6 - A body more carnal

Summary

Cleansed, as they ought to be, of defilement and passion, the men and women who lead the polity seek to emulate sacrificial, quietist mothers raising dependent children. While the heraldic bodies they seek to reproduce are not single-sexed, there are two other sex-exclusive bodies in the society with which they are in dialogue. They are male, war spirits (brag) and female, sexual spirits (samban merogo; see Barlow 1992; 1995). This chapter examines the extraordinary discourse with which masculine spirits alternately satirize the moral order in everyday life and lend it a virtually unconditional support during ritual contexts. I first provide exegesis of their absurdist poetics as a caricature of the stoic, sacrificial body espoused by those who would uphold the maternal schema. I then discuss the quite moral role these same spirits are given to play in the course of the ritual cycle when the values they would otherwise ridicule they carefully affirm. The distinctive relationship between their mocking and moral poses, in other words, is neither mimetic nor functional but contrapuntal, doublevoiced and unfinalized.

Among the genres through which such a spirit voices objections to the maternal schema, perhaps the most basic one is expressed by his unambiguous gender. His body is not inhibited and androgynous: masculine passion and fluids overflow him. He is not just a spirit but a spirit-man (brag; or pot nor).