Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth

7. Imprisoning Frames and Open Debates: Trobriander, Buddhist, and Balinese Rebirth Revisited

7 I M P R I S O N I N G F R A M E S A N D O P E N D E B A T E S Trobriander, Buddhist, and Balinese Rebirth Revisited reincarnation, procreation, and the embodiment of the soul In this final chapter I want to further explore a theme that pervades much of this work, that even radical religious innovation must occur within the frame of preexisting structures of thought, which can on occasion act as “prisons of the longue durée.” As usual I will place that notion within ethnographic and historical contexts, returning to the “small-scale” societies discussed in chapter 2, especially Trobriand. Then, varying our theme somewhat, I deal with Bali, a “nation” consisting of villages that resemble the small-scale societies of our sample yet have historical connections with Buddhist and Hindu cultures. Let me begin with an existential puzzle, or aporia, that is expectable in any rebirth eschatology and that is waiting to surface under suitable circumstances. The spirit or soul at death must eventually come back to earth, and for this to happen the spirit must find its way into the womb of a woman. Take the not-unusual case of the Kutchin, reported by Slobodin , in which the spirit, in the form of a small creature such as a mouse, creeps into the vagina of the woman just before parturition.1 Or consider the invisible spirit child of the Trobrianders, who clings to driftwood or a similar object and waits to enter into a woman of the same matriclan. If it is indeed the spirit that initially gets incarnated or reincarnated in the human womb, then what is the role of coitus and semi319 nal ejaculation in conception? This is a key aporia of any rebirth eschatology , and it differs from the Christological idea of the Virgin birth, which is considered miraculous and pertains to none but Jesus’ immaculate conception. One must not assume, however, that ordinary people are any more obsessed with solving aporias of existence simply because they are expectable from our model than ordinary Christians are with resolving their theodicy. Aporias of existence become relevant to ordinary people only when they are hit by untoward events or when they are forced to confront personal or familial crises. Let me begin with Plato’s idea of that wonderful original society of men without genitalia. Immoral men in this group are punished by being reincarnated as women, beasts, and plants, whereas good males reincarnate in their original form. Therefore, in this first reincarnation souls became embodied with no reference to sexual intercourse whatever, and metacosmesis as a process independent of procreation occurs. Afterward sexual intercourse becomes necessary for procreation, but women’s womb-passion poses an issue that Plato never raised, namely, whether it was possible for them to conceive without coitus and seminal injection. Souls could also be embodied in plants during the first reincarnation and presumably later on as well; this at least is not a result of intercourse! So is it with Pythagoras’s being reborn as a tree and Empedocles as a laurel , although the latter at least believed in autoreproduction among “whole-natured things.” To resolve this issue let me refer to a famous controversy that animated the anthropological imagination in the late 1960s. Provoked by Edmund Leach’s well-known essay “Virgin Birth” and Melford E. Spiro’s spirited response, numerous debates arose in Man on whether Trobrianders and the Australian àdivàsis (aborigines) were ignorant about physical paternity , specifically, the idea that “sexual connection is the cause of conception ” or that coitus is at least a necessary condition for the formation of a fetus.2 This argument, as David Schneider shrewdly put it, ignores the fact that even in sophisticated modern societies virtually everyone is in some sense ignorant of the “true” knowledge of physiological paternity, except in the simple sense of a correlation between coital insemination and conception as part of the process.3 In the 1960s one could frame the issue in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions; in the new millennium this terminology is rendered dubious by the knowledge that conception can indeed be engineered without coitus. Thus, in hindsight a cynic may argue that anthropologists of the 1960s, who were postulating a causal connection between coitus and conception, were also ig320 Imprisoning Frames and Open Debates norant of...