1975/Douglas/xi

By Piercing together, context to context, the references the Lele made to animals in their daily life, I reached some understanding of their main fertility cult, centered on the pangolin. If my fieldwork had been more thorough I would have been able to understand better the meaning this scaly ant-eater had for them. Their knowledge was not explicit; it was based on shared, unspoken assumptions. At the grass-roots level of daily behaviour the sense that emerged from their rituals and beliefs posed the problems about implicit forms of communication that I have been pondering ever since, as these essays show. Re-reading them, I see how confused and timid presentation has disguised the unity of theme. I also realise that with better fieldwork this theme would certainly have been shelved. For thanks to the work of others in Central Africa I am even more aware of rich layers of context I have unexplored. Above all, Luc de Heusch's study of the traditions of Luba royalty has made me see the gap between the daily-bread, common-sense world that I recorded and the high tradition of Central African cosmology in which the Lele beliefs fit so well. Disengaging certain recurring threads and identifying them as the warp and the different local cosmologies, he has greatly advanced the analysis of implicit forms of communication. If only the material and the theory had been available earlier. 
The Lele cult of the pangolin was performed by a few initiates who alone would eat its flesh and were sworn not to reveal its secrets. It was one of many cults, each vested with its communal property of esoteric knowledge. I was never made privy to those secrets. Apart from the aristocratic clan, no women were admitted to knowledge of the cult. If I had stayed longer, and if I had known what theoretical uses the unveiling of their secrets would have served, I could have learnt much from a formidably clever and witty princess from the Eastern Lele. But structural analysis had not at that time redeemed myth and ritual from folklorism. Only now do I glimpse, in the pages of Le Roi ivre (de Heusch, 1973), the possible sources of the pangolin's power. For, though I knew that this fish-like tree-dweller was the potent sign for a union of heaven and earth, I did not know that just such a union was celebrated in different ways by other tribes of the region. The pangolin was said to be a chief. The sacral kingship of the Lunda, Luba, and Bushong was also instituted in a marriage between celestial and earthly powers and in the rituals and myths about it are many echoes of Lele custom. De Heusch's book makes me see in very different light the brief, mysterious little tales of the origin of the Lele, which I dismissed as truncated and defective. Rather as the synoptic gospels need the structural analyses of John and Pauline epistles for their exegesis, so the miracles of the pangolin need, for their full meaning to emerge, to be related to the cosmic themes of divine kingship and to the constitution of human nature and the planetary system. All that is too late for me now. Access to that implicit public language (Bernstein, 1972) from which the sacred canopy was woven would have given me enough work for the rest of my days, simply to analyse it. Moreover, the question of why the pangolin had so much power over human destiny would have been satisfactorily answered within the terms of the culture itself. Because my material was poor, I was driven to consider the matter under its more general aspect. In a comparative perspective, the question of implicit knowledge confronts the question of cognitive relativity so that they come to form only one single problem, as I shall try to explain below.