«They came in the night and grabbed me, took me outside and tore my shirt off. That annoyed me - you know how hard it is to get a decent shirt in the village - but they were all masked so I didn’t know who it was. Then one of them beat me on the back with those sharp reeds that really cut you and pushed me in the bullrushes - you know the ones whose sting lasts for days. Then they dragged me down to the lake to a muddy bit where the crocodiles live and threw me in the water, shouting that the crocodiles were coming. They held my head under the water till I nearly drowned and something sharp grabbed my leg and when I was hysterical they ran away, laughing. I dragged myself home and collapsed. The cuts all got infected and I couldn’t move for three days. The pain was terrible and I got a fever that nearly killed me. It was a wonderful spiritual experience.»
The words of an anthropologist describing his initiation into a men’s masking society in East Africa. Anthropology is full of pain. First, there is the pain of the fieldwork researcher. This is an odd pain for his or her suffering is taken as a measure of the value of their work. Anthropologists have been beaten and scarified, circumcised and starved, spat on and rubbed in excrement, all in the name of getting inside the skin of local people, understanding the way they think and feel. Pain is the ultimate proof of seriousness of purpose, of sympathy and empathy, the absolute core of the participant observation that is virtually the only intellectual capital of the subject. It is assumed that people who go to Africa or Asia to study exotic cultures must feel pain as the ultimate «being there». You just know that any anthropologist worth the name who was working on Christianity would absolutely insist on being nailed to a cross.
Yet, as my colleague’s words show, you are not supposed to make too much of it. It was a wonderful experience. For the measure of your understanding of what you have been through is that, where as for other mortals it would have been hell, you actually enjoyed it. To live amongst a people, suffer pain and hardship at their hands and not love them and their way of life is to be simply an ungrateful tourist who failed to grasp the local viewpoint. You are the equivalent of someone who went to Paris and couldn’t be bothered to go up the Eiffel Tower. I once worked among a people where the central rite of a man’s life was to have his penis peeled for its entire length. It literally sorted the men from the boys. Without undergoing it, you were a snivelling child, wet and smelly, as contemptible as a mere woman. After the transformation, you were a real man, the finest thing God had created and allowed to swagger and swear oaths on the knife of circumcision. I sat up all one night worrying about whether to become a «real» man or - more seriously - a «real» hairy-chested anthropologist. Then, I paid a fine of six bottles of beer to the men to be classed as «honorary circumcised». I still think it is the best deal I ever made.
Then there is the pain of the «natives». That, too, is everywhere. Pain is a resource that is deployed lavishly in human culture. In the Third World, we think immediately of a government monopoly of pain, the torturers in their dark rooms who live hand in glove with military dictatorships and absolutist regimes and deploy their batons, castor oil and electrodes in the loyal service of the state. One day, we smuggly believe, progress will sweep them away and everyone will enjoy universal human rights.
Yet pain is not just an aberration within imperfect nation states. In villages and townships, cattle camps and nomadic encampments, pain is proudly and openly deployed in traditional ways. Boys have their penes cut to open like flowers when they have an erection or drive pins through their noses and tongues. Men slash at their genitals with glass. Girls have their clitores sliced off, their lips pierced and their feet hobbled. Backs and faces and stomachs are pricked and carved and tattooed with blunt nails. People are mutilated and maimed and disfigured.
Human culture drips with blood and inflicted pain and the surprising thing is that most of it is voluntary. For pain is an important cultural resource and even in the West, we are raised in an economy of pain. As a child, I was assured that Christ suffered for me. I was to be redeemed by suffering myself and when I suffered I should accept it and offer up my pain to him. The explanation and colonisation of pain is a principal concern of all religions. I once bought a poignant T-shirt. «Shit happens,» it declared. «Catholics say shit happens because of original sin. Jews say shit happens because I don’t love my mother. Protestants say shit happens because I don’t work harder. Hindus say here’s that same old shit coming round again. Buddhists say: What shit?»
The body is not just something we live in. It can be used to show our social and symbolic place in the world. In the West, as we grow up, we have to gain slow ownership over own bodies until we are recognised as adult. Adolescence is a series of battles over ownership of hair, face, genitals and young adults notoriously dye, pierce and paint ever part of the new territory they have gained. The first thing you do with newly private bits is flaunt them publicly. When we change our social status, join the army, get sent to prison or admitted to hospital, we lose control of parts of our bodies again. Body and symbolic status are so closely tied together that, as we get old and our bodies fall apart, our social place falls apart too.
Elsewhere such transitions are less gradual. They may involve dramatic public rituals and often pain is part of this. Pain strips us bare of pretension, humbles us, reduces the whole world down to our own bodies and concentrates time to the here and now, this very second we are living through in agony. It has been said that we are only truly aware of language at the moment when it becomes opaque, as in poetry. Pain does the same for human experience. It is the opposite of that dissolution of self that comes from orgasm or the mystical nirvana for it etches the brutal reality of the material in every fibre of our being. For this reason, it is often a central part of rites of passage, where people pass from one status to another.
Nothing more dramatically demonstrates the difference between members and non-members than the infliction of pain that is humbly accepted in the knowledge that, one day, the sufferer will become the tormentor of neophytes in his turn. Nothing carries more clearly the message that what is being acquired in the ritual is of huge value and there is no bigger gap than that between the torturer and his (even willing) victim. And the fact that the change may be carved into the living flesh of the initiate makes it permanent and truly part of his or her being.
Moreover, pain is a versatile currency. «Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry for» our parents would threaten us as children. Physical pain turns up at funerals as the counterpart of mental anguish, expressing the social loss the living have suffered. But here it is usually self-inflicted, unlike at initiations. Whereas, in the West, we may slip into black and look a little sad, around the world, the bereaved gash their heads, punch themselves in the face, chop off digits or make themselves permanently blind by crying and sitting in smoke.
Such drama belies the evanescence of physical pain. Like smell, in all languages, pain is powerful and evocative yet defies vocabulary. Doctors struggle to grasp it and interpret their patients’ groping descriptions of it. It is a private language impossible to communicate. Pain can only be compared to something else, something usually inflicted by others. So it is «stabbing», «throbbing», «splitting» and perhaps this is why cultures around the world are only too willing to ascribe it to the hostility of others, to the external malevolence of witchcraft, sorcery, divine attack, rather than the treachery of our own flesh and blood. And, as shown in the words of my colleague undergoing initiation, it cannot be held on to.
Pain is quicksilver. When we have it, it is the only reality. When it is gone, its intensity becomes incredible even to ourselves. Ask any woman who has undergone childbirth or any victim of the concentration camps. Pain must be constantly recalled, commemorated, marked in other ways or it simply dissolves, slips through the cracks of perception and becomes implausible even to us who have suffered it. Perhaps this is why pain-reformers, those who campaign against the brutality of traditional rituals, have so little success. Initiation is their principal subject and female, rather than male their preferred target. This is because feminist crusaders ideally see all culture as a male conspiracy so that girls have a greater claim to victimhood than boys who will only grow up to become oppressors themselves.
Several years ago, I was attacked in the street at night, quite out of the blue, in what I had always considered a safe part of town. A boy of about sixteen came up behind me and swung a baseball bat at my head. I must have caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye, for, by some miracle, I turned and so only received a glancing blow to the temple as he ran off laughing. The policeman who interviewed me was clearly bored. «We know who it was» he said, yawning. «But we’ll never prove it. They’ll all stick together and no witnesses will come forward. It was a kid’s gang. They’re a bunch of teenagers and this is their initiation. It may seem odd to you but they have to go out and beat someone up to join. They didn’t make a very good job of you and the kid will probably have to do it again.» - «It’s nice that someone is keeping up standards.» This was not a joking matter and he looked disapproving. «If it’s any comfort, you were chosen completely at random. It could have been anyone. There was no reason.»
But I knew it wasn’t that simple. Years ago, I had ducked out of my own anthropological initiation into fieldwork, paid the beer instead of yielding up the terrible pain of circumcision. Now, this was the bill coming round again. It was an explanation worthy of being put on the T-shirt with the others, another version of the human insistence that we lived in a just universe. Now, I can no longer recall the terror and pain of lying there on the pavement, blind from the blood flowing into my eyes, as passers-by stepped carefully round me. In a few years more, like my initiated colleague, I will probably describe it all as a wonderful spiritual experience.