Chicken Guts

A couple of reviews of Elizabeth Pisani's Indonesia Etc. have remarked on the complex mix of Christianity and paganism on the Indonesian island of Sumba. As Pisani puts it, “The people of Sumba are nominally Christian, though . . . many still cleaved to the ancient Marapu religion, guided more by what they read in the entrails of a chicken than by what they read in the Bible.”¹

Traditionally, sophisticated Christians see such acts as reading entrails (or tea leaves, etc.) as a superstition rooted in the physical world that is demeaning to the spirituality of religion. They would prefer to understand the physical world via the guidance of the abstract ideas of their religion. I was thinking of such practices and their relation to metaphor as I was later reading an essay on Hinduism in the New York Times.² In this essay Jonardon Ganeri, a scholar in Indian philosophy, explains why Hinduism tends to be tolerant of other other religious beliefs:

“[In Hinduism] religious texts are often not viewed as making truth claims, which might then easily contradict one another. Instead, they are seen as devices through which one achieves self-transformation. Reading a religious text, taking it to heart, appreciating it, is a transformative experience, and in the transformed state one might well become aware that the claims of the text would, were they taken literally, be false. So religious texts are seen in Hinduism as 'Trojan texts'. . . . Such texts enter the mind of the reader and help constitute the self.”

In reading, there is a meeting of the ideas presented in the text and the self of the reader. In part, yes, the ideas of the text “enter the mind of the reader and help constitute the self.” But reading also involves the opposite process—the pre-existing self of the reader making sense of the ideas of the text, projecting his own understandings and expectations onto the text. That's why one person can read the same text several times during a lifetime and understand it somewhat differently each time—a somewhat different self is reading it each time. In literary texts in particular, several readers can understand one text in several different ways, and that reality enriches the text rather than diminishing it. We too often forget what the mind brings to the text. 
 
So, when a shaman is looking at chicken entrails or tea leaves or any other external object that is supposed to reveal some truth or prophecy, what happens might be a case of the thing itself giving meaning to the mind, as it seems to be in Sumba, according to Pisani: if the fatty tissue of the chicken is “thick and yellow, the owner has a marvellous year ahead”; if it is “thin and whitish, . . . the owner leaves in tears.” But what if the shaman is dealing with tea leaves or patterns of smoke, manifestations that don't assume an either/or form? And what if, as is likely, the shaman knows the people of his village well? Is it not likely that the shaman's conscious or unconscious understanding of a person's or a people's abilities and disabilities might be projected upon the external image? I would think so.

We really should not scorn such pagan practices as reading chicken entrails, since it is really just another form of metaphorical thinking. The concrete object functions as the image, the vehicle that is used to carry and present the more abstract thoughts and perceptions of the shaman. This seems to me a very efficient way to transfer wisdom. The entrails operate essentially like a book; the shaman attaches certain ideas to the chicken, and the “reader” takes in those ideas.

Think of the image of the U.S. flag; think of what different thoughts and feelings patriotic Americans and extremist Muslims project upon that same concrete object. So much of meaning is what we project onto a text or an object. As long as we don't read literary or religious texts literally—so long as we don't abandon our own knowledge in the face of what we see in the text, then certainly reading helps us to create a self. And reading is, essentially, a metaphorical process—the meeting of marks on a page with the abstract capacities of the individual mind.

1Elizabeth Pisani, Indonesia Etc. (NY: Norton, 2014), pg. 57. Also see pg. 64.

2http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/what-would-krishna-do-or-shiva-or-vishnu/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw