theother side.

    ME: I assume that the specific ways you referred to himwere strategically placed.

    ET: Of course. To engage with the academic side of an-thropology has meant engaging with the canon, and soIve had to think of him in that way. But he was also avery full human being. These were dialogues of a sort.

    ME: I have another question to do with the Ihamba ritualyou describe and the tooth you saw. I think there wouldbe a lot of anthropologists who would say that its all abit crazy, your seeing a spirit form.

    ET: Yes, yes. Some people, including some anthropolo-gists, think this is crazy. Ive been helped by Roy Wagnerin this. The tooth is a peculiarly strong thing, and so,was this going through the veins? And the concept of aspirit tooth is also somewhat strange. Jesus said, Putyour fingers in the holes in my hands and you will be-lieve. This is a spirit figure, coming after the crucifix-ion, and yet this poor guy Thomas was able to feel it.And people say this is a myth. How could it be?

    I was certain it happened to me. I didnt actually seea tiny little tooth coming out of the skin. I saw the spiritobject, a gray blob, come out. I dont know whether aconcrete tooth came out of the vein, or a spirit tooth asa gray blob came out. But I saw it, whatever it was. Andone does not retract things like that, you know? I knowits hard for people, but if they begin to take in a littleof the reports they hear (like Evans-Pritchard walking inthe Azande village and seeing a spirit light) then we canget somewhere. We havent sufficiently grappled withthese issues, and yet they dont go away. There are al-ways more coming up. It stays like a tooth in our veins,if I can put it that way. We dont know what to do. I justlike to go on with this study on the quiet. Its the samewith my work in Point Hope, Alaska, and in Ireland. Iwill always try to get into the thick of things in this way,whether its the whale spirit in Alaska or visions of Maryat Knock Shrine in Ireland.

    Sometimes I wonder what Vic would think of me now.What would he think of me running shamanistic ses-sions? How would he think of my Catholicism, in whichI say, God the Mother Almighty? Theres a certainfeminism in this. What Im doing now is an extensionof the Chihamba, the White Spirit side of Vic, not theDrums of Affliction side. I obviously take off from thespiritual side of thinking. I dont get any visions orflashes about what Vic would think, but Im grateful tothat guy, and, God, the communitas. The conversationswith Vic were marvelous. We would get breakthroughsright and left. Those were great times.

    I think we can go on with Victor Turners work. Mywork, of course, is relatively obscure, but it does affecta small range of people, and I think theres a certaincommunitas in it. I always hope we might get somebreakthroughs.

    References Cited

    f r e u d , s i g m u n d . 1955 The interpretation of dreams. Trans-lated and edited by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books.

    m a r c u s , g e o r g e . 1987. Review of: The spirit and the drum:A memoir of Africa, by Edith Turner. Parabola 12(3):11618.

    m i l l e r , h e n ry. 1965. Tropic of Capricorn. New York: GrovePress.

    ro y a l a n t h ro p o l o g i c a l i n s t i t u t e o f g r e a t b r i -t a i n a n d i r e l a n d . 1951. 6th edition. Notes and querieson anthropology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

    t u r n e r , e d i t h . 1987 The spirit and the drum: A memoir ofAfrica. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

    . 1996. The hands feel it: Healing and spirit presenceamong a northern Alaskan people. DeKalb: Northern IllinoisUniversity Press.

    t u r n e r , e d i t h , w i t h w i l l i a m b l o d g e t t , s i n g l e -t o n k a h o n a , a n d f i d e l i b e n w a . 1992. Experiencingritual: A new interpretation of African healing. Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press.

    t u r n e r , v i c t o r . 1957. Schism and continuity in an Africansociety: A study of Ndembu village life. Manchester: Manches-ter University Press.

    . 1962. Chihamba, the white spirit: A ritual drama of theNdembu. Manchester: Manchester University Press for theRhodes-Livingstone Institute.

    . 1967. The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual.Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    . 1968. The drums of affliction: A study of religious pro-cesses among the Ndembu. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

    . 1969. The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure.Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    . 1985. On the edge of the bush: Anthropology as experi-ence. Edited by Edith Turner. Tucson: University of ArizonaPress.

    t u r n e r , v i c t o r , a n d e d i t h t u r n e r . 1978. Image andpilgrimage in Christian culture: Anthropological perspectives.New York: Columbia University Press.

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  • Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 853

    Fig. 1. Map of Southern Germany showing the posi-tion of Hohle Fels and other sites mentioned in thetext.

    New Evidence for Paleolithic RockPainting in Central Europe1

    nicholas j . conard andhans-peter uerpmannInstitut fur Ur- und Fruhgeschichte und Archaologiedes Mittelalters, Universitat Tubingen, SchlossHohentubingen, 72070 Tubingen, Germany([email protected]). 8 xii 99

    Despite Paleolithic research dating back to the 1860s,little evidence for parietal art has been documented inthe caves of Central Europe. However, on August 3, 1998,Patrick Russell, a member of the excavation team atHohle Fels Cave, located near Schelklingen, Germany(fig. 1), recovered a painted rock fragment from an ar-chaeological horizon containing abundant Magdalenianartifacts. The find was photographed in situ and belongsto geological stratum 1k. This fragment of limestone pre-serves a double row of seven and a truncated double rowof four dark-red, subcircular dots and provides new ev-idence for rock painting in Central Europe. While anearlier age cannot be ruled out, stylistic and contextualarguments suggest that the depiction dates to the Mag-dalenian (Conard and Floss 1999). The rich Magdalenianlayers of Hohle Fels are well documented and date to ca.13,000 b.p. (Blumentritt and Hahn 1991, Housley et al.1997, Conard and Uerpmann 1999).

    Hohle Fels Cave is located at an elevation of 543 mabove sea level in the Ach Valley near Schelklingen, ca.20 km west of Ulm. Along with the nearby Blau andLone Valleys, the Ach Valley, with its many caves, formsthe heartland for Paleolithic research in southwesternGermany (Muller-Beck 1983). The cave is one of the larg-est of the Swabian Jura, with a 30-m-long entrance pas-sage leading to a main hall with an area of 500 m2 anda ceiling as high as 12 m (Blumentritt and Hahn 1991).The entrance passage to the cave, 6 m wide and 3 mhigh, opens toward the north-northwest and is situatedroughly 100 m southeast of and 7 m above the Ach River.

    Hohle Fels has been studied by several generations ofscholars beginning with the work of Oskar Fraas (1872)and continuing into the 20th century with the work ofRobert R. Schmidt (1912). More recently Gustav Riekconducted excavations in the entrance to the cave from1958 to 1960 (Saier 1994). Further excavations were con-

    1. q 2000 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearch. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2000/4105-0007$1.00.Thecurrent research at Hohle Fels is funded by grants from the Deut-sche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Sonderforschungsbereich 275 ofthe University of Tubingen, and the Heidelberger Zement Companyand by contributions from the Landesdenkmalamt and the Gesell-schaft fur Urgeschichte. We thank Harald Floss, Gerhard Bosinski,and Michael Bolus for their helpful comments and A. Frey, H. Jen-sen, and Andrew Kandel for technical support. We are particularlyindebted to A. Aksoy for his careful work in conserving the paintedwall fragment from Hohle Fels.

    ducted under the direction of Joachim Hahn of the Uni-versity of Tubingen in 197779 and 198796. These ex-cavations again focused on the entrance rather than thepresumably more disturbed deposits in the interior ofthe cave (Blumentritt and Hahn 1991, Hahn 1997a).Hahn reopened the excavation at Hohle Fels with thegoal of recovering archaeological material from a chrono-stratigraphic setting similar to that from his nearby ex-cavation at Geissenklosterle (Hahn 1977a). FollowingHahns death, excavation at the site has continued underour direction from 1997 to 1999 and has focused on ec-ological and economic questions related to the UpperPaleolithic of the region. Beyond the important Magda-lenian and Gravettian deposits at Hohle Fels (fig. 2), thesite shows potential for yielding both Aurignacian andMiddle Paleolithic materials, as is the case at sites in-cluding Geissenklosterle in the Ach Valley and Hohlen-stein-Stadel and Vogelherd in the Lone Valley (Hahn1977b, Muller-Beck 1983).

    The debate over the presence of parietal art in CentralEurope has lasted for decades and has been characterizedby a series of claims and subsequent refutations for theexistence of cave painting since the recognition of Pa-leolithic cave paintings in France and Cantabrian Spainat the turn of the 20th century (Conard and Floss 1999).Over the past three decades, the work of Joachim Hahnhas played a central role in regional research on Paleo-lithic art. Hahns excavations at Geissenklosterle pro-vided new evidence for Aurignacian figurines (Hahn1986) that complemented the previously excavatedmammoth ivory statues recovered from Vogelherd (Riek1934) and Hohlenstein-Stadel (Schmid 1989, Hahn 1986).Susanne Munzels archaeozoological work also led to the

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  • 854 F current anthropology

    Fig. 2. Schematic stratigraphic profile of Hohle Fels including four major stratigraphic units (after Conard andUerpmann 1999): A, with finds from the Magdalenian and radiocarbon ages of ca. 13,000 b.p.; B, correspondingto the last glacial maximum, ca. 20,000 b.p.; C, containing Gravettian finds and dating to ca. 29,000 b.p.; andD, containing early Upper Paleolithic finds from a test excavation.

    recovery of the remains of two bone flutes from Geis-senklosterle including one made from the radius of aswan (Hahn and Munzel 1995). These musical instru-ments and the ivory figurines from the site stem fromthe Aurignacian find horizon II and date to ca 33,500 b.p.with radiocarbon and 37,000 b.p. with thermolumines-cence (Richter et al. 2000).

    Prior to the 1970s, painted stones had been recoveredfrom several sites in southern Germany. Best-knownamong these are several painted stones from the Mag-dalenian which were excavated in 1912 by J. Fraunholzin collaboration with H. Obermaier at Obere Klause (Ob-ermaier 1914, Freund 1963, Bosinski 1982). Additionally,E. Soergel and W. Soergel recovered a 9.4 # 5.5 # 2.2-cm painted cobble of either Magdalenian or Late Pale-olithic age from HohlensteinKleine Scheuer in 1923(Wetzel 1961, Hahn and von Koenigswald 1977), whileG. Rieks excavations at Vogelherd (Riek 1934) andHohle Fels (Saier 1994) provided further examples ofstones and rock fragments with traces of pigment. Saier(1994) describes five painted rock fragments from theMagdalenian layers of Rieks excavation at Hohle Felsand has been able to refit one specimen to a broken cob-ble from Hahns more recent excavation there. Amongthe early finds from Obere Klause, Kleine Scheuer, andHohle Fels, rows of small red dots and faint lines con-stitute the most common motifs. Despite the existence

    of earlier ivory figurines from the Aurignacian, femalefigurines and occasional figurative engravings fromGravettian contexts, and hundreds of figurative engrav-ings from the Magdalenian (Bosinski 1982, Hahn 1986,Scheer 1994), figurative painting is entirely unknown inGermany. Moreover, with the possible exception of apurported painted animal from Byci Skala Cave (Oliva1996), figurative painting has remained absent in the Pa-leolithic of Central Europe.

    Hahns careful excavations at Geissenklosterle andHohle Fels provided more recent evidence for Paleolithicpainting in addition to the stones mentioned above.Noteworthy are two finds of Aurignacian age from Geis-senklosterle. One is an 8.5 # 6 # 4.5-cm piece of lime-stone with red, yellow, and black pigment from layer IIb.The other is a limestone fragment from the lower Au-rignacian layer IIIa, which Hahn (1988) describes as pre-serving a black V-shape. Hahn argues that this 10 # 10# 3-cm piece, which appears to stem from the wall ofthe cave, was intentionally painted. While this interpre-tation is plausible, the irregular nature of the black andbrown color could be the result of natural processes orincidental human agency. Hahns excavations at HohleFels have also yielded at least three examples of stonespreserving traces of red pigment (Blumentritt and Hahn1991, Scheer 1994). These often poorly preserved finds,as well as the material from earlier excavations, provide

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  • Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 855

    Fig. 3. The painted fragment of limestone from HohleFels, scale in cm. (Photo H. Jensen)

    convincing evidence for nonfigurative painting on mo-bile objects, small stones in particular. Before the dis-covery of the new find from Hohle Fels, however, noconvincing evidence for cave painting had been recov-ered within Germany. While the new depiction stopsshort of furnishing definitive proof of the existence ofcave painting in the region, it does provide the best ev-idence thus far for parietal art in Germany.

    The new find from Hohle Fels measures 7.6 # 5.9 #1.7 cm and was recovered from geological horizon 1k.The painted surface is smooth, whereas the reverse sidepreserves unweathered, angular surfaces. The find pre-serves two double rows of 47-mm oval red dots (fig. 3).One double row is complete and depicts seven subpar-allel pairs of dots. The other double row includes fourpairs of dots and is clearly truncated, indicating that thedepiction originally continued beyond the limits of thecurrent piece.

    What distinguishes this find from the objects men-tioned above is the excellent preservation of the pigmentand particularly the recognition that the reverse side pre-serves unweathered, angular surfaces. This observationindicates that the limestone fragment in all likelihoodstems from the wall of the cave. This stone fragment iscomposed of the same granular Upper Jurassic limestonethat forms the walls of the cave. While fragments of thecave wall are extremely common within the Paleolithicfind horizons of the cave, this is the first such fragmentto preserve unambiguous evidence for painting. The col-lapse and fragmentation of the cave walls have beenclosely documented by Hahn (1991) in connection withhis study of scratches on polished surfaces of the formerwalls of Hohle Fels. The apparently ubiquitous fragmen-tation and collapse of the cave walls of the region mayhelp to explain the scarcity of parietal art in the region.While the theoretical possibility exists that the lime-stone fragment was painted after it fell from the wall,the truncation of the depiction and the fresh, angularnature of the broken surfaces of the specimen indicatethat it was originally part of a larger representation onthe wall of Hohle Fels rather than a piece of mobile art.

    In the context of southern Germany, the motif paintedon the new find from Hohle Fels shows particularlystrong similarities with the best-known painted stonefrom Obere Klause, where three double rows of sevensmall red dots are depicted on a rounded, 16-cm-long,elongated piece of limestone (Obermaier 1914, Muller-Beck and Albrecht 1987). Although the general absenceof parietal art makes comparisons within Central Europeimpossible, diverse depictions of red dots and rows of reddots are well known in the Paleolithic art of WesternEurope, for example, at Niaux (Clottes 1995), Grotte Car-riot (Lorblanchet 1984), and Grotte Le Travers de Janoye(Clottes and Lautier 1984; Bosinski, personal commu-nication, 1999).

    This painted wall fragment from a Magdalenian layerat Hohle Fels provides the best evidence to date for pa-rietal art in Germany and helps to fill a gap in our knowl-edge of Paleolithic art that appears to be in part dictated

    by the poor preservation of cave walls in the karst regionof Central Europe.

    References Citedb l u m e n t r i t t , r . , a n d j . h a h n . 1991. Der Hohle Fels.

    Museumsgesellschaft Schelklingen, Schelklinger Archaologi-sche Fuhrer 1. Blaubeuren: Schroder.

    b o s i n s k i , g . 1982. Die Kunst der Eiszeit in Deutschland undin der Schweiz. Kataloge vor- und fruhgeschichtlicher Altertu-mer 20. Bonn: Habelt.

    c l o t t e s , j . 1995. Les cavernes de Niaux: Art prehistorique enArie`ge. Paris: Edition Seuil.

    c l o t t e s , j . , a n d j . l a u t i e r . 1984. Grotte le Travers deJanoye, in Lart des cavernes: Atlas des grottes ornees paleo-lithiques francaises. Edited by A. Leroi-Gourhan, pp. 54448.Paris: Imprimerie Nationale.

    c o n a r d , n . j . , a n d h . fl o s s . 1999. Ein bemalter Stein vonHohle Fels bei Schelklingen und die Frage nach palaolithischerHohlenkunst in Mitteleuropa. Archaologisches Korrespondenz-blatt 29:30716.

    c o n a r d , n . j . , a n d h . - p . u e r p m a n n . 1999. Die Ausgra-bungen 1997 und 1998 im Hohle Fels bei Schelklingen, Alb-Donau-Kreis. Archaologische Ausgrabungen in Baden-Wurt-temberg 1998, pp. 4752.

    f r a a s , o . 1872. Beitrage zur Culturgeschichte aus schwa-bischen Hohlen: Der Hohle Fels im Achtal. Archiv fur Anthro-pologie 5:173213.

    f r e u n d , g . 1963. Die altere und die mittlere Steinzeit in Bay-ern. Jahresberichte der bayerischen Bodendenkmalpflege 4:9167.

    h a h n , j . 1977a. Fossilvergesellschaftung nr. 72: Nachgrabungenim Hohle Felsen bei Schelklingen, Alb-Donau-Kreis. Archaolo-gisches Korrespondenzblatt 7:24148.

    . 1977b. Aurignacien: Das Altere Jungpalaolithikum inMittel- und Osteuropa. Fundamenta A9. Koln-Graz.

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  • 856 F current anthropology

    . 1986. Kraft und Aggression: Die Botschaft der Eiszeit-kunst im Aurignacien Suddeutschlands? Vol. 7. Tubingen: Ar-chaeologica Venatoria.

    . 1988. Das Geissenklosterle I. Forschungen und Berichtezur Vor- und Fruhgeschichte in Baden-Wurttemberg 26. Stutt-gart: Theiss.

    . 1991. Hohlenkunst aus dem Hohlen Fels bei Schelklin-gen. Alb-Donau-Kreis. Archaologische Ausgrabungen in Baden-Wurttemberg 1990, pp. 1922.

    h a h n , j . , a n d w. v o n k o e n i g s w a l d . 1977. Die steinzeit-lichen Funde und die spatglaziale Nagetierschicht aus der Klei-nen Scheuer im Hohlenstein im Lonetal. Fundberichte aus Ba-den-Wurttemberg 3:5275.

    h a h n , j . , a n d s . m u n z e l . 1995. Knochenfloten aus demAurignacien des Geissenklosterle bei Blaubeuren, Alb-Donau-Kreis. Fundberichte aus Baden-Wurttemberg 20:112.

    h o u s l e y, r . a . , c . s . g a m b l e , m . s t r e e t , a n d p . p e t -t i t t . 1997. Radiocarbon evidence for the late glacial humanrecolonisation of Northern Europe. Proceedings of the Prehis-toric Society 63:2554.

    l o r b l a n c h e t , m . 1984. Grotte Carriot, in Lart des caver-nes: Atlas des grottes ornees paleolithiques francaises. Editedby A. Leroi-Gourhan, pp. 45354. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale.

    m u l l e r - b e c k , h . Editor. 1983. Urgeschichte in Baden-Wurt-temberg. Stuttgart: Theiss.

    m u l l e r - b e c k , h . , a n d g . a l b r e c h t . Editors. 1987. DieAnfange der Kunst vor 30.000 Jahren. Stuttgart: Theiss.

    o b e r m a i e r , h . 1914. Fouilles en Bavie`re. LAnthropologie 25:25462.

    o l i v a , m . 1996. Le Paleolithique superieur de la republiqueTche`que (19911995), in Le Paleolithique supe`rieur europeen:Bilan quinquennial 19911996, UISPP, Forl, 1996, Commis-sion 8, vol. 76, pp. 11529.

    r i c h t e r , d . , j . w a i b l i n g e r , w. j . r i n k , a n d g . a .w a g n e r . 2000. Thermoluminescence, electron spin reso-nance, and 14C-dating of the Late Middle and Early Upper Pa-laeolithic site of Geissenklosterle Cave in southern Germany.Journal of Archaeological Science 27:7189.

    r i e k , g . 1934. Die Eiszeitjagerstation am Vogelherd im Lone-tal. Vol. 1. Die Kulturen. Tubingen: Heine.

    s a i e r , c . 1994. Das Material der Altgrabungen vom HohlenFelsen, Gemeinde Schelklingen, Alb-Donau-Kreis. Mastersthesis, University of Tubingen, Tubingen, Germany.

    s c h e e r , a . 1994. Neue jungpalaolithische Funde aus demHohle Fels bei Schelklingen, Alb-Donau-Kreis. ArchaologischeAusgrabungen in Baden-Wurttemberg 1993, pp. 2427.

    s c h m i d , e . 1989. Die Altsteinzeitliche Elfenbeinstatuette ausder Hohle Stadel im Hohlenstein bei Asselfingen, Alb-Donau-Kreis. Fundberichte aus Baden-Wurttemberg 14:33118.

    s c h m i d t , r . r . 1912. Die diluviale Vorzeit Deutschlands.Stuttgart: Schweizerbart.

    w e t z e l , r . 1961. Der Hohlenstein im Lonetal: Dokumente alt-europaischer Kulturen vom Eiszeitalter bis zur Volkerwande-rung. Mitteilungen des Verein fur Naturwissenschaft undMathematik in Ulm (Donau) 26:2175.

    Cooperative Reproduction in IturiForest Hunter-Gatherers: WhoCares for Efe Infants?1

    paula k. iveyDepartment of Anthropology, University of NewMexico, Albuquerque, N.M. 87131, U.S.A.([email protected]). 13 iii 00

    Efe foragers of the Ituri Forest, Democratic Republic ofthe Congo, share in a unique child-rearing system inwhich infants receive care from many individuals otherthan their mothers from birth into early childhood (Tron-ick, Morelli, and Winn 1987, Tronick, Morelli, and Ivey1992). Cooperative reproduction is highly unusual froman interspecific perspective and is especially challengingto evolutionary theory, compelling primatologists andbiologists to devote considerable attention to parentingbehaviors exhibited by alloparents (individuals otherthan the parent) toward conspecific young (e.g., Reidman1982, Emlen 1984, McKenna 1987, Small 1990, Clutton-Brock 1991). From an explosion of research on animalbehavior since the 1960s, three general hypotheses havecome to dominate ecological perspectives on apparentlyaltruistic parenting behaviors: nepotism, reciprocity, andlearning-to-mother.

    1. Nepotism predicts a substantial amount of variationin alloparenting both within and between species (Mc-Kenna 1987). Investing in kin is considered an extensionof investing in ones own genetic reproduction, as thedegree to which genes are shared is expected to predictshared fitness interests. This equation, however, like allevolutionary predictions, is economic in nature andweighted by the relative costs and benefits to individualsof alternative behaviors within a specific environmentalcontext (Williams 1966, Altmann 1979, Emlen 1995).The costs and benefits of particular behavioral strategiesare determined by ecological interactions of the socialand physical environment and individual life-history pa-rameters affecting survival, growth, development, andreproduction. Human life history sets the stage for atleast two important opportunities for kin, as well as oth-ers, to care, with important coevolutionary conse-quences. Parents nurture multiple weaned dependents,

    1. q 2000 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearch. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2000/4105-0008$1.00.Thisresearch was supported by grants from the National Science Foun-dation (BNS-8609013), the National Institute of Child Health andDevelopment (1-RO1-HD22431), and the Spencer Foundation. I amdeeply grateful to those who made this work possible: Edward Z.Tronick, Child Development Unit, Childrens Hospital, Boston,Mass., and Gilda A. Morelli, Boston College, Boston, Mass., for theopportunity to conduct this research; Jane B. Lancaster, James S.Chisholm, David S. Wilkie, Bryan K. Curran, and Hillard S. Kaplanfor additional assistance and counsel; Snowden M. Henry and MariaElena Argueta for critical and continued support; and anonymousreviewers for their comments. Above all, I am indebted to the Efe.

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  • Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 857

    table 1Caregivers Predicted by Alloparenting Hypotheses

    Allocaregiver Nepotism Reciprocity Learning-to-Mother

    Adult male U Adult female

    Reproductive U U Nonreproductive U Postreproductive U

    Child male U U Child female U U U

    increasing the demand for and availability of care (Lan-caster 1997). Consistent with theoretical indications thata lengthy developmental period favors allocare by re-tained related helpers-at-the-nest (Lack 1966, Brown1987, Koenig et al. 1992), sibling care is the most com-mon form of alloparenting in traditional societies (Weis-ner and Gallimore 1977). In addition to the prereprod-uctive period, early female reproductive senescence mayincrease the probability of completing investment inlater-born young (Lancaster and King 1985, Hill and Hur-tado 1991, Hawkes et al. 1998) and enhance the repro-ductive efforts of adult offspring through assistance infood getting (Hawkes 1997) or child care (Hill and Hur-tado 1996).

    2. Reciprocity. Other interspecific research suggeststhat where the costs of aiding unrelated young are lessthan the costs of leaving the group (e.g., because of pre-dation pressure, low food availability, or social compe-tition), unrelated helpers may assist parents in return forenhanced access to physical (e.g., food, territory) and so-cial (e.g., alliance, mating) resources necessary for repro-duction (Ligon 1983, Reyer 1984, Davies 1990). Emlen(1982a, b) modeled the fitness payoffs of helping betweenunrelated individuals, concluding that contributing re-sources to the reproductive success of an unrelated in-dividual would be a successful strategy for both helperand beneficiary if they resided in a marginal environmentwith highly unpredictable access to the resources nec-essary for reproduction. Comparative analyses suggestthat cooperative breeding is found in environments thatare extremely limited in resources or saturated with con-specifics, limiting opportunities for juvenile or subor-dinate individuals to secure food, mates, space, or otherresources necessary for independent reproduction (Clut-ton-Brock 1991). By definition, small traditional societieslack the intensive stratification that results in large-scalesubversion of the reproductive interests of some mem-bers of the group to the advantage of others. However,cross-cultural research confirms that demographic, ec-onomic, and social limitations commonly impinge on anindividuals ability to mate and parent young in thesepopulations (Irons 1983; Hill and Kaplan 1988a, b; Bailey1991a; Hill and Hurtado 1996). The extent of cooperativebehavior exhibited within human groups, on a scale un-paralleled in other species, suggests that in some eco-logical contexts allocare by unrelated but frequently in-

    teracting individuals may be included in the suite ofshared and reciprocal social behaviors, such as cooper-ative resource acquisition and food sharing, that char-acterize traditional behavioral patterns.

    3. Learning-to-mother. Like the reciprocity hypothe-sis, the learning-to-mother hypothesis predicts that per-sonal but delayed fitness benefits are associated withalloparenting. Through skills gained from caring for theyoung of others, prereproductive individuals may in-crease the chances of survival for their own future off-spring without incurring the risks to their young of in-experienced care (Spencer-Booth 1970, Lancaster 1971,McKenna 1987). This hypothesis is based on several ob-servations: (a) parenting skills do not appear to be innateamong primates; (b) survivorship among primate off-spring is highly dependent on the quality of care theyreceive; and (c) the infant mortality rate for primiparousfemale primates is higher than that for multiparous ones.Field studies report increasing reproductive success withage due to increasing reproductive skills in a number ofnonprimate species as well (Lack 1966, Charlesworth1980, Clutton-Brock 1988). Perhaps in no species is thequality of care more critical to developmental outcomeand future reproductive success of young than in hu-mans, with important life-history consequences for par-ents, caregivers, and their wards (Bogin 1998, Charles-worth 1988, Hrdy 1992, Chisholm 1999). As predictedby their future role as mothers, cross-culturally, younggirls most frequently perform allocare (Barry, Bacon, andChild 1957, Weisner and Gallimore 1977).

    The hypotheses of nepotism, reciprocity, and learning-to-mother suggest specific life-history strategies for al-loparenting the young of others (table 1). Evolutionaryecological theory predicts that caregivers will allocateinvestment on the basis of the inclusive-fitness costs andbenefits of providing care, with individuals giving careto the closest dependent who is likely to benefit fromchild care efforts. The probability and amount of in-vestment should be determined by (1) the degree of re-latedness between the potential caregiver and the childand (2) the ratio of the cost of care to the caregiversfitness to the fitness benefit received by the child. Whileecological theory implies an economic impact (i.e., costor benefit) of behavior on individual reproduction, mea-suring the survival or reproductive consequences asso-ciated with specific behaviors remains challenging (Rog-ers 1990, Clutton-Brock 1991, Lessells 1991, Kaplan1997). The potential overlap of individual investmentinterests (e.g., kinship and reciprocal interests) and thecompeting tradeoffs of alternative behaviors (i.e., oppor-tunity costs) complicates the task of assigning costs andbenefits of behaviors to individual fitness. With regardto these constraints, this investigation assumes a tem-porally proximate focus: to examine the distribution ofEfe infant allocare across caregivers to assess the ex-planatory strength of alternative hypotheses.

    alloparenting among the efe

    While some form of allocare has been described, at leastqualitatively, in most hunter-gatherer societies, the most

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  • 858 F current anthropology

    extreme example of alloparenting in a foraging popula-tion has been reported for the Efe of the Ituri Forest. Datacollected in 198283 showed that the percentage of timeyoung infants spent in physical contact with individualsother than their mothers increased from 39% at 3 weeksto 60% at 18 weeks. During observations infants werecared for by an average of 14.2 different persons, with arange of 5 to 24 (Tronick, Morelli, and Winn 1987). Tron-ick et al. hypothesized that this communal pattern ofcare was a cultural adaptation to the thermoregulatorychallenges faced by Efe infants. Infants on average weigh2.4 kg at birth, a weight considered at risk in the West-ern medical context (Tronick and Winn 1992). Peacock(1985) and Hewlett (1991) have suggested that the uniquepattern of Efe infant care may be explained by high ratesof infertility among reproductive-age Efe women. Tron-ick, Morelli, and Winn (1989), however, found that thefrequency of care by nulliparous adult females did notaccount for the extent of allocare. A number of studiesdescribe Efe child care from a developmental point ofview (Tronick, Winn, and Morelli 1987; Morelli andTronick 1991; Morelli 1987, 1997; Tronick, Morelli, andIvey 1992); however, it remains unclear why so manyindividuals among the Efe forfeit their time and energyto provide care to the young of others. This investigationwas prompted by the challenge of alloparenting behaviorto ecological precepts: Who cares for Efe infants, andwhat are the costs and benefits to alloparents of childcare services rendered?

    the study population

    A corpus of research provides details of the environmentand lives of the Efe (cf. Morelli 1987, Peacock 1985, El-lison, Peacock, and Lager 1986, Tronick, Morelli, andWinn 1987, Wilkie 1988, Fisher and Strickland 1989, Jen-ike 1987, Bailey and DeVore 1989, Bailey 1991a, Wilkieand Curran 1993). The Efe are widely accepted to be themost traditional population of pygmies in Africa. Theyassociate with horticultural groups in an elaborateexchange system whereby farmers trade cultivated foodsand material goods (e.g., cloth and metal) for the valuableforest resources of meat, honey, medicines, and buildingmaterials (Wilkie 1989, Bailey 1991a). The Efe periodi-cally provide labor in the gardens of the Sudanic-speak-ing Lese; however, since the end of colonial harvest quo-tas in the 1960s, the severe deterioration of roads, andthe collapse of the cash market since the 1980s, mostLese gardens have contracted to subsistence level. Labordemands are intermittent, and many Efe lack access toopportunities for garden work. While some Efe have es-tablished their own gardens, they tend to be small andcommunal, with low and unpredictable yields (Wilkieand Curran 1993). Only one focal family in this inves-tigation planted a small shared seasonal garden ofcassava.

    The Efe live in camps ranging from 6 to 45 people,with an average of 21. Typically, they clear a small areaof forest (1015 m diameter) and construct low huts inan open semicircle around a communal space in which

    most daily camp activities occur. Although descent ispatrilineal and residence is virilocal, maternal relativesmay also live in the natal camp because of sororal mar-riage exchange between clans. Nuclear families share ahut, which is primarily used for storage and sleeping,and a cooking hearth, but children, including infants, areby no means restricted from playing, exploring, and evensleeping in other areas of camp. Efe women usually traveltogether in small groups to gather forest produce, suchas fruits, nuts, tubers, and mushrooms, fish in thestreams that traverse the forest, or forage for bananas,cassava, and sweet potato in abandoned gardens. Gardenlabor is highly seasonal; during planting and harvest Efewomen may assist Lese women, and Efe men are usuallyengaged in horticultural work only to fell trees whennew gardens are cleared from the forest. Efe males huntwith bow and arrow in groups, using dogs and huntersto flush game to waiting bowmen, or hunt primates sol-itarily by stealth. Camps move on an average of everysix weeks in response to changing access to forest andhorticultural resources, from near-village gardens duringplanting and harvest to deeper in the forest during primehoney, fishing, and hunting seasons (Bailey and Peacock1988, Wilkie and Curran 1993).

    methods

    Data were collected between January 1988 and October1989 in 18 camps within a 36-km radius of the IturiProject research station in northeastern Democratic Re-public of the Congo. The focal subject sampling tech-nique (Altmann 1974, Borgerhoff Mulder and Caro 1985)was adapted to record the behaviors of infant and mothersimultaneously across all contexts, with the infant asthe priority focal subject. The focal sample consisted of20 infants (13 females and 7 males) between 12 and 15months of age. Infants were observed for eight 15-minutesessions sampled across two consecutive and typicaldays, evenly distributed across daylight hours. Behaviorswere continuously recorded as they occurred on a laptopcomputer that simultaneously tracked real time, facili-tating a calculation of the absolute duration of events.Time measures were adjusted to a 12-hour day. Scansrecording the identity of all individuals within visual orclose hearing range of the infant (i.e., within a reasonabledistance to respond to infant distress) were conductedimmediately before and after each block of continuousbehavioral coding, and departures and approaches of in-dividuals were recorded as they occurred, to calculatethe total proportion of time that individuals were inphysical proximity to the infant. All exchanges of ma-terial goods, including food and other resources, betweenparents and individuals other than dependent childrenwere recorded, whether they occurred within coding pe-riods or not. Systematic and informal interviews wereconducted with mothers and other caregiv