The matted gloves worn by the boy in
the picture are filed with hundreds of bullet ants sewn into the glove with
their stings facing inwards. It is part of the Coming of Age rite of initiation practiced by the Satere Mawe of the Amazonian rainforest. According to the Schmidt Sting-Pain Index, bullet ant stings are the worst in the insect world;
and the boy must dance while he is enduring the agony. He is 12 years old and
will have to endure this ritual twenty times before being considered ‘a man’.
1 Whichever Amazonian first devised this piece of exquisite torture was a
genius equal to the Marquis de Sade himself.
Given a sufficiently harsh dose of
pain, humiliation or degradation the personality will undergo a deep
transmutation. This is a piece of folk knowledge has existed since the first
hunter gatherers of Upper Paleolithic societies created Initiation Rites of Passage
for their adolescent young men.
Personality changes produced by
traditional Initiation Rites all have
one common purpose: the creation of a new identity that rejects childhood,
replacing it with a personality that identifies with those inducing the trauma:
i.e. the elders of the tribe or cult.
In primitive societies when a young
man, still yet a child, undergoes an Initiatory
Right of Passage he emerges from the
terribly painful process a fearless warrior or hunter: ‘a man’. He has a new
identity. In some societies the internal rejection of everything associated
with childhood and the feminine is so thorough that, from then on, he will not
even acknowledge his own mother.
I think what happens in such violent
initiations is similar to the well known phenomena of falling in love with your
abuser or torturer. Known as the Stockholm
syndrome, for which there has never been a satisfactory explanation. 2
I am going to suggest the explanation lies in
the way a weak person under stress identifies with someone who is strong.
Under extreme stress I have a shift
of identity. Where the abuser is convincingly enforcing his power over me
something dramatically unconscious happens: I shift valence. I unconsciously appropriate him and his power by becoming
him. I am no longer purely a victim.
This would explain why, having been
being abused, I tend to become an abuser myself. I am acting out of the
powerful ‘abuser identity’ I appropriated when I was the victim. Later, when I
am dealing with a weak person, I will tend to shift into the abuser valance
that is now one of my identities.
It seems that the greater the pain of the
abuse, the more complete is the shift of valence and the rejection of the
former identity. This is why Initiation
Rites of Passage in primitive societies are so extraordinarily prolonged
and violent. They have to have an identity changing impact that’s overwhelming.
It has to be so painful that the boy shifts out of who he is. His new identity
will reject the identity (the child) that has undergone the pain, replacing it
with the identity of the elders. He gives up himself to be them – in other words, he shifts valence into their more powerful
identity and, with it, assumes all their habits and values. After this he can
differentiate himself from any pain or
suffering. He is now ‘a man’ of the tribe.
Rites of Passage are intrinsically conservative. They
are designed to transmit traditional habits and to stifle individual creativity
and innovation. One can see this at work in most religions and gangs. These
groups derive their incredible persistence, in part, from the cloned identities
of their devotees transmitted down the generations.
For girls of the Uaupes of Brazil traditional Initiation Rites
are just as severe as for boys. The rejection of childhood and the creation of
separate, authorized identity is still the goal.
‘When a girl reaches puberty she
undergoes one month’s seclusion fed only on bread and water. Then the girl is
brought out naked and beat with sticks by family and friends until she is
either dead or blacks out. Once the girl wakes up, if she does, the beating is repeated four times. After the fourth
beating the sticks used to beat her with are dipped into pots of fat and given
to the girl to lick. She is now considered a woman worthy of marriage.’3 That she may be, but
somehow, after that lot, I don’t think she’ll be leading the African Women’s
Rights movement.
·
We could say that major steps in life
are either forced by external conditions or by a Readiness for Change. Steps brought about by duty, severe crisis or
social pressures are forced changes for which the person may not ready. A
forced identity change usually arises out of environmental pressure or impact
of some kind. Such changes will tend to
create a separate identity that rejects its former self, thus inhibiting the continual,
natural flow of development. A radical change of identity causes a split in the
personality, cutting it off from the previous identity and its memories.
Rainforest rites of passage are an extreme example of this.
The psyche’s ability to assume and
discard identities is a phenomenon that has not been fully acknowledged or studied.
I’m not talking about schizophrenia – perhaps manifestation of this ability – I
talking about identities that are assumed and discarded in the course of
‘normal’ life. For example, different people have different points in their
childhood before which they can remember little or nothing. The cut-off happens
early for some; for others quite late. A shift of identity can come about by
finding oneself in a hostile or alien family. An identity is then assumed that
seems to be what is required, often a copy of someone in the environment.
Each past identity has its own slant
on life, its own emotions and its own memory. A discarded identity doesn’t just
disappear. Depending on the severity of the rejection, a discarded identity has
a strong and stable persistence in the unconscious.
One often hears people say, ‘part of me thinks this and part of me
thinks that’. This is not just a cognitive variance of ideas. These are different
identities in conflict.
I think if we regard of our serious
conflicts in terms of different identities and the historical context in which
they were created, we begin to sympathise with how we got to where we are. We
begin to appreciate our own story.
As to the vexed question: which of
all these identities is the real me? The answer is:
it depends who’s asking !
I
1 Coming of Age: The Importance of Male Rites of Passage
Brett & Kate McKay
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2008/11/09/coming-of-age-the-importance-of-male-
rites-of-passage/
rites-of-passage/
2
http://counsellingresource.com/lib/therapy/self-help/stockholm/
3
http://akorra.com/2010/10/10/top-10-odd-puberty-rituals/
contact:
stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
(03) 981 2264
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