The First Person Singular

21. What I Have to Imagine

97 21 What I Have to Imagine While the term “myth” in the polemics of positivists and in much current discourse designates the fantasies of a collectivity, in anthropology “myth” designates a discourse, common to a community, that arises out of and gives rise to ritual. Its categories appear as archetypal images or symbols; its narrative plot represents their relationships, conflicts, combinations, and resolutions. Myths are taken to provide a meaning to the actions and inactions of individuals, the undertakings and common projects of a collective , and the lives of a human collectivity among other collectivities and among other species in nature. It happens that two societies and two myths enter into contact— the Islam of the Arab invaders and the old Zoroastrianism of the Persians ; the white mythology of priests and missionaries and the old African mythologies of enslaved peoples in Mississippi, Brazil, and Haiti. Two political systems, two economies, and also two mythologies pull in different directions in the activities and also in the understanding of people. There results not only mental confusion but physical inability to function in this field of contradictions. In the in-between zone, where the two cultures and mythical systems imperfectly overlap, marginal leaders—medicine men, faith healers, Vodouserviteurs , cargo cult messiahs—work. They interpret the enslavement and deportation from Africa to Brazil, Haiti, and Mississippi in terms of the deportation and enslavement of the Jews in Egypt; they identify the triumphant white-skinned saints set up in the altars of Catholicism, Saint James and Saint George, with Ogum and Oxossi, African gods of war and knowledge. Their work is not simply to construct coherence between the universal categories of divergent myths; it is to construct coherence between the universal categories of myths and the concrete experience of individual people. They have to enable individuals to make sense of their ametropic lives. They work piecemeal, rather like jurisprudence works. The healers and serviteurs operate by bricolage, by tinkering with the system, using parts of Christian mythology and parts of Aztec or Yoruba mythology to make sense of what is happening in this individual. They have to fill in the gaps; they invent, they work by inspiration. They improvise rituals and 98 T H E F I R S T P E R S O N S I N G U L A R sacraments. And shamans really do, in many cases, succeed in making individuals functional again; healers really do heal.1 Field anthropologists found that typically shamans and healers had undergone some severe crisis in their lives. They had fallen into deep depressions, had fallen prey to strange sicknesses, had suffered physical and nervous collapse. Now they help other dysfunctional individuals by individualizing myths to explain their sicknesses and diagram cures. Are shamans and healers in fact neurotics and psychotics, improvising religions—which Freud called collective neuroses? Or should we say that neurotics and psychotics have shamans, witch doctors, Vodou serviteurs inside them—or that they are shamans, witch doctors, Vodou serviteurs occupied only with themselves? Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan conceived the fantasy systems of neurotics and psychotics as private myths. But does not each of us elaborate such private myths? The common language of physical dynamics and electromagnetism, and of physiology, neurology, psychology, and pragmatic reason—the meaning system of our culture—has to be applied to our environment and our bodies in order to enable us to make sense of how our bodies function or do not function in the situations in which we find ourselves. In seeking to do so, we may find that the symbolic system has internal flaws or else that it does not adequately fit our environment. Moreover, the meaning system, the categories, are general, while we are individuals in particular situations . There is a gap; each of us has to fill in, with meaningful terms, this gap. The symbols we each devise to cover over the gap will be particular to ourself. They populate a fantasy space that is individual to each of us and which consists not simply of a floating mass of images but a personal system of interpretation. For Immanuel Kant the rational community is the first and only form of community in which each individual practices respect for the others. What commands our respect for other people is the evidence that they exist on their own as rational agents. A rational agent is not just driven this way and that by external lures and internal unconscious drives...