"The Rites of Passage" by Arnold van Gennep

This classic anthropological work was first published (in French) in 1908 and so some of the content seems a little old-fashioned to our modern sensibilities. It was the first work to discuss rites of passage and the origin of that phrase. Van Gennep believes that all rites of passage can be divided into three phases: separation, transition, and re-incorporation. He then goes on to list a huge number of examples of rituals of birth, puberty, marriage, and funerals, and many others. As such it is a quaintly old-fashioned but nevertheless interesting source of a lot of information. I don't know how much is still believed to be true.

• "As we move downward on the scale of civilizations ... we cannot fail to notice an ever-increasing dominance of the secular by the sacred." (p 2) Leaving aside the potentially racist assumptions inherent in any scale of civilizations, I was reminded of Bettany Hughes in The Hemlock Cup when she pointed out that in ancient Athens (which some people regard as the pinnacle of civilization even though slaves were regarded as non-humans) "Life itself was thought to be a religious experience."
• "The life of an individual in any country is a series of passages from one age to another and from one occupation to another." (pp 2 - 3)
• "Rites of passage theoretically includes preliminal rites (rites of separation), liminal rites (rites of transition), and postliminal rites (rites of incorporation). (p 11)
• "Except in the few countries where a passport is still in use, a person in these days may pass freely from one civilized region to another." (p 15): I didn't know this was true in 1908!! On the other hand: "Today, in our part of the world, one country touches another; but the situation was quite different in the times when Christian lands comprised only a part of Europe. Each country was surrounded by a strip of neutral ground which in practice was divided into sections or marches. These have gradually disappeared, although the term 'letter of marque' retains the meaning of a permit to pass from one territory to another through a neutral zone.  Zones of this kind were important in classical antiquity, especially in Greece, where they were used for market places or battlefields." (pp 17 - 18)
• He suggests there is "an almost universal association between landmarks and the phallus" (p 16)
• "A society is similar to a house divided into rooms and corridors. The more the society resembles ours in its form of civilization, the thinner are its internal partitions and the wider and more open are its doors of communication." (p 26)
• "Exchanges have a direct, constraining effect: to accept a gift is to be bound to the giver." (p 29)
• "If the Jews had linked themselves with Yahweh by perforating the septum, how much fewer would have been the errors in ethnographic literature?" (p 73)
• The Mysteries of Eleusis "included: (a) a voyage through a hall divided into dark compartments which each represented a region of hell, the climbing of a staircase, the arrival into brightly illuminated regions, and entrance into the megaron, where sacra were displayed; and (b) a representation of the rising of Kore" (p 91)
• The initiation into the rite of Attis included the initiate going into a pit "and the blood of a sacrificed bull covers his entire body; then he comes out of the pit bloody from head to foot ... like the newborn child emerging from its mother's body." (pp 92 - 93)
• The veil as a symbol of separation. "In worship, sacrifice, and marriage rites, for example, the veiling is temporary. ... in Catholicism, to pass from a liminal stage (novitiate) to the stage of permanent incorporation into the community is to 'take the veil'. ... Among certain peoples a widow may wear a veil ... Socrates covered himself with a veil after drinking the hemlock, thereby separating himself from the world of the living." (p 168) Once you start going, veils are everywhere. The hood a hangman uses to cover a man about to be hanged. 
• Among the Mylitta "every girl must once offer herself to a stranger and receive a coin from him" (p 170)
• "In Dalmatia ... to have good fortune in the house, one should have intercourse with a goat, collect the sperm, and rub the door of the house with it." (p 173)
• "There is a popular saying that only the first time counts; it is an interesting fact that this idea is truly universal" (p 175)

Interesting. March 2017, 194 pages

"Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari

The real beauty of this book is that it is written in very clear, very accessible, very simple language. It explains ideas and concepts. And it covers 2 million years of human history in 466 pages.

The inevitable downside of all this simplicity and brevity and clarity is that it admits no uncertainty. There is no suggestion that the ideas it presents may be controversial, that even the facts it offers are interpretations of evidence about which there are often fundamental disagreements.

For example, on page 55 he states that there is "some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging." (p 55) Fair enough. But he then builds speculation on this evidence as if it were a fact. Human brains have decreased in size because agriculture opened up "niches for imbeciles".  One of his great themes is how well adapted humans were to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and how much more miserable agricultural peasants were than their forebears.

He defines religion as "a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order" (p 255) and thus he claims that Buddhism and Marxism are religions even though they deny the supernatural. I would classify religions as systems of beliefs that accept the supernatural and thus I would deny that either Buddhism or Marxism are religions. He doesn't argue the point, he just states his definition and that is that. Later he says "if it makes you feel better, you are free to go on calling Communism an ideology rather than a religion" but that just made me feel patronised! Presumably science, in that the Laws of Nature are 'superhuman' and that  a scientist is likely to have a world view with human norms and values embedded into it (such as Occam's razor) qualifies as a religion. Hmm.

Another example: On page 266 he states that "one of the distinguishing marks of history as an academic discipline" is that "historians tend to be sceptical of ... deterministic theories." Yet this comes at the end of several pages when he is arguing that empires inevitably grow.

I mean, I like the idea that: "Capitalism's belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of nearly everything we know about the universe. ... The human economy has nevertheless managed to keep on growing throughout the modern era, thanks only to the fact that scientists come up with another discovery or gadget every few years." (p 352) But is this a fact or Mr Harari's opinion?

I have grumbled enough. Such a wide sweep over world history in such an accessible book inevitably requires short cuts. On balance, Sapiens is a delightful book with lots of brilliant insights. I agree with most of his claims above. I also thoroughly enjoyed the insights below.

• Chimpanzees have a hierarchical structure in which less dominant grunt and grovel to the alpha male (p 28)
• The Maoris only reached New Zealand 800 years ago; almost immediately the islands' mega-fauna became extinct. (p 74): We are not the first generation to drive other species out of existence.
• Wheat "domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than the other way around". (p 90)
• "From a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural." (p 164) Some things are forbidden in our culture but they are not 'unnatural'
• "Every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions." (p 182) For example, the values of equality and freedom inevitably contradict one another (p 183) "Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values , it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture." (p 184) Eg God and the devil. Logically, monotheists cannot admit a dualistic belief such as the devil (p 247)
• History is a "level two chaotic system" (p 267) because predictions made by historians are likely to affect the outcome (the weather is a level 1 chaotic system because weather forecasts won't affect what the weather is ,unless we start seeding clouds etc). He suggests that this is likely to make historians "prophets who predict things that don't happen" (p 268)!
• Cultures are "a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host", carried by memes (p 270)
• "Ardent capitalists tend to argue that capital should be free to influence politics, but politics should not be allowed to influence capital." (p 367)
• "It is chilling to contemplate what might have happened if Gorbachev had behaved ... like the French in Algeria." (p 414)
• Many of us act like a man on the beach trying to welcome good waves and push back bad waves. Buddhists suggest we should behave like a man who "sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please." (p 442)

Read this book. It is beautifully written and full of important ideas (but remember that they are ideas, not holy writ). November 2015; 466 pages