Wind, Life, Health: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives

184 Pages·2007·4.693 MB·English

by  Elisabeth Hsu, Chris Low

Preface
This publication stems from an eponymous conference held at Oxford University in
June 2005. The editors can claim to have met at a drinking hostelry on St Giles to
discuss informally topics of interest whence the initial spark was born and momen-
tum instigated for a wind conference.With particular backgrounds in the medical his-
torical anthropology of southern African Khoisan and the anthropology/history of
Chinese medicine,we were intrigued in our discussion ofwind not only by the diver-
sity and richness but also the fundamental congruency in the way wind has been per-
ceived by peoples in different parts of the world. Wind is a theme central to the
thinking ofpeoples in both contemporary and ancient cultures.The value ofdiscussing
wind lies in what it brings not only,on a theoretical level,to elucidating human rela-
tionships with one of the planet’s basic aspects of life but also to exploration of how
the materiality ofwind shapes social practice at a number offundamental levels.The
particular sensorial relationship we have with wind has persistently led to embedding
our experience of the meteorological phenomenon, and of respiration, in a web of
associations concerning life and death and the cosmos at large.
The volume examines the richness of human ideas and practices surrounding
wind,breath,spirit,sentiment,life,and health by seriously exploring the primordial
human experience ofbeing immersed in the winds in the environment and breathing
them in.It seeks to balance detailed ethnography with theoretical insight and deliber-
ately takes a broad approach to broach the subject from different disciplinary per-
spectives. The papers engage with a wide range of themes, including landscape,
weather, body, perception, emplacement, climate, seasons, song, and music. They
concern hunters and gatherers in the polar region, the Malaysian rainforest, the
Andaman Islands,and the deserts of southern Africa,as well as stratified societies of
Muslim East Africa,ancient and medieval India,China,and Greece,and historical and
modern Europe, namely the Victorian English and mountain-dwelling Swiss. Each
author brings out specific ways in which different peoples,physically and conceptu-
ally,have grappled with winds and spirits,their smells and sounds,the way they feel
and sentiments they bring about,and how these are linked to ways ofknowing about
the world and being in the world.Two regrettable exceptions from the volume concern
the potential contributions by Jim McNeley on Navajo wind and Carol Laderman on
the inner winds amongst the Temiar,but echoes oftheir generous participation at the
conference can be felt throughout.
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We are grateful for the support received from the British Academy,the Institute of
Social and Cultural Anthropology,the Wellcome Unit for the History ofMedicine,and
the staff and facilities of the Osler-McGovern Centre,Green College.
Elisabeth Hsu & Chris Low
Editors
December 2006
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Introduction
Chris Low & Elisabeth Hsu University of Oxford
Theintroductioncontextualizesthehistorical,ethnographic,andtheoreticalaccountsofwindinthe
followingpapers,allofwhichdealwithhowwindthe‘natural’phenomenonrelatestohumanlifeand
culture.Itdrawsattentiontothediversityofrelationshipswithwindwhilstalsoaddressingwhyitis
thatsimilarpatternsofideassurroundingwindexistacrosscultures.Itexploresthenotionthat
human/windrelationshipsaretightlyboundtothesensuousqualitiesofwind,whichinturnreflect
theembeddedunfoldingofhumanlifeasanaspectofenvironment,anddrawingonphenomenology
asaparticularlyappositehermeneuticapproachtounderstandingtherelationship.
Wind, on first consideration, may be thought of as a ‘natural phenomenon’:‘air in
motion’. Our different words for wind, including breezes, wafts, squalls, whirlwinds,
hurricanes,andcyclones,tellussomethingabouttheorigins,scale,andimplicationsof
thephenomenon.Cyclicallyorerraticallywindsappearanddissipateacrosstheland-
scapeasoneoftheprimordialrhythmsofunfoldinglifeandpartofthebackdropoflife
intheopen.Yetwindisalsoexperiencedindoors,intheformof‘drafts’and‘currents
of air’, and if it is not reduced to a phenomenon of modern meteorology and the
naturalsciences,windcanalsobethoughttomanifestinbreathingandintheinternal
body winds that circulate in veins or appear in the form of sneezes and coughs. Or
windscanbedeitiesandspirits.
Wind takes on different guises when it works its way into different aspects of
people’slives.Itbecomesapowerwhenthesailorhoistshissail,afriendwhenitcools
anoverheatingbody,anenemywhentherhinocerosthatyoudidnotsee,justbehind
thebush,picksupyourscentinacapriciousflirtof thebreeze.Itbecomesanillness
from a bitter relative or an offended ancestor.The English phrases‘winds of change’,
‘windsofwar’,‘togetwindofsomething’,‘throwittothewind’,or‘threesheetstothe
wind’allpointtodifferentrelationshipswithwind.Thedifferentwaysinwhichwinds
interactwithpeoplelendthemdifferentidentities.
In this volume,we begin with the ubiquitous external‘wind’phenomenon,which
moreoftenthannotislinkedtotheinternalexperienceof‘breathing’,andexplorethe
enormously rich range of ideas about wind and ways of being in wind, negotiating
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with,controllingand‘binding’,inhalingandexpulsingthewinds.Thevolumediscusses
bothmeteorologicalwindsandembodiedexperiencesofwindinsocialandhistorical
context,bydrawingoutlocalnuancesofunderstanding.Itpresentsadetailedstudyof
intimaterelationshipswithwindwhichholdthelife-givingsensualphenomenonina
profound relationship with ways of conceptualizing life and death, sickness and
healing.
Considerationofwindforcesareturntothebigquestionsoflifethathaveoccupied
philosopherssincetheearliestdocumentedrecords.Windcouldarguablybeusedasa
conceptualtooltoinformafundamentalsetofcoredichotomies,oftenperceivedasa
legacy of Greek thought, through which the conundrum of life continues to be
explored:beingandbecoming,realityandappearance,subjectandobject,natureand
culture,mindandbody.Thispotentialcapacityofwindstemsfromitbeingrecruited
acrossculturesasawayofthinkingaboutahostofphenomenathatdefinefundamen-
talaspectsofthephysicalandspiritualworld.Windisbothfeltandtangible,andthus
physicalandelusive,asisthespiritual.Itcomesasnosurprise,therefore,thatideasof
wind persistently overlap with notions of spirit, divinity, breath, smell, and shadow.
These concepts work together in a family of resemblances to inform ontology and
epistemology.
Windenvelopspeoplewithintheirenvironmentandbreathingisthebasisoflife.In
thisvolume,whichtakesthosefundamentalexperiencesof‘nature’asastartingpoint
for discussing their resurfacing in core concepts of ‘culture’, we provide a further
anthropological critique of the nature-culture dichotomy that has long entrenched
Westernthought.Atitsheartistheidentificationof,andmeaningattributedto,wind
as it moves between nature and culture, body and mind.While building on Ingold,
Descola,Ellen,andRival,whosincethe1990shaveprovidedasociologicalreformula-
tionofnaturethatdirectlychallengesthenature-culturedualism(Franklin2002),this
volume’s interrogation of how wind moves between the domains of the perceptual,
symbolic, and metaphorical owes, furthermore, a particular intellectual debt to the
phenomenologyof perceptionandtheanthropologyof thesenses.
The strength of the ethnographic accounts in our endeavour lies in exploring, in
vivid sensual terms, how wind, the environmental phenomenon, becomes socialized
through practice and belief. The papers begin with Ingold’s analysis of wind, which
takesuphisthemeof‘dwelling’,thatis,therecursiverelationshipbetweenpeopleand
landscape laid out in earlier works (e.g.Ingold 1993; 2000),and explores wind as an
aspect of landscape.Parkin,Roseman,Pandya,and Low similarly develop themes of
howwind,asanaspectofthesensualexperienceofbeinginacertainplacewithcertain
sortsofwinds,atacertaintime,informssocialpractice.Thesepaperspostulate,inthe
veinof Rival(1993;1996),thatperceptualknowledgeof thelandscapeaffectscultural
choices,ideas,andpractices.
Another theme intrinsic to all papers in this volume,which is not explicitly dealt
withinanysingleone,concernstheapparentcross-culturalsimilarityof windideas.
Thematic clusters can be observed in the above-mentioned ethnographic papers, in
thoseonancientandmedievalIndia,China,andGreecebyZysk,Hsu,andLloyd,and
those on modern Europe by Jankovic and Strauss.The question that these apparent
similaritiesposeconcerns,ultimately,issuesof biologicalparityinpeople’sparticipa-
tionintheenvironment,andhowthisfeedsintoabiologicallymediatedsetofsimilar
ideas. Ellen (1996) pushed for an underlying ‘cognitive geometry’ that allows some
realistcrossoverbetweendifferentculturalconceptionsofnature.Descola(1992;1996),
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who works with totemism and animism as two principal agents in his discussion of
howpeopleconstructcontinuitybetweenthenaturalandthecultural,acknowledged
the existence of cognitive universals but emphasized that these fuzzy templates or
patterns are heavily mediated by the local environment and the types of practices
throughwhichtheenvironmentissocialized.However,asevidentfromtherecurrent
themesofwindinthisvolume,whichresurfaceindisparateliterateandoral,contem-
poraryandancientsettings,thequestionisperhapsbestansweredwithlessgeometry
andmoreallowancesforambiguity.
Althoughethnographywouldappearbettersuitedtobringingoutthecontribution
of the personal to societal ideas of wind, individual voices necessarily underpin the
distillationsofhistory,asisevidentfromthecontributionsbyLloyd,Hsu,Jankovic,and
Zysk.Whenthetextualsourcesarereturnedto,thecleanhistoricalgeneralizationsthat
havefedWesternpopularimaginationsoonbreakdowninthefaceofrealdiscrepancies
and inconsistencies, both within the work of one author and across authors. Such
inconsistency is generally not associated with received textual knowledge, but as the
authors in this volume show, who all are attending to primary source material, it is
intrinsicnotonlytooralbutalsotoliteratetransmission;thetextsinquestioncontain
as much contradiction, ambivalence, and flexibility of knowledge as anthropologists
have identified in contemporary settings. Regardless of previous orality-literacy
debates,these studies demonstrate how wind as an overarching term holds different
waysofbeingknownthatcanbecalleduponindifferentcontexts,makingknowledge
of windseemvariable,preciseandimpreciseatthesametime.
Whilst taking a broad historical and ethnographic approach, it is hoped that this
comparative exercise, with its focus on the phenomenology of wind, goes further
towards a profound understanding of the relationship between the natural-
turned-culturalphenomenonofwindanditsroleinthefoundationoflife.Questions
posed include: who experiences wind, and how? What is the relationship of outside
windtoinsidewind?Whohasaninterestinwindandincontrollingandbindingthe
winds – doctors,priests,farmers,or ascetics – and why?What are the ways in which
suchbindingisconceptualizedandoperated?Thiscollectionof essaysseekstofinda
meaningfulwayof talkingabouthuman/windrelationshipsmorebroadly.
Theexperienceofwind
Windasbreathoflifereflectsabasicdailyexperienceasmuchasamythologicaltruth.
Breathinggeneratesandensuresthecontinuationoflife,andthishasconsistentlybeen
taken as evidence of divine presence, or the gift of life, by all manner of cultures,
including our own.Wind touches and is felt,inside out.While there is considerable
variationintheexperienceandtheexpressionofwindideasasaconcept,itishardnot
tobestruckbytheremarkablecongruenceinrelationshipsunderstoodtoexistbetween
wind,breath,andvariouslyframednotionsoflife-force.Equallyremarkableistheway
suchthemesrevealthemselvesatworkinwebsof differentsortsof culturalcontexts.
TheNavajo,forexample,perceivelifetohaveemergedfromtwowindsinthelower
worlds,awhitewindandadarkbluewind,whichexistedinEarth’sveinsorroots.Male
white wind lay on top of female dark wind, intermingled in the manner of sexual
intercourse,andtherebygeneratedEarth,Sky,andtheplants,animalsandpeoplesof
thelowerworld.Thetwowindsgavetheseformsthebreathof lifeandthepowersof
behaviourandthought.Atalaterperiodthesemanifestationsoflifemoveduptothe
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earth’s surface accompanied by the winds. These winds were placed in the east and
south,andthetwofurthercardinalwindswereplacedalongsidethem(J.K.McNeley,
pers.comm.,June2005).
Cross-culturally, considerations of wind very quickly lead to overlapping ideas of
breath,spirit,smell,song,sentimentandshadow.Whilstthiswebof relationsmayat
firstappearunfamiliartocontemporaryWesternintellectualtraditions,similarwaysof
thinking have a long pedigree in Western thought and continue to operate in more
everyday contexts of living in wind. In ancient Greece, Aristotle thought that life-
engendering‘vital heat’was present in all pneuma (Lloyd,this volume).Through the
early modern period and into the present, different theories of ‘vitalism’ or ‘vital
principle’ have persistently associated breath and life-force. Moreover, the Western
Christiantheologicaltraditionhasprovidedanongoingarenainwhichnotionsofwind
arearticulatedinadistinctlyun-meteorologicalmanner.IntheBiblethewordruachhas
beentranslatedvariouslyasair,breath,wind,divinepower,andHolySpirit.InGenesis
wefind:‘ThentheLordGodformedmanofdustfromtheground,andbreathedintohis
nostrilsthebreathoflife,andmanbecamealivingbeing’(Genesis2:7);inJob‘theSpirit
of God has made me,the breath of the Almighty gives me life’(Job 33:4); and from
Ezekiel(37)welearnthathumanbonesbecomealiveasthefourwindsblowonthem.
Inadditiontolinksmadebetweenwind,breath,andlife-forcebyancientscienceand
theology, as Jankovic identifies in nineteenth-century Britain, there has long been a
parallel thrust from more mainstream corners of science, medical topography, and
geography. These various research contexts have looked more towards measurable
physicalandmentaleffectsofwindonpeople.Strauss,whocombinesanthropological,
literary,andscientificdatatoexploretherelationshipbetweentheinhabitantsofalpine
Leukerbad and the Foehn, demonstrates how a folk idiom and knowledge of wind
continuetointeractwithmoderncontextsofscientificanalysis.TheFoehnisadown-
slopekatabaticwind,liketheChinookorSantAna.Theyallarehotandstrong,and
known to cause strange behaviour, migraines, and even fits of madness, and are a
determinantof livingpatternsandof regionalidentity.
Thatwindaffectsfeelingshighlightsthefactthatwindpenetratesthebodyatboth
a physical and a mental level. The ecological psychologist James Gibson, who had
observed that air is insubstantial and proposed that life or activity takes place at its
boundaries or points of interaction with objects, ascribed wind as medium and its
manifestationsastheresultofcontactwithsubstance.Hisapproachusefullydrawsour
attentiontowhatwinddoesatamacrolevelandwhereandhowthismightrelateto
biological and evolutionary development. His emphasis of surfaces is important in
relation to how wind contact shapes the gross physical environment, such as sand
dunes,mountains,orwind-beatenhedgerows.Itisalsoatthislevelthatwindfeedsinto
humantechnologicalandeconomicrelationshipsthrough,forexample,sailingshipsor
building designs. Additionally, Gibson’s exploration has some particularly useful
insights into how animals relate to wind as the holder of tracks of smell, light, and
sound (Gibson 1979: 17). Informative as his approach is, however, he does not seem
adequatelytotakeintoaccountthepenetrationof wind.
Inthisvolume,Ingoldengageswithfeelingsinhiscontestationof Gibson’spolar-
ization of wind and substance. He envisages that people ‘mingle’ with ‘wind, rain,
sunshineandearth’.Life,hesuggests,islivedinazoneinwhichsubstanceandmedium
are brought together. As he forefronts issues of ‘immersion’ and the‘environmental
relationship’, feelings emerge as a consciousness of connection and interaction. This
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conflationofmentalandbodilyprocesses,andtheconsolidationofhumanswithinthe
world, reflects life-views of many indigenous peoples. In very different intellectual
contexts,notentirelyunrelatedlinkshavesimilarlybeenmadebytwopillarsof New
Age philosophy Joseph Campbell (1991: 18),the comparative mythologist,and James
Lovelock(1979),theatmosphericgeochemist.Weliveinadynamicrelationshipwith
oursurroundings,andtheexperienceofwindlendsitselfwelltoaccountingforsubtle
atmosphericchange,regardlessof whetheritisseasonal,climatic,oremotionallyfelt.
With Ingold in mind, feelings can usefully be thought of as evidence and means of
participation.
From a loosely conceived co-evolutionary perspective,what seems emergent from
this research is an acknowledgement that the receptivity to nature evident amongst
many indigenous peoples is tied to what Bird-David (1990) termed the‘giving envi-
ronment’.Withinsuchworldviewstheworldrevealsitself inaregularmanner.Events
that happen together or phenomena that are experienced in a like manner are con-
nected and likely to recur in a similar pattern as the world continues to unfold,
regenerate,and provide.A particular example of how such attention to the environ-
mentmightrelatetowindistheobservationthattheinhabitantsaroundLakeTiticaca,
inPeru,connectthecoloursof thelaketothestrengthof thewind(Orlove2002:35,
144-5).Afurtherimpressiveawarenessofsuchconnectionsisalsoevidentintheability
of Polynesian navigators to read ocean swells as indicators of the direction of and
distance from land (Lewis 1973). Through a skilful reading of this patterned and
revealingenvironment,humansareenabledtomakepredictionsandactinwaysthat
arebeneficialtosurvival.
In his study of nomadic spirituality, Berman (2000) observed that when many
NativeAmericansrefertotheGreatSpirit,theyaretalkingaboutwind.Henotesthat
spiritrefers,inthissense,tothecreationitself:‘Watercomingoffaleaf,thesmellofthe
forestafterrain,thewarmbloodofadeer’(Berman2000:11).Hisobservationislinked
tothewider-heldtiesbetweenwindandbreathaslife-creator,buttheNativeAmerican
beliefsclearlytaketheunderstandingfurther.Whatseemstobereferredtoisanotion
ofauniversalflowingforcethatisparticularlyevidentinthediscerniblepatternsoflife,
although it is thought to be at work in all things.Historically,such beliefs have been
referredtoas‘animism’.Ingold(thisvolume)shedssomelightonwhatthisanimistic
labelactuallydealswithinhisassessmentthatwhatdistinguishesso-called‘animists’is
their receptivity to life and their awareness of living within a current of continual
generation.Hisrecognitionoftheimportanceofsuchawarenessconfirmsfindingsof
other anthropologists, from Paul Radin and Robin Riddington working amongst
NativeAmericanstoGeorgeSilberbaueramongstsouthernAfricanBushmen.
Whenanawarenessthatalllifebydefinitionhasthebreathorwindoflifewithinit
is combined with this notion of connection, it becomes possible to conceive of life
being underpinned by wind relationships, in which each phenomenon possesses its
ownwindwhilstpartakinginthegeneralordivinewind.Inmanyindigenousperspec-
tives wind and breath stand for both the medium of connection and the marker of
powerandidentity.Whileexperiencedasweavingabindingpatternthroughlife,wind
has an undeniably felt presence,and perhaps it is such a relationship between divine
breath and materialized breath that holds wind, breath, and spirit in such a tight
conceptual overlap. In this sense humans may stage themselves as participating in
divinebreath,thesamebutlesspowerful.Windandbreathprovideboththetriggering
sparkandthematerialitythatmakepossiblethisprocess.
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