The cloud god and the shadow self

M A R Y D O U G L A S

The cloud god and the shadow self:;

It could seem to be curious that people should be worried about who they are. At a busy time, it sounds like a luxurious kind of curiosity. Some might answer that all people everywhere are interested in consciousness and selfhood, and that only our wavering focus on others gives us the (false) impression that our own worries are new. I dare to disagree with this. I do believe that the contemporary fascination with self- identity is an essential part of the post-modern experience, but I do not concede that this part of our present culture is unique.

Anthropologists know that there have been other societies at other times that have been obsessed with this topic. Our task is to put the issue of reflexivity into a comparative framework of knowledge and morality. I will ask what kinds of social environment are most hospitable to free speculation about personal identity. And, conversely, what kinds of social environment produce an authoritative blueprint of what it is to be a person, so that people get on with their business unbothered about who they are?

Personal Identity

At least in England, and I think in western Europe generally, it is the case that officially the internal workings of the psyche are a private matter. There is no way of knowing how other subjects are composed except in so far as they choose to reveal themselves, and there is no way of knowing that what they reveal is true. It is even hard to say what meaning truth or falsity would have in respect of individual consciousness. Legally and administratively we have no authoritative definition of selfhood. The idea is not articulated.

I want to consider the self as a convention and use our own experience as an example of conventionalised personhood to make the contrast with other culturally defined persons. Our contemporary idea of the self is a conceptual space deliberately

*This paper was delivered as the inaugural lecture at the third meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Oslo, June 1994.

As I have wanted for a long time to compare the idea of God with the idea of the self numerous acknowledgements are due. The first draft was prepared for the 1989 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, called 'Claims on God', but as the editing of those lectures progressed the chapter on the Cloud did not fit into the subsequent publication, In the wilderness (1993). I tried it again in the University of Frankfurt in 1990, and in Honolulu at the ISISS in 1992. I thank those who have helped to develop the theme by discussing it with me, particularly Ronald Hendel, Anita Jacobson-Widding, Robert Littman, Emmanuel Sivan and Werner Schiffauer.

Social Anthropology (1995). 3, 2, 83-94. @ 1995 European Association of Social Anthropologists 83

kept blank. 1 also maintain that it is kept empty for good political reasons, which have to do with trying to live in a plural democracy. Where these reasons do not prevail, the conventionally defined self may be an articulated concept. In that case questions of identity will be more easily settled.

But first I ought to give examples of the composite model of the self. Hindu mythology tells of individuals who may wander from their bodies; a sage who may be turned into a woman; a king who becomes an untouchable. Africa abounds in examples of persons who can turn into leopards, chickens, or jackals and do grave damage in their alter persona. The missionary ethnography of the Congo provides a puzzling array of West African ideas about multiple souls. The literature gives the impression that in the Congolese cosmology something that has been variously translated as ‘the life-soul’, ‘the life essence’, the ‘dream-intelligence’, or ‘the breath’, was a separate agent within the person. (Jacobson-Widding 1979: 40ff.) One of these cases will serve to remind us why it is that a composite model of self is unacceptable today.

Undertaking fieldwork in the Southern Congo, Anita Jacobson Widding found that the Buissi people divide the self into several parts and at the same time code the universe into combinations of the colours black, white and red. The colours are used in medicines, used for ceremonies, and for divination. In order to explain how the theory of souls works, she has first to give a full account of the system of mutual indebtedness which locks each individual into his own clan unit, with mutual responsibility for debts and fines. The solidary group which gives individual Buissi security is matrili- neal. The father also has an obligation to defend a son involved in a judicial process, even against the head of his son’s clan (Jacobson-Widding 1979: 39ff.). In their law courts, own clan is coded white, and father coded red. White means knowledge, understanding, continuity; red means power, vitality. White with red is used for protection against disease and for curing; red, white and black are the colours of enquiry, rituals of divination and diagnosis. Black and white are used to signify the loser and the winner of a law suit. The Buissi dead are also coded either whte or black. This is a cosmology which fully articulates the person, making its differentiated parts operative within the social system. Such an articulation depends on consensus about the nature of right and wrong and unambiguous allegiances. The self could not be so completely appropriated by society if the general posture were one of challenge to the legitimacy of a system.

The unitary person

In the west, in contrast to all these examples so familiar to anthropologists, the embodiment of one person for their lifetime in one body is axiomatic. In other cultures the person may go from one body to another or the one body may contain two or more persons, but claims that persons can split, or flit, are not taken seriously in western philosophy. (It is a different matter in psychology.)

However much evidence may mount up that in other parts of the world the right way to think of the person is as a composite - containing several persons in one - our philosophers still maintain that a person is one rational agent continuously inhabiting one body.’ It is not a matter of evidence. The idea that the person can combine several semi-independent agents, not always living at peace with one another, and not

1 I have developed this argument, with a discussion of intentionality, in Douglas 1992.

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well anchored in their bodies is rejected. In accusing everyone else of error, the philosophers do not admit to ethnocentricity or cultural imperialism, though in another context the charge would embarrass them. The conviction of rightness is the more interesting in that the divergence has nothing to do with our regular claim to cultural superiority, our technology. Nor does it simplify intellectual matters for liberal philosophers. When so little can be attributed to the self, the idea of self- interested behaviour which is central to utilitarian philosophy becomes extremely problematic (Parfit 1984).

The argument here is that in modern industrial democracy a composite person is unacceptable not for intellectual but for forensic and political reasons; in other words, it is an ideological problem. In the acceptance of the concept, juridical requirements dominate: to be able to stand before a judge and make a sworn declaration about presence or absence from the scene of crime, a defendant has to be accountable as one person consistently in one body. It would throw the judicial process into confusion for the defence to be allowed to say that the accused was bodily present, but not responsible because his real person was actually in Timbuctoo at the time, or for the prosecutor to claim that though the defendant was absent, he wreaked the injury by sending one of his souls to do the deed. For good juridical functioning the person has to be unitary, responsible, accountable: factors making for competence to be judged. Our kind of society would not work with a theory of multiple personalities able to act at a distance.

In various counselling approaches to illness, separate identifiable agencies within the person are discussed - as in psychoanalysis - but they stay in the sphere of therapy (Schafer 1976). Some of them come very near to identifying homunculi inside the person, though the theories are relatively fringy (Douglas 1990). Outside the thera- peutic context, the nature of personhood remains unitary. Homunculi as separate internal agents are not acceptable (Penelhum 1971; Frankfurt 1976). The unexplorabi- lity and unquestionability of the unitary person is evidently a protection. It is a guarantee of freedom that no one is allowed to claim to know better than we what are the prerequisites of life and of fulfilment as a person (Berlin 1969). In our culture the prime need is individual freedom. We do not need a Nazi dictator telling us that some persons are vitiated by the wrong hereditary constitution, a want of Aryan blood or any other racially defined deficiency. We do not need a Church to tell us that we are composed of a body and an immortal soul and therefore that we ought to be elimi- nated if we embrace heresy or practice witchcraft. There was a short period recently when women had the possibility of claiming impairment in law due to pre-menstrual tension - but when they considered the implications of allowing themselves to be viewed as less than fully responsible citizens, they abandoned the idea. It is part of our cultural individualism to resist any standardised theory about the person. Thus collec- tively and consensually we have barred ourselves from a historic area of discourse. This is what makes it possible for some of our philosophers to ignore other cultures’ notions of the composition of the self, or reject it as irrational or irrelevant. And this it is which makes anthropology so important.

Our distinctive cultural bias goes along with, and supports, contemporary plural democracy. Anthropologists can go along with it if they wish. They can throw themselves with the same ardour as the rest into wondering why identity crises occur and why they make us so unhappy. But I would think that the calling of anthropology is to escape from the cultural bias of the times, and to find a place for objectivity. The

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demand for a reflexive culture that achieves awareness of itself cannot be met by accepting the blind spots and respecting the contemporary out-of-bounds signs. We have to be open.

I am not talking about the personal selfhood that an individual subjectively knows. Anyone is entitled to their own ideas: indeed this is a protected area of intellectual autonomy. I am talking about a collective construct. The focus here is on a standardised idea which is current and accepted at a given time and place. For us now, in the ongoing struggle to make something of the democratic ideal, the thought of the self has become a secret, empty place, inaccessible to public probing. We are a certain kind of community, finding certain reticences necessary, and respecting personal privacy. We agree that for all practical purposes the self shall be defined in its juridical posture, unitary and indivisible. It will be a very different kind of community that allows the self to be conceived as divided into identifiable interacting sub-selves. And that community is so much one that we Westerners wish to avoid it is difficult for us even to imagine.

Our unitary, continuous agent who can be held to account for all his or her acts supports our individualist and pluralist culture. Our legal system would not deliver our notions of justice if people could switch their identity back and forth and around. Our standard idea of the person corresponds to the accountability requirements of our judicial system. In the other civilisations that anthropologists know therapy may win over jurisprudence. The people may be less determined to hold on to strict accountability, more ready to let one another off the hook. They can relieve an unfortunate person of blame for disasters by divining that the victim has done bad things not through his own fault but because some other person, alive or dead, has entered into his body. It may be an option to advise him that in his pre-natal existence he brought his own misfortunes on himself; or that after the dissolution of his body he can still be an active agent. I would even maintain that this habit of structuring the concept of the person gives more scope for true reflexivity than our habit of leaving it unstructured.

The empty throne A publicly standardised cognitive block faces us with a dilemma.’ Because it is part of our own culture we are helpless to examine systematically a place where responsible thoughts and words are excluded and only fantasy is free. Our novelists can expand upon issues of personal identity - and no wonder that they do. No wonder we have problems of identity in the context of possible heart and brain transplants. To go further with the comparative enquiry we need more instances from other cultures; but if they are instances of ideas about selfhood we are likely to be highly prejudiced by our own cultural inheritance. I therefore propose to extend the question of knowledge of other selves to another set of ideas.

What kinds of religion harbour a strict monotheism? O r which religions find it unproblematic that God should be manifest in many forms, present in wood and

2 Maurice Bloch has taken issue with my use of the word ‘cognitive’ in the sense of a cultural limitation on what can be known. In reply I admit that this sense is not generally used by psycholinguists, but assert that it is necessary for anthropologists to resist a terminology which rules out the kind of questions about cultural control of curiosity and category formation that belong traditionally to anthropology and which, as things are, can only be raised in that discipline. See Douglas and Hull 1993.


stones, governing a pantheon of immortal saints, or existing as a trinity of divine persons? The central theological idea of Judaism is that God is aniconic. It is common in many theologies for God to be described as unknowable, but this religion has a special kind of unknowability. In Judaism (as in Islam) it is a cardinal offence to make an image of god in molten metal or carved wood or stone. When God does appear to his people, it is as an amorphous cloud, cool and dark by day and a pillar of fire by night. Essentially the God of Judaism is a hidden presence. He is present invisibly: present in his Name, though the word is not to be pronounced; present in the tabernacle, though his throne is empty. The idea of God is maintained as a theologi- cally blank spot.

In parallel with what we have said about the inviolable person in our culture, we can surmise that the doctrine of the unimaged God would have been entered as Judaism’s defence against the tyrannies of rulers. Those who would restrict the incipi- ent power of the monarch in early Israel would not have allowed the ruler to claim to speak for God, still less to be an incarnation of God. The same would apply to republicans in the Second Temple period, repudiating the restoration of monarchy. They would have defended the idea of an aniconic God3 who could never be com- pelled to inhabit an image, or respond to magic formulae. Their hostility to tyranny would have made it a repulsive idea that their God could be a forensic resource for anyone. The Lord’s inscrutability would support the doctrine of a God who cannot be held accountable in human terms. The God-beyond-claims is the God whose hand cannot be forced by magic, and who cannot be defeated, or even confronted, by rival spirits.

Thus a distinguished Biblical scholar has argued that the rejection of images, and the rejection of soothsaying and magic, were all of a piece with Israel’s thoroughgoing monotheism (Milgrom 1990). Another introduces politics more directly. Ronald Hen- del sees the origin of Israel’s aniconic tradition ‘as an integral expression of the religious and political principles on which the universe of early Israel was constructed’ (Hendel 1988: 365-82). Kings claiming to be gods were not acceptable in this community, but this was in opposition to the king-gods of the region.

The Ark of the Covenant with its two cherubim with wings outstretched consti- tutes Yahweh‘s throne, the earthly image of the heavenly throne, from which the Lord rules. Compare this empty throne with that of the Phoenician king, Ahiram, around 1000 BC, also flanked by two winged cherubim; and with a Canaanite royal figure of the twelfth or thirteenth century BC, from Meggido, again a seated figure flanked by two cherubim. From the sixth century BC onwards there are many images of en- throned gods seated on cherubim thrones: in the Lebanon, Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia. In this context it makes sense to argue that it would have been impossible in Israel to have an image of God on the throne when royal kingship had no place in Israel’s political spectrum (Hendel 1988: 378-81; Tryggve 1982). So the God of Israel is as unarticulated as the modern secular self of Europeans. However, a paradox arises. If Judaism’s God is an empty concept, how is that the Jewish believer seems to be able to carry on a continuous and highly personal dialogue with the almighty How do we understand this combination of intimacy and distance?

3 I have searched for other studies of aniconic gods in history but find that most of the historians

4 I owe this question to a kind commentator at the EASA meeting, but cannot remember who it was. attention has been drawn to iconoclasm rather than to aniconicism. See Douglas 1993.

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Knowledge as a resource

It would be good to bring together these two very different cases into a single enquiry into the limits of knowledge. We want to understand the capability to exclude certain kinds of knowledge. Here is an interesting topic, the self; here is another one, God. But the interesting topic remains unarticulated. Questions can be asked, but no answers can be accepted about its particular elements and powers. The topics remain generalised. Whence comes the power to stop enquiry? In the case of our ineffable selfhood, whence comes the motive force for liberal philosophers to declare that other descriptions are wrong? Why is it so difficult to get philosophers (apart from a few notable exceptions) interested in alternative models ( H a c h g 1991; 1992; Dennett 1982)? In the case of Judaism, whence comes the strong revulsion against polytheism in any form? To attempt an answer, we need to get some distance from ourselves and the way we see the problem.

After threshing around unsatisfied in the sociology of knowledge, I suggest making a complete break. Let us treat knowledge as a resource like any other and put it into the framework for examining the distribution of any resources whatever. From this starting point, I recommend Elinor Ostrom’s (1985) analysis of institutions. Ostrom is particularly interested in irrigation rights and other questions of water control. She has made major contributions to the study of the human uses of the environment, and specialises in the analysis of problems concerning common pool rights, prisoner’s dilemma, and public goods. This is a very promising opening, for like water, heathland, or forests, knowledge can be protected as private property or it can be put into the public domain.

Ostrom is particularly interested in how resources in the public domain are managed (Ostrom 1990). She holds that many of the situations in which political scientists consider that a dilemma of collective ownership will be solved by the spoli- ation of the commons are in historical fact resolved successfully. By success she means that conflict is avoided, uncertainty reduced, and that the common resources are protected from destruction. It is never enough to put the scarce resource into the public domain. What saves it from destruction is the particular form of the rules which protect it. This careful analytic approach is very anthropological in style and it should apply very well to the question of how a community protects its cultural identity by stopping certain kinds of questions.

Ostrom starts by defining an institution as a system of rules governing a situation in a defined action arena. So first we find the relevant arena. In the two cases we have raised, the arena for the modern concept of the self is juridical; in the case of Judaism, for the concept of God, it is cultic. It prescribes behaviour by ruling what is required, permitted or forbidden. It is good advice when attempting to understand diverse ideas about selfhood to identify an arena and the rules that affect the structure of the action than can be taken within it. The rules provide incentives and deterrents.

First, a boundary rule defines a domain and governs entry and exit. For arguing about multiple persons in one God Judaism is the boundary which constrains what can be said. For our arguing about the possibility of multiple selves the courts have strict boundary rules, but these are only activated for a prosecution; outside that arena we seem to be free to say what we like, but the freedom has no consequences for the definition of the concept.

Sets of scope rules, position rules and authority rules define how participants in


the area can relate to one another. For instance, in the psychoanalytic session there is permission to talk about differentiated parts of the patient’s self, possibly at war with one another and threatening to diminish the scope of interaction (Horton 1961; Douglas 1982; Schafer 1976). In Temple Judaism the arena of conversation about the nature of Godhead was governed by the roles of the priests. In both cases asymmetric position rules define who can make the authoritative pronouncements.

We are interested in how knowledge becomes a protected resource and how it is put into the public domain. Consequently the most immediately relevant parts of Ostrom’s method are the information rules. These define and grade information channels, give conditions for opening and closing flows of information, fix rules for assessing evidence. For us, for example, the psychoanalytic arena is very strongly bounded, and only impinges on the judicial arena under strictly controlled conditions. In Judaism a similar bounding of knowledge was effective in the principle that mystics could have direct knowledge of God, but that it could not be expressed in rational discourse: mysticism and reason were opposed sources of information (Dan forthcom-

At each institutional level a relevant view of the public interest is likely to be invoked. Institutions relate to one another under what Ostrom calls higher order ‘aggregation rules’. These are formulae for weighting individual choices and calculating the collective choice. Ostrom’s model recognises that each level has its own rules for monitoring behaviour, calling into account, and penalising. This suggests that when our moral philosophers reject the idea of complex persons within persons they are calculating the effects on collective choice and worrying about general accountability, and whether they will be called into account for blurring the agreed boundary.

‘Where will the moral conscience go if a person can be in two places at once? What will happen to rules of evidence? How can responsibility be allocated?’ Subordinate institutions have to have some degree of compatibility with those operating at the largest level of collectivity, or there will be conflict. This is why gaps in possible knowledge appear, and why some questions are ruled out as unaskable, and why so much emotional investment is disclosed when comparative problems are raised.

Even the imagination is restricted, so that some philosophers seem not to know that social solidarity will not dissolve and that coherent social life can continue with articulated ideas about differentiated elements in the person. Even the imagination of anthropologists must be unusually restricted if they accept the claim that post- modernity gives us a valuable self knowledge as well as an unprecedented degree of personal autonomy. I will try to demonstrate the opposite case, that post-modernity is at a disadvantage in not having access to a highly structured concept of the person. This means turning round the favourite idea of the person as liberated from social constraints and so able to achieve a uniquely ennobling self-f~lfilrnent.~ The cultural bias that accepts the illusion of a moral evolution towards greater self-consciousness is

ing).

5 ‘From a mere masquerade to the mask, from a role to a person, to a name, to an individual, from the last to a being with a metaphysical and ethical value, from a moral consciousness to a sacred being, from the latter to a fundamental form of thought and action- that is the route we have now covered . . .’ (Mauss 1979: 90). T h e ‘we’ is not editorial, but ‘we, the human race’ who have achieved this progress: I . . . I shall show you how recent is the philosophical term ‘self‘, how recent is the ‘category of the self‘, the ‘cult of the self’ (its aberration), and how recent is the respect for the self . . . (Mauss 1979: 62).

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an instance of how in our times the very objectivity which reflexivity is expected to endow may have become more elusive.6

The self In a theory of accountability

I now return to self-knowledge among the Buissi. They have encoded colours in the body by relationships and the relationships are organised strictly on the complementary interaction of the mother’s and the father’s side. Their theory first splits the human being between two persons: an inner person, the soul, which is contributed to the person’s make up by the mother’s breath, is white because it represents the reason and order which come from clan relationships; an outer person, the body, the life and energy, is contributed by the father. The body is black on the outside, red on the inside, signifying the amoral energies generated by the father’s unpredictable role in making trouble through witchcraft for the son’s clan and for the son himself. The inner person is split again into a body and a soul, and the outer person also (Jacobson- Widding 1979: 309ff.). This makes four persons. At each level, the inner person is white, representing the authority of the clan. The undivided power of reason which governs the life of the collectivity is shown in the expectation that when members of one matrilineage meet members of another clan, each regards the other party as one single jural and moral person, speaking with one voice (Jacobson-Widding 1991).

This dualistic coloured diagram is operated in the law courts with the special language which forms an ‘official discourse’, where the theory is worked flexibly and efficiently to attribute responsibility and determine appropriate compensation. All the misfortunes that can happen in life can be diagnosed according to these principles, allowing blame to be clearly assigned, and indicating remedial action. Every mishap is drawn into the political structure of complementary and antagonistic clans.

Buissi society is hierarchical, with ranked degrees of non-negotiable expectations. Different degrees of articulation are basic to their idea of social life as well as of the person. Behaviour at the surface layer is heavily prescribed and its freedom restricted; the next layers are freer of some formal obligations, but prescribed for others. Thus the parts of the person are specialised for social commitments. Each psycho-social layer of self is subject to appropriate laws or conventions. Each psycho-social layer of self has its corresponding anatomical part: blood, bones, fatty outside, entrails inside, limbs, and so on. The physical body parts match the system of social constraints. When illness or misfortune strike, bodily symptoms guide the diviner to the causes. The patient knows his or her self through the lens of social obligations mapped on the body: when the rules are correctly observed, he is well; neglected, he ails, and some one is always responsible.

It betokens a great deal of stability that a people can keep a constant view of all relationships in colour terms. We would never want to say that one aspect of the person always came from the father’s side and another always from the mother’s. We would reject so much predictability, still more reject so much control. The Buissi

6 Andre Gingrich in his paper on ‘Inside a tired community’ at this EASA meeting said that J. Habermas has been much misunderstood in his call for reflexivity as a prerequisite for knowledge: reflexivity is the means, not an end in itself.


example illustrates how the model of the person is constituted from demands for accountability.

In the west, accountability at law is individual and unstructured: all that is demanded is that the person be a rational agent, continuously embodied and undivided. Logical, spatial and temporal tests of evidence apply. If it can be shown that he was somewhere at the relevant time, it is to be understood that he could not have been somewhere else; action at a distance, such as hexing or cursing, is not taken seriously as a cause of legal complaint. We want our interpretation of evidence to be guaranteed by the unique association of self with bodily presence.

The Buissi are concerned with something else. Everyone’s interest is to assert the formal accountability of the clan to protect its members. The arguments at court are about arraigning the rival clans, their lawsuits are as much about curses inflicted by dead relatives as about living felons. Clan complementarity, the mother’s and the father’s role, is projected upon the person, for the practical purpose of determining blame and innocence, which amounts to the practical, political issue of winning or losing the case. Every one is passionately interested in the settlement of enormous debts which ensues.

It is not just the colours, but motherhood and fatherhood that are precisely defined and mapped onto the body. An anatomical coding matches the colour coding. The father’s part relates to the bones and the hard parts of the body; the maternal part is white and relates to the soft and liquid elements. The claims of the dead are black or white according to the evil or good character attributed to the dead person. According to what part of the body hurts, the coding guides the diagnosis. With every pain and mishap an individual is made aware of his inherited allegiances. It is necessary to have this detail so as to make clear that the Buissi model of the person is much more articulated than ours.

Their theory of personhood and their theory of the body are integrated with their theory of society. Our theory of the person has achieved, over long centuries of intellectual effort, its independence of claims to control. We have our abstract, emptied model of a free and uncommitted individual. We would resist being shackled as Buissi are by corporate claims going back for generations into the past. In the same way the people of Judah resisted for similar reasons being shackled by the claims of a king who is a god incarnate or the claims of the owner of a powerful image of God.

Shadow persons and the cloud image

The method of Elinor Ostrom advises us to consider different arenas of claims and rules. Buissi have several distinct arenas for their discourse of the person. In their official discourses the theoretical model of the body does not vary much. Buissi informants give the same official story, much as our philosophers are united in their version of unified personhood. However, another more intimate arena exists, where personal relations can develop. When among friends, in an atmosphere almost of secrecy, the Buissi reveal a different arena of the person, subject to different rules and penalties. In this arena the shadow defines the domain, prescribes entry, exit and exclusion rules. In this domain intimacy is protected by prescribed speech forms as well as tone of voice, information channels are specified, penalties are set and behaviour controlled.


Anita Jacobson-Widding found this when she observed Buissi children teasingly trying to jump on each others’ shadows and being reproved by adults. She then noticed adult men carefully avoiding each others’ shadows - not all, but those of certain persons. Only by questioning in a confidential mode did she learn how a person can be harmed through attack on his shadow (Jacobson-Widding 1990). The first rule is that all asymmetrical relations require shadow-avoidance. Every day when the men come to eat together, and when they go down to the water to bathe, son and father, elder and younger brother, nephew and uncle must keep at a sufficient distance not to tread on each other’s shadows. Abstracted, choreographic representations of the social structure, these rules teach that an individual person’s initiative and autonomy is threatened by the close proximity of anyone superior or inferior in rank. Shadows can safely mingle only in the absence of hierarchical ranking. Grandfather and grandson may sit close together; they are so intimate they can take food out of each other’s mouths. Friends of different clans should not be afraid of harming each other through the shadow since rules of seniority internal to the clan do not divide them. The arena of the shadow is the sphere in which the social structure is laid aside, where there is no fear, only humour, tenderness and perfect freedom.

Two concepts of the self varied systematically on two levels of Buissi social life, one public or official (where the ranks and roles are known), the other personal. The Buissi official discourse lodges the person in bones and solid enduring parts of the body, articulates it in the face, draws it in uncompromising black and white. In the personal discourse metaphors for the person refer to body liquids and shadows. They evoke elusiveness, uncertainty, fluidity, ephemerality, ambiguity. Thus while the official discourse of the body is about roles in the social structure the intimate discourse of the shadow refers to the self beyond role playing, open, uncommitted, unpredictable.

Under all the layers of the person, beyond any prescriptive rules, they allow an innermost element to escape scrutiny. There is an uncommitted self, therefore a self-for-itself, all potential, unappropriated, unclaimed by others. This is the most private, uncommitted, freest person of all, and the least accessible to enquiry. No bodily organ corresponds to or contains it. This is the real self. It corresponds in Buissi theory, to the person’s shadow, a flickering, mobile image, moving as the owner moves, still when the movement stops, responsive to the least emotion. How deeply they have meditated on the concept of personhood, these West African philosophers !

The shadow self is the creative and vulnerable seat of the personality. If it is harmed, the whole person declines. No one from a social distance can tread on another’s shadow, or the owner will sicken. Dear friends embrace, their shadows mingle, no harm will follow. Danger comes from encroaching others of higher or lower rank. The shadow is only safe in intimacy. Thus does the Buissi theory of the shadow articulate the idea that persons should not be abused by authority: it declares their inmost being to be especially vulnerable in proximity with persons of different status. Its ephemerality is a protest against abuse of personhood.

The parallel is very suggestive for the Judaic image of God as a cloud. In Judaism, a religion of formal commandments and rules of purity and propitiation, there is a place inside the tabernacle on which no political claims are acceptable. The place on the Mercy Seat in the tabernacle is cleared and made permanently empty, occupied only by an intangible, ephemeral cloud which transforms into a blazing column of fire. Its


shapelessness manifests uncommitted potential, the fount of all action, unlimited, undepictable. There are several major differences. For example, unlike the Buissi construction of the inner self as vulnerable, God as a cloud is a source of judgement and power. But the comparison holds in other ways.

Buissi have given up most of the idea of the person to the claims of society, but amid all the constraining rules they have reserved one corner, the shadow, for an inextinguishable sense of the person, free of all formal claims. This seems to represent a high degree of reflexivity and self-knowledge. Inside the multi-faceted social person is an empty secret place where the self-in-itself can flourish. The shadow self is compat- ible with a public, formal self acting in the public sphere and fully constrained by social obligations. There is no inconsistency. Two compartments of experience comp- lement one another.

Similarly in Judaism, there is a space within the legalistic conception of God as justice and righteousness for the loving, tender God of the psalms and prophets. The divine cloud filling the dark empty place in the tabernacle complements the other manifestations of the sacred. Just in not being articulated, the cloud God, like the shadow person, is accessible to the imagination in a more intimate and mystical way than the Creator-law-giver.

Co nc I us Ion

So what about us? We have no intellectual props, no socially defined facets, no contrasting hard edges on which to build our idea of ourselves. Trying to think about subjectivity without reference to supporting social manifestations is like thinking about a hole inside a hole. However, the comparisons suggest that the stark definition of subjective agency is part of the jurisprudential definition of reality which has to exclude dreams and visions and occultism so as to protect our civil liberties. It is this (rather than its inherent intellectual appeal) which gives the idea of the unitary person its rightness and immunity. Recognising the ideological foundations of the unitary person, we are free to take the concept out of the realm of the sacred ineffable, and into the category of ideas to be studied comparatively with all the aids to objectivity that we can muster.

Objectivity is the problem. As a profession, anthropology is sensitive to observer’s cultural bias. These instances of a reserved cognitive space are provocative. They explain why we tend to worry about identity, since we live in a culture that deliberately refrains from marking it. Questions for research are normally set within the investigator’s culture. Getting answers to these questions is not so important as finding questions which can be asked from a culturally neutral po~ i t ion .~ For example, how is knowledge recognised as a resource? How is it put into the public domain? How is it protected from despoiling privateers whose reckless use of concepts expose the whole landscape to erosion and flooding? The exercise teaches us how highly contrived is our version of selfhood. If the post-modern person believes a new and more powerful reflexivity is available, we have grounds for disputing it. If anyone

7 In my opinion this is the pressing agenda for anthropologists, not how to escape from our own cultural bias, but how to generate theoretical questions from a systematic comparison of different cultural biases.


regrets the emptiness of the contemporary idea of the self, we can justify it as part of the condition of living in a plural society.

Mary Douglas

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The cloud god and the shadow self

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