On rituals and familiarity

whee... anthropology post time. If you're looking for doggy things, move along.

Rituals are peculiar things. On the one hand, they can be extremely mundane. Brushing your teeth, for example, is a thing that, aside from a practical function, for many persons serve as the preparation for sleep, or relaxation, or make them ready for the start of their day. I'm oversimplifying, but yeah, brushing your teeth is pretty much as mundane as it gets, yet it can be considered a ritual. On the other hand, you get the large, society-organising, mind shifting, world altering rituals. This is the inauguration of a president, or the human sacrifice that marks the end of one era and the beginning of the next in many South American societies. The removal of a heart and the resulting death of a person is considered pretty foreign to our understanding of the world, and is seriously overdramatised and made into a spectacle by Hollywood (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, anyone?).

Yet, just this morning, I attended such a ritual. It was a brain, and not a heart, but I feel like I'm splitting hairs in this case. Let me describe it to you:

Before the brain-ritual can begin, the ceremonial priests undergo extensive preparation. They are ritually clothed in garb that is never present outside of these rituals. The garb is loose, unflattering clothing that would be closest to sleepwear, and would accordingly be considered inappropriate to wear anywhere else. The garb is usually all of one colour, green, blue or white being typical, though brown is not unheard of. They cover their feet in special coverings in order to keep the outside world and all of its contaminating elements out of the ritual space, and also to keep the ritual space separate from the everyday, outside world. These are not shoes, and would not provide any protection to their feet from physical dangers like thorns or stones - they serve no purpose aside from maintaining and isolating the purity of the ritual space in this society. They also cover their heads in a similar manner to the way they cover their feet. This masks any hairstyle they may be wearing. In fact, the ceremonial garb seems to deliberately depersonalise the ceremonial priest - he or she is merely a symbol of being someone with the knowledge and necessary training to carry out this ritual, and his or her individuality is entirely irrelevant to the situation.

Once appropriately garbed and hooded, they proceed to clense their hands. They have special liquids that they apply and a strictly ritualised manner in which they apply this liquid. This is considered so important that even though the ritual is very harmful to their skin, over time resulting in very dry, cracked skin that can be fairly painful to live with, they do this every time and with great precision. Special circular motions and interlocking of finger digits are concluded by a long and careful rinsing process. Once done, these hands may now not touch anything in the ordinary, everyday world. They are carefully covered in purpose made gloves, gloves which are typically also worn only during rituals such as these.

I, as an observer occupying that peculiar space between a knowledgeable person and a layperson, was allowed to observe this process through a special screen. My knowledge comes from my experience as an anthropologist, but does not grant me the privileges of a fully fledged initiate into the ceremonial priesthood - something which takes roughly ten years to achieve, though initiates start practicing this ceremony from their second or third year. 

The priest enters the ceremonial area, and finds a human brain laid out on an altar for him. Priests are often male, though women are not excluded from becoming such priests. The brain has been carefully prepared by initiates. The skull was carefully sawed open, the brain stem severed, and the brain itself anointed, oiled and perfumed to make it into a ceremonial object. On special side-tables alongside the altar are various implements. A long bladed knife, various hooks and pins, and an assortment of what looks to be tweezers are laid out in neat rows. These implements, like the tables and altar, have all been ritually heated and anointed with alcoholic substances in preparation.

The brain is ritually sourced. Sometimes, a person willingly donates their body for this kind of ritual dismemberment. This is quite rare, though, and is socially a little frowned upon. More usually, the brain is taken from someone killed violently, often by the rapid impact of a big object to their body at high speed. This body is then not claimed or identified by anyone, which signals its availability for use in this ritual. Often, these bodies come from the least of society, the poorest, those with few social connections, people who will not be missed.

For the next hour or more, I truly lost track of time, the priest spoke a special language as he carefully cut the brain into ever smaller pieces, sometimes following along with the curved grey matter, at other times cutting through it. The special language is never spoken outside of the ritual context or the training therefore, lest it lose its power. It is made up of ancient languages of people that the priests consider their forebears, even though it is nearly impossible that they are actually genetically related to people who spoke those languages thousands of years ago. As he speaks, he names each piece of the brain with a word of power, that imbues that section with meaning and power that is only meaningful and powerful to the initiates of the priesthood, but that nonetheless leave the audience with a sense of awe and power.

The ritual is repeated, again and again, with no purpose outside of naming the parts and practicing the skills needed to perform the ritual itself. 

Finally, the ritual concludes with clapping of hands as a show of appreciation for the work done by the priest, and much admiration is expressed for the straightness of his cuts and his ability to remember and recite the ceremonial names of each part. 

What I was in fact watching was not some obscure tribal ritual, but a dissection of a brain by an anatomy expert. This ritual, that I have made seem somewhat strange, is in fact a perfectly ordinary teaching tool for making doctors and neuro-scientists - highly valued and powerful experts in their own context. 

Why did I make this seem so strange? Anthropology typically seeks to make the strange seem normal. In that way, it is a very powerful tool with which to fight prejudice (witchcraft is not foolish or superstition, in fact, it explains unfortunate events quite well, and even gives you some sense of control over them - see this PDF article by Evans Pritchard). But in an interesting twist of fighting prejudice, anthropology can also make the normal seem strange, by couching it in the narrative style usually reserved for practices we would find abnormal, worthy of condemnation. I'm not trying to say that dissections are worthy of condemnation, definitely not. I am trying to point out how very weird our medical science is. How very powerful our doctors and other medical people are, that they can take body parts from people and display them, anonymously and with great ceremony, to other experts. 

These body parts, depersonalised, unnamed, disconnected from a person, is entirely foreign to nearly anyone's experience after dying - most are carefully placed in caskets, celebrated and buried, with a marker indicating who they were and how long they lived. If the cadaver was donated, there may well be such a marker for the person, but donations are rare (and no wonder). Part of the reason for this rarity, is of course, a culturally-mediated conviction that bodies must be whole to be able to be resurrected upon the return of the messiah, but part of it is also that few people want to be made into such a specimen after death. Mostly, it's an unnamed and unclaimed corpse as a result of a road accident (which we have way too many of). The end of that corpse is being burned up with medical waste in a fire, or at best, remaining forever more in a jar of formaldehyde. 

Looking away from this spectacle once you've been invited in is frowned upon as unscientific (I am such a charlatan, this sort of thing makes me very queasy). Being a person of science makes you one of the most powerful people in today's world - like the priests of the Christian medieval world, they literally decide what is true and what is not, what can, and cannot, be known, or acted upon, or changed. 

I'm not trying to condemn. I'm trying to ask a question. Is this right? Is this fair? Is this, really, how we want to decide what is real, what is worth knowing and acting upon? 

Person whose brain I saw dissected today, I'll remember you. If nothing else, I can do that much. I'll remember you as a human, who lived, laughed, cried, spoke and made a difference to those around you. You were more than an amygdala oblongata and a pons, more valuable than a list of terms. Your contribution to medical science may be questionable, but I hope you teach students what they need to learn to practice medicine, and that in their practice they heal people.