Landscapes of Fear

1. Introduction

Introduction Landscapes of fear? If we pause to reflect on what these are, surely swarms of images will come to mind:fear of the dark and of abandonment in childhood; anxiety in strange settings or on social occasions; dread of corpses and of the supernatural; fear of disease, war,and natural calamities; uneasiness at the sight of hospitals and prisons; fear of muggers in desolate streets and neighborhoods; anxiety at the prospect of the breakdown of world order. Fears are felt by individuals and are in this sense subjective; some, however, have a clear source in a threatening environment , others donot.Certain kinds of fears haunt children, others emerge onlywith adolescence and maturity. Some fears burden "primitive" peoples who live in stressful environments, others appear in complex technological societies that have vastpowers over nature. In every study of the human individual and of human society, fear is a theme—either covert as in stories of courage and success , or explicit as in works on phobias and human conflict. Yet no one (so far as we know)has attempted to take "landscapes of fear" as a topic worthyofsystematic exploration in its own right and for the light it may shed on questions of perennial interest: What is it to be human? What is it like to live in the world? We shall, in this book, attempt such an exploration, seeking inparticular to trace links and resonances between various landscapes of fear. Fear is not,of course, specific to human beings. All higher animals knowit as an emotion that signals danger and is necessary to survival. We tend to suppress this fact from our consciousness , perhaps because we need to preserve "nature" as an 1 . Landscapes of Fear 4 area of innocence to which we can withdrawwhen discontented with people. Forus,flowersand pebbles on the beach are images of serenity. Certain animals such as a cat nursing her kittens or a cowgrazing in a field are pictures of mammary calm. Calm in the nonhuman world is,however,deceptive. Ananimal may feel safe at home, at the center of its territory; but, given the power of its distant sensors (smell,hearing, sight),it is aware ofa much larger space which offers both temptations and threats. Few images of fear are as vivid as that of a rabbit that has just left its hole and confronts the open field: its ears shoot up and its body quivers in suspense. It is ready to run for its life at the breaking of a twig. The intensity and frequency of fear differ greatly among species . Compared with the nervous rabbit, the lion surveying its domain of open savanna seems wholly unafraid. Preyed-upon animals have, of course, more reason to be nervouslyalert than animals that prey. Herbivores have many powerful enemies, from which they must escape if they are to survive. Evolution has provided herbivores with lateral eyes, which are an advantage because they give a nearly panoramic field of vision. The rabbit, defenseless and ever watchful, may actually have binocular overlap in the region behind the head as well as in that in front of it: "No one can sneak up on a rabbit."1 Lions,like other beasts of prey, have frontal eyes. Their business is to hunt and kill; they have little cause to fear enemies coming up from behind . Vigilance must, however, be relaxed periodically in all animals. Who sleep well? "Those with a clear conscience," we would like to say,but the answer with far more general application is, "Those who can afford to be unafraid." Thus, predators such as cats sleep well, whereas species subject to heavy predation , such as rabbits, slumber poorly. Security of homeplace is also important. Bats in sheltered caves sleep more than sheep which doze in the open.2 Individuals within a species may well differ in feeling fear. Among humans—a highly polymorphous species—some people are naturally timid, whereas others are as naturally bold.We recognize temperamental variation in household pets, but are less sure how members within a wild species differ from each other, partly because observational data are lacking. Degree of polymorphism may serve, however, as a rough indicator. The bodies of individuals in some species (crowsor seagulls, for example ) are in fact very much alike, and it may be that the emotional responses of these animals show comparable uniformity.3 In estimating the kinds and range of fear known to an animal [3.144.248.24] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...