The - Golden - Bough - and - Apocalypse - Now - An - Other Fantasy

This article was downloaded by: [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ]
On: 10 December 2014, At: 07:51

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,
UK
Postcolonial Studies
Publication details, including instructions for
authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpcs20
The Golden Bough and

Apocalypse Now : An-other
fantasy
Jojada Verrips
Published online: 19 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Jojada Verrips (2001) The Golden Bough and Apocalypse Now :
An-other fantasy, Postcolonial Studies, 4:3, 335-348
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790120102688
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the
information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.
However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,
or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views
expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and
are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the
Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with
primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any
losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,
and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or
indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the
Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,
sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is
expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 07:51 10 December 2014
Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp 335– 348, 2001
The Golden Bough and Apocalypse

Now: an-other fantasy1
JOJADA VERRIPS
Introduction
For ages, the fantasy gure of the wild man has spoken to the imagination of
Europeans. Together with his wife and children this longhaired and speechless
antipode of civilised man lived in inhospitabl e woods and groves where he led
a frugal and beastly existence. Sometimes the wild man became aggressive
towards humans and assaulted them, but he could also act as their aid and mate.
In a number of splendid publication s the Mexican anthropologis t Bartra has dealt
with the origin and meaning of this fantasmatic gure from Europe’s popular
culture. 2 For a long time, it was thought that the wild man really lived in rough
and remote regions, but gradually the idea developed that this strange creature,
which aroused fear and fascinated at the same time, stood for unconscious and
unknown aspects of one’s own personality. Thus Dudley writes about the
numerous tales of search for the wild man: ‘In all these stories the hero
penetrates a symbolic ‘heart of darkness’ and nds some sort of frightful demon
gure, only to discover ultimately some truth about himself. The Wild Man is
in essence some forgotten potency of his own personality’.3 Especially during
Romanticism serious efforts were made to learn more about this fearsome but
nevertheless fascinating wild man inside.4 This stimulated some to embark on
‘scienti c voyages into the uncivilised —and previously ignored—unconscious ’.5
This ‘interiorization’ of the wild man coincided with ‘the disappearance of the
dark places of the planet’.6 Before one started looking for the wild man in the
caverns and crevices of the self, so-called savages elsewhere in the world
attracted the attention of explorers, traders, missionaries, and (colonial) of cials
and became objects of curiosity and description. During the nineteenth century,
anthropology gradually came into existence and ever since anthropologist s have
made it their job to study (facets of) the societies and cultures of ‘primitives’ and
‘savages’ outside Europe. Though they advertised themselves as scientists and
held positions at universities for developing what they claimed to be a scienti c
discipline, some anthropologist s made, right from the start, ample use of their
imagination and literary talents when they vividly described, analyzed, and
interpreted the lives of ‘wild men’ all over the world and published readable
books about their ndings. This—the use of imagination by anthropologist s who
emphatically stated that they were engaged in objective science—was one of the
reasons why some of them were scorned for being fantasts who, just like writers
of ction, were guilty of producing untrue representations of reality and of the
other. Here we touch upon a classic question regarding the relation between
ISSN 1368-879 0 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/01/030335– 14 Ó 2001 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
DOI: 10.1080/1368879012010268 8
JOJADA VERRIPS
anthropology as an empirical science, oriented towards delivering ‘true’ studies

of (aspects of) the societies and cultures of ‘wild’ others, and anthropolog y as
literature inspired by the power of fantasy and the imaginary. This relationship
is what I want to deal with in this essay by concentrating on the stamp (the
books of) James Frazer and Joseph Conrad put on Bronislaw Malinowski’s
( eld)work and the consequences this had for the anthropologica l study of the
wild man, rst in faraway and later in nearby places. I will then look at the way
in which the same couple of writers, Frazer and Conrad, inspired a non-scientist,
the lm director Francis Ford Coppola, to make his glorious movie, Apocalypse
Now. Apart from demonstrating that anthropology , separately or in combination
with literature, can function as a source of inspiration for popular products of the
imagination, I also want to show how these products can help anthropologist s to
track down something they lost sight of with and after Malinowski: the presence
of the wild man outside as well as inside ourselves as an important object of
study. Finally I will suggest that it can be fruitful to once again turn this
fantasmatic gure into a central topic of anthropologica l attention, and will
sketch the lines along which the ‘wild man’ can be understood.
Frazer– Conrad– Malinowski

Frazer did not personally know Conrad before the rst edition of The Golden
Bough appeared in 1890, and Conrad only got acquainted with this work after
he had published his Heart of Darkness in the autumn of 1900, at least according
to Hampson.7 Malinowski acted as an important personal link between both men.
He was stimulated by The Golden Bough to study anthropolog y in England,
where he became the protégé of Frazer. Just before he left for Australia,
Malinowski gave his countryman Conrad, who also had gone to England and
made his career there, a copy of his monograph on the family among Australian
aboriginals. 8 Both Frazer and Conrad, whose books he eagerly read, formed
inspiring examples for Malinowski, though he did not become the Conrad of
anthropology as he had wanted, and later committed a kind of intellectual
patricide on Frazer which strongly resembled the type of regicide treated so
thoroughly in The Golden Bough.9
The scholarly work which Frazer devoted himself to (as Fellow of Trinity
College in Cambridge) from roughly 1880 until his death in 1941, is often
belittled as ‘armchair anthropology ’. Already at the beginning of this century,
several anthropologist s disquali ed work such as The Golden Bough as being too
speculative and literary. When evolutionism , which was rmly supported by
Frazer, was discredited, the impact of his publication s in anthropologica l circles
also rapidly decreased. This, however, does not mean that his in uence on the
rst generation of academically trained anthropologist s and sociologist s has not
been great. He was a source of inspiration , not only for Malinowski but also for
such celebrities as Haddon, Rivers, Crawley, Marett, Durkheim, and Lang, to
name just a few. While his fame among anthropologist s waned rather quickly,
in other circles Frazer remained a very popular and widely read author up to this
day.10 Reprints and translations of his magnum opus The Golden Bough continue
to appear. The fact that in anthropolog y this work lost its in uence rather soon
336
THE GOLDEN BOUGH AND APOCALYPSE NOW
was due not principally to its outspoken evolutionis t orientation, but even more
so to its artistic, literary, ctive, and fantasmatic character, which did not t in
with the developing idea of the discipline as an empirically and theoretically
well grounded science. Diverse scholars have pointed out that The Golden Bough
closely resembles literary works and should perhaps be classi ed as such, rather
than as anthropology . Frazer’s use of Turner’s romantic painting, also titled ‘The
Golden Bough’, has been noted, as have his owery and poetic style of writing,
his inclination to represent things as more beautiful (and different) than they
were in reality, the fact that he composed his work as a travelogue, and his
powerful (plea for the) use of imagination.11
Undoubtedly, Frazer abundantly used his imagination for his ‘conjectures’ or,
if one may say so, his ‘fantasies’ regarding the ‘true’ course of development of
magic and of religious thinking. This contribute d much to his intellectual
downfall in the rapidly expanding world of professional anthropology . However,
for exactly this reason, his work was admired and considered as a rich source of
inspiration in literary circles. A whole series of eminent novelists and poets, such
as Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, and Joyce were in uenced by it.12
Although, as far as one knows, Conrad did not directly inspire or in uence
Frazer, there nevertheless exist clear parallels and striking af nities between the
work of the two men. One of these concerns the use they both make of the
travel-metaphor. 13 Hyman, for instance, deemed The Golden Bough to be
composed as ‘travelogue, with a strong presence … of the tragic genre’.14 In
1985, Thornton wrote: ‘The entire narrative of The Golden Bough is cast in the
form of a travelogue, which becomes both a scienti c and a moral enterprise’.15
On the basis of diverse quotations he demonstrates how the image of the journey
(or quest, I would say) dominated Frazer. Roth compares Frazer with such
classic writers as Vergil and Dante who, just like him, portrayed a kind of travel
to and through the underworld.16 Conrad, of course, used the same images in his
famous novel Heart of Darkness, where he speaks of Marlow embarking upon
a toilsome search for ivory-trader Kurtz, who had founded a kind of dark
mini-empire in the interior of the Congo, in which he wielded his scepter over
the indigenous population and played the role of a weird weather-king.17 In this
respect, one can ascertain a clear parallel between Conrad and Frazer, one that
becomes even more striking when one notes that while Frazer wanted to
demonstrate how far Western man had developed intellectually , and how far his
civilization had progressed since Adam and Eve, he also thought of Western
civilization as nothing more than just a thin layer over an original wild
one—which he explicitly associated with ‘lower’ social strata and perceived as
an infernal threat constantly at the point of breaking through to the surface. Let
me illustrate this by the following quotation:
Among the ignorant and superstitious classes of modern Europe it is very much
what it was thousands of years ago in Egypt and India, and what it now is among
the lowest savages surviving in the remotest corners of the world … It is not our
business here to consider what bearing the permanent existence of such a solid layer
of savagery beneath the surface of society, and unaffected by the super cial changes
of religion and culture, has upon the future of humanity. The dispassionate observer,
whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly regard it otherwise than
337
JOJADA VERRIPS
as a standing menace to civilization. We seem to move on a thin crust which may

at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.18
It was Conrad who showed in his Heart of Darkness how Kurtz the civilised
Westerner had fallen back into a savage state in exactly the way as Frazer
deemed such a relapse possible in The Golden Bough, and how Marlow, the man
who had to locate Kurtz, was horri ed and at the same time fascinated and
attracted by the totally transformed trader.19 In his beautiful essay ‘Frazer,
Conrad and “The Truth of Primitive Passion’”, Hampson points out how
Bertrand Russell used the same imagery as Frazer in characterizing his rst
impressions of Conrad:
I felt, though I do not know whether he would have accepted such an image, that
he thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a
thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the
unwary sink into ery depths.20
Because so many writers already have put forward this idea, I will here take it
as an accepted fact that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness depicts how Westerners,
just like the so-called savages they turned into their slaves and servants during
colonial times, could change into real wild men, and that they possessed a
horrifying dark side which under certain circumstances could manifest itself and
lead to serious distortion s in, as well as of, their environment. In this regard
Conrad’s novel can be seen as a variant of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
which in its turn shows a striking family resemblance to age-old folktales about
werewolves (civilised persons who all of a sudden changed into bloodthirst y
monsters) and wild men and women.21 What Frazer not only deemed possible
but also seemed to fear in The Golden Bough, namely that westerners could get
trapped in an alarming de-civilizatio n process, was vividly shown by Conrad in
his novel, which according to Mascia-Lees ‘dramatizes Freud’s contemporane-
ous claim that civilised man can see in the primitive his own taboos and
repressions, his cannibalistic , sadistic, scatological, and homoerotic desires made
manifest’.22 In this respect, Conrad and Frazer clearly resemble each other.23
Both Frazer and Conrad used their imaginative and literary powers to great
effect. Each in his own way made a deep impression on Malinowski, the man
who, together with a few others, is seen as a founding father of modern
anthropology . On several occasions Malinowski aired his great appreciation of
Frazer’s work and made it clear that it was a rich source of inspiration for him.24
However, the same holds true for the work of Conrad which Malinowski
devoured during his eldwork among the Trobriands, as appears from his
diaries25 and correspondence with his wife. Notorious is his use of Kurtz’s
horrible remark ‘Exterminate the brutes’, aimed at the people among whom he
lived for such a long time. For everybody who knew his magni cent monograph
Argonauts of the Western Paci c it was a great shock to read this, because in this
book one does not come across a single improper expression with regard to the
Trobrianders. Malinowski, so runs the story that has its origin in an essay by
Firth, wanted to become the Conrad of anthropology . This is what his successor
at the LSE wrote: ‘I have been told by Mrs. B.Z. Seligman that Malinowski once
said proudly, ‘Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology ; I shall be the
338
Conrad”.26 In order to look like Frazer and Conrad, Malinowski went as far as
his imaginary and literary powers would carry him and also used the travel
metaphor in a poetic way with regard to his ‘savages’. He too wrote a kind of
odyssey, in this case that of the trading travelers in the Paci c. However, as
Clifford has tried to make clear recently, Malinowski did not realize his
aspiration to become an anthropologica l Conrad. It is true that his dairies breathe
an atmosphere similar to that of Heart of Darkness and Malinowski, in situations
of crisis and despair,27 starts to look like its main character, Kurtz; but his
anthropologica l work, as exempli ed by Argonauts, remains a far cry from the
literary achievements of Conrad. In Argonauts Malinowski made nothing of the
theme of the ‘lie’ or ‘the problem of truth speaking, the interplay of truth and
lie in Marlow’s discourse’, which played such a prominent role in Conrad’s
famous novel.28 Instead, he presented a work which was incomplete in a
particular sense: ‘In Argonauts the Diary was excluded, written over, in the
process of giving wholeness to a culture (Trobriand) and a self (the scienti c
ethnographer). Thus the discipline of eldwork-based anthropology , in constitut-
ing its authority, constructs and reconstructs coherent cultural others and inter-
preting selves.’29 And, I would add, constructs others and anthropologist s who
no longer show a family resemblance with the ambivalent, split persons that
gure in the work of Frazer and Conrad. True, Malinowski once wrote:
[The anthropologist] has to break down the barriers of race and of cultural diversity;
he has to nd the human being in the savage; he has to discover the primitive in
the highly sophisticated Westerner of to-day, and, perhaps, to see that the animal,
and the divine as well, are to be found everywhere in man.30
Yet he never reached the point at which he could have come up with descriptions
and interpretation s of the ‘animal’ in his ‘savages’ as well as in the ‘highly
sophisticate d Westerner’. I think such neglect of humanity’s ‘wild’ side—re-
markable for a man familiar with Freud’s work—has been a regrettable develop-
ment, because it led to the disappearance of an important dimension of human
life as a topic for serious anthropologica l investigation ; that is, its irrational,
emotional, uncivilised , violent and, transgressive elements. Malinowski was too
busy showing how much the ‘savages’ of the Trobriands resembled civilised
Westerners, too preoccupied with arguing that one should not mistake them for
pre-logical thinkers nor for ‘contemporary ancestors’. This meant that in his
work that which really was wild or uncivilised in the ‘uncivilised savage’
disappeared behind the ‘noble’ or ‘civilised savage’, a human being with just
another kind of civilization and almost no transgressive inclinations . I realize
that I am dealing with a sensitive point here, but what I wish to emphasize is that
while a view of man as homo duplex is not altogether absent in the modern
anthropology which Malinowski helped to found, it did not have concrete
consequences for the study of the wild sides of human thinking and acting—
whether in so-called primitive societies or the so-called complex ones.31 I think
it is remarkable, and a shame, that anthropologist s specializing on Europe are not
seriously interested in the production, distribution , and consumption of all sorts
of manifestations of mimetic (and sometimes concrete) violence on this conti-
nent. They usually leave the study of these striking phenomena to disciplines
339
JOJADA VERRIPS
such as literary sciences and cultural studies. What they miss is an understandin g
of ‘fantasy spaces’ that are highly relevant for anthropolog y because they can
tell us much about the existence and meaning of volcanic layers underneath
civilised ones or, in other words, about the Mr. Hyde or the Kurtz which human
beings, including Westerners, can sometimes turn into. In connection with this
it is salient that Stocking, when he deals with Malinowski’s Kurtzian traits,
speaks about ‘a far- ung progeny of horri ed (my emphasis, JV) Marlows’, but
does not draw a single conclusion from comparing anthropologist s with the main
characters in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (such as, that they should reckon with
a Kurtz in themselves and seriously study fantasies about the occurrence of
gures like Kurtz and other wild men in the societies which they select for their
eldwork).32
After Malinowski it became usual among anthropologist s to (to put it crudely)
represent the other not as less but just as differently civilised, and to forget
everything about the reverse side of civilization (excepting carnivalesque behav-
ior) that is revealed in occasional outbursts of transgressive behavior. The
systematic study of the construction of ‘hearts of darkness’ in cultures and
societies all over the globe has been conspicuousl y absent from their research
agendas. Evil has been exorcised, if not from the world, at least from anthropo-
logical monographs. The legacy of the structural– functionalist obsession with
ultimate order, for example, has been a serious impediment for an anthropolog -
ical understandin g of witchcraft. In the footsteps of Evans-Pritchard, Africanists
perceived and presented witchcraft as a con rmation of societal order. But as
Geschiere has recently shown, this view completely neglects the horri c nature
of the image of the witch.33 Similarly, an impressive array of anthropologica l
community studies done in Europe offer an orderly, rather rosy and sometimes
even distinctly idyllic image of the ways in which people think about and behave
towards each other, in both rural and urban settings.
If in the twenty- rst century someone would like to know something about the
role of rancor and hatred, (civil) wars, terroristic activities, murder and man-
slaughter, dreadful forms of discrimination , and other glaring transgression s in
the Europe of this century, he or she would not nd much in the publication s of
anthropologist s known as experts with respect to this continent. It may well be
that future researchers will disqualify the work of their predecessors as fantastic
products of the imagination, as extraordinary instances of science ction,
because they pay no attention to the ‘wild’ sides of life in villages, towns, and
cities.
To get a picture of the ‘hearts of darkness’ of the Western world, one will
have to look for others—such as the man who was also inspired by Frazer and
Conrad, lmmaker Francis Ford Coppola.
Frazer-Conrad-Coppola
Like Malinowski, Coppola considered Conrad and Frazer to be inspiring men.
Apocalypse Now is a screen adaptation of Heart of Darkness with the Vietnam
War as decor. In the lm, the setting is not the jungle of Africa but that of
Cambodia; the protagonist is not an ivory-trader gone native but an American
340
colonel, also called Kurtz, who goes berserk. Just like his namesake in the
Congo, he has built his own dark empire on the upper course of a river from
where once he savagely fought the Viet Cong. No Marlow searches for this
Kurtz upstream, but a Captain Willard has instructions from a few shady military
men to kill this bizarre warrior-priest who no longer obeys any (military) rules.
Before he reaches the anus mundi where the mad colonel resides in the ruins of
a temple, surrounded by a small army of indigenous warriors, Willard and his
companions experience the war in all its insanity. The scenes are well known
and there is no need to sketch them here.34 When Willard after a long and
toilsome voyage nally meets Kurtz, the mad colonel is always partly in the
shade; his face is half in the dark, never fully visible, as is that of Willard, who
begins to look much like the man he is supposed to kill (something that happens
also to Marlow, who became more and more like Kurtz). After a short stay in
the decaying temple where Colonel Kurtz has his quarters, Willard kills him with
a machete. At exactly the same moment the indigenous followers of Kurtz
sacri ce a water buffalo, killing it with chopping-knives . When shortly after-
wards Willard emerges as a kind of wild man from Kurtz’s den and the colonel’s
allies hesitantly start to cheer the killer-captain, it looks for a few seconds as if
he is about to become the new prince of darkness.35 However, Willard does not
accept the role; he throws away his machete and leaves the place of darkness
together with Lance, his last companion.
This end of the movie is not Conradian, but Frazerian, for one easily
recognizes here central themes from The Golden Bough, that is, regicide and the
dying ( re)god.36 The interpretation of the end of Apocalypse Now as a variation
on this theme is strongly supported by one, very short, scene containing an
explicit reference to Frazer. It shows a close-up of a few books placed on a small
table next to Kurtz’s bed or couch. These books are: the Bible, Frazer’s The
Golden Bough, and From Ritual to Romance by Jessie L. Weston, a book on the
quest for the Holy Grail that was very much in uenced by The Golden Bough.
Next to the last two books lies, very symbolically , a huge dagger. Weston’s
work, together with The Golden Bough, inspired Eliot when he wrote his famous
poem, The Waste Land, from which Colonel Kurtz quotes one or two lines while
talking with Willard just before the latter cuts him to pieces with his machete.37
In the original screenplay, Kurtz is not murdered. Instead Willard drags the
wounded madman out of the jungle while he whispers the words that became
world-famous: ‘The horror, the horror’. During the shooting of the lm on the
Philippines —a project Coppola once compared to an odyssey during which he,
as well as his crew members and actors, all started to show traits of Kurtz in the
jungle—he constantly thought up new endings.38 When, where, by whom, or
from what he got the idea to give his movie a Frazerian ending, I do not know
and I nd this also less interesting than the fact that the version released has this
denouement. It shows how the anthropologis t Frazer and the writer Conrad put
their stamp on a cult lm from the second half of the twentieth century, a
product of the imagination representing in a fantastic manner what Malinowski
pushed aside and modern anthropolog y after him more or less lost sight of,
namely the Western wild man who lives by his own (anti- or a-social) rules and,
in the end, spreads death and destruction where and whenever he wants. The
341
JOJADA VERRIPS
wild man, who just as what Otto called the numinous, can be seen as a
mysterium tremendum and a mysterium fascinans, a reality that is a source of
both fear and fascination.39
How to go on
In Malinowski’s case, despite his debt to the anthropologis t Frazer and the
author Conrad, the wild, uncivilised , transgressive, and horrible sides of human
life, are overlooked. In the case of Coppola, by contrast, the same in uences lead
to a fantastic representation and depiction of these undeniable phenomena.40
After Malinowski we cannot but observe a loss of concern for the a-social and
even destructive wildness of the other far away and (very) nearby, a wildness
with which one could think, or better, fantasize about one’s own dark potential-
ities, and the conditions under which the beast inside might wake. We can also
notice within modern anthropolog y a loss of attention for what Malinowski
touched upon in his shocking dairies, that is, fantasies of hatred and aggression
with regard to the ‘savages’ or ‘strangers’, very often called informants if not
friends, who were chosen as objects of study and research. For a long time, such
bothersome ‘facts’ have always been dealt with in the margins in our disci-
pline. 41 Only in the course of the last few years a handful of anthropologist s and
sociologist s have emerged who try to take them seriously again.42 Taussig,
whose pathbreaking study of Colombian society as ‘shrouded in an order so
orderly that its chaos was far more intense than anything that preceded it—a
death space in the land of the living where torture’s certain uncertainty fed the
great machinery of arbitrariness of power, power on the rampage—that great
steaming morass of chaos that lies on the underside of order and without which
order could not exist’,43 deserves mention here. Zulaika’s magni cent studies of
political violence in the Basque country and Van de Port’s masterly book on the
outbursts of violence in former Yugoslavia do something similar for Europe.44
Bringing these aspects to the fore is not an easy job, because what is being
emphasized here requires that we have to highlight something we prefer to
ignore or keep in the background.45 However, Apocalypse Now shows the
horrible in a fantas(ma)tic and thrilling way; through dark mirror images of
ourselves, the lm throws horror into our faces.46 Meanwhile, there has been an
army of scholars (containing no anthropologist s as far as I know), who have
dealt with this aspect of (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and) Coppola’s movie.47
It is extraordinary that the fantas(ma)tic voyage into the realm of darkness, the
underworld or hell, which for ages has played such an important role in literature
and popular culture,48 became a source of inspiration for anthropologist s only in
recent years. One wonders why they forgot for such a long time Frazer’s
observation with regard to ‘the permanent existence of … a solid layer of
savagery beneath the surface of society’ and our moving ‘on a thin crust which
may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below’. I
think that the following statement by Wolf can help us to at least partly
understand this remarkable forgetfulness: ‘One might say that anthropolog y is
but a latter-day version of the descent into hell, into a strange and bizarre
underworld, in which the hero—disguised as The Investigator—walks untouched
342
among the shades because he carries in his hand the magic sword of Science’.49
Here, the sort of voyage I have in mind is indeed mentioned, but the researcher,
in this case the anthropologist , stays out of range, walks untouched, because he
is carrying the magic (!) sword of science, science with a capital S. This is
precisely what seems to have happened in the case of Malinowski, who
systematically described and analyzed the life of ‘savages’, but who as a scientist
relegated his own ‘wildness’ to his dairies, banned it instead of considering it as
a crucial phenomenon which might have helped him to pay attention to the
‘wild’ sides of cultures and societies. As a scientist he dealt, at least in his
of cial publications , with order and system(s), not with disorder or, in Taussig’s
words, ‘that great steaming morass of chaos that lies on the underside of order
and without which order could not exist’. Remarkable for a man who appreciated
and used the work of Freud.
I think that it is time for a change if we want to gain deeper insight in, on the
one hand, the contemporary quest for the sublime (in the sense of ‘delightful
horror’ as it crops up, for instance, in the consumption of neo-mythologica l
movies replete with sex and violence and in the popularity of extreme forms of
recreation 50) and, on the other, in concrete manifestations of the abject in a
plethora of contexts such as (civil) wars. In order to develop a greater sensitivit y
for the meaning of these different forms of what in Dutch may be called
‘Demonie’,51 especially in the allegedly civilised Western world, the fan-
tas(ma)tic representations and depictions of writers, playwrights, pop-musicians
and lmmakers, among others, can very well function as sensitizing signposts.
At the same time they can also become interesting objects for anthropologica l
study. 52
One scholar who has done precisly this is the Lacanian philosophe r Slavoj
ZÏ izÏ ek, who in the last decade has written much about (popular) fantasy products,
such as (violent) movies, as well as outbursts of concrete violence. Like Lacan,
ZÏ izÏ ek uses the notion of the ‘Real’, a ‘something’ which pushes people forward
but is too big for words and therefore horrible. In order to hide from this horrible
‘something’ as well as somehow get a grip on it, people use their capacity for
fantasy. With the help of this faculty they produce fantas(ma)tic ctions which
they mistake for reality that conjure up exactly what they prefer to hide, that is,
the horri c of the ‘Real’. As ZÏ izÏ ek remarks: ‘The relationship between fantasy
and the horror of the Real that it conceals is much more ambiguous than it may
seem: fantasy conceals this horror, yet at the same time it creates what it
purports to conceal, its ‘repressed’ point of reference’.53 Moreover ZÏ izÏ ek
considers these ctions or fantasies not simply as the result of particular desires,
but as important for their formation. Seen from this perspective, one can say that
the fantas(ma)tic representations I am talking about, such as Apocalypse Now,
have a manifold meaning. They are hiding places, means to both express and
understand, and shapers of desire. As shapers of desire, products of the
imagination can in my view channel this desire in, at least, two directions: a
socially positive and a socially negative one.54 In the rst case, they teach us by
showing extreme positions , how these extremes are in the end untenable and
therefore better to be avoided.55 In the second case, we do not observe avoidance
but rather face the ways in which desire is realized in a more or less sadistic and
343
JOJADA VERRIPS
inhumane way, on a small or a large scale. I am interested in both variants,56 but

especially in the socially negative one. I think that ZÏ izÏ ek’s ideas about how we
can better understand the a-social variants, such as new racism and extreme
nationalism , are rather promising. Very sensitizing is, for example, his idea that
we are completely unable to put in words what race and a nation(state ) stand for
and what they really mean, that they are just ‘Things’ to which we relate through
fantasies. 57 It is exactly these kinds of fantasies which can function as a frame
for the formation and concretization of aggressive feelings in such a way that
seemingly decent citizens can turn into wild men and women who end up
killing. 58 Of course, in order to understand more of (racist and nationalist )
violence we will have to pay attention to such important matters as (global)

economic and political contexts.59 However, in my view, we should concentrate
above all on studying fantasies, these often horrible products of the imagination
we nd not only among others but also in ourselves, and their sinister role in
awakening the beast inside. But this requires that we shift our focus, as ZÏ izÏ ek
repeatedly suggested, from the victims of all kinds of ugly violence toward the
brutes who perpetrate it, or toward the Kurtzes as they are depicted by Conrad
and Coppola.60
The lesson? Before there can be a science of man there has to be the long-awaited
demythi cation and reenchantment of Western man in a quite different con uence
of self and otherness61
Notes
1
For their comments and editorial work I want to thank Johannes Fabian, Birgit Meyer, and Bonno Thoden
van Velzen
2
R Bartra, ‘Identity and Wilderness. Ethnography and the History of an Imaginary Primitive Group’,
Ethnologia Europaea, 21(2), 1991, pp. 103– 125; Wild Men in the Looking Glass. The Mythic Origins of
European Otherness, Transl. by CT Berrisford, Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1992;
The Arti cial Savage. Modern Myths of the Wild Man, Transl. by C Follett, Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 1997.
3
E Dudley, ‘The Wild Man Goes Baroque’ in The Wild Man Within. An Image in Western Thought from the
Renaissance to Romanticism, E Dudley and ME Novak (eds), Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1972, pp. 122– 123.
4
And after, for Showalter aptly remarks that the quest romances of the Fin de Siècle were ‘allegorized
journeys into the self’. E Showalter, Sexual Anarchy. Gender and Culture at the “Fin de Siècle”, London:
Bloomsbury, 1991, p. 82.
5
E Dudley and ME Novak, The Wild Man Within, p. 312.
6
The Wild Man Within. Rather than about ‘dark places’ I would talk about ‘blank spaces on the map’.
7
See R Hampson in J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness with The Congo Diary, edited with an introduction and
notes by R Hampson, 1995, London, Penguin Books Ltd, p. 172.
8
R Hampson in J Conrad, Heart of Darkness with The Congo Diary, p. 174.
9
But see E Leach, ‘Frazer and Malinowski. On the ‘Founding Fathers’,’ Encounter, XXV(5), 1965,
pp. 24 – 37, for he strongly rejects such a view of Malinowski’s attitude towards Frazer.
10
According to Leach, ‘Frazer and Malinowski’, p. 28, Frazer had lost his academic reputation already around
1900. For a good overview of Frazer’s intellectual in uence in the social sciences and humanities, see JB
Vickery, The Literary Impact of “The Golden Bough”, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Chapter 3.
11
See M Roth, ‘Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Reading Lesson’, in Modernist Anthropology . From
Fieldwork to Text, M Mangarano (ed), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 76; Leach, ‘Frazer
and Malinowski’, p. 27; R Crawford, ‘Frazer and Scottish Romanticism: Scott, Stevenson and The Golden
Bough’, in Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination. Essays in Af nity and In uence, R Fraser (ed.),
344
London: Macmillan, 1990, p. 29; Vickery, The Literary Impact of “The Golden Bough”; R Ackermann, J.G.
Frazer His Life and Work, Cambridge: Canto Book, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
12
See Vickery, The Literary Impact of “The Golden Bough”.
13
Although Frazer did some traveling, his work was almost exclusively based on the (ethnographic ) reports
and travelogues of other writers. The life of Conrad, on the other hand, was for a long time characterized
by nothing but traveling and writing.
14
See R Crawford, ‘Frazer and Scottish Romanticism: Scott, Stevenson and The Golden Bough’, p. 29, and
also Vickery, The Literary Impact of “The Golden Bough”, p. 133.
15
RJ Thornton, ‘ ‘Imagine yourself set down—’ Mach, Frazer, Conrad, Malinowski and the role of
imagination in ethnography’, Anthropolog y Today, 1(5), 1985, p. 10.
16
See Roth, ‘Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Reading Lesson’.
17
We may note here Hampson’s intriguing and suggestive question: ‘Did Frazer perhaps help Conrad to bring
different elements into focus in his representation of Kurtz as a ‘man-god’?’ See R Hampson, ‘Frazer,
Conrad and the ‘truth of primitive passion’,’ p. 179. See also Hampson in Conrad, Heart of Darkness with
The Congo Diary, p. 135, no. 81.
18
JG Frazer, The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion. Part I The Magic Art and the Evolution of
Kings, Vol. I, Third Edition, London: Macmillan and Co., 1922, p. 236.
19
I want to point out that traveling in space (a horizontal movement) is related to a (moral) fall (a vertical
movement) and that both movements can be interpreted as going back in time. In the case of Heart of
Darkness, it does not seem to be a coincidence that Marlow has to travel upstream in order to locate Kurtz
for there one can nd the sources of the river and/or evil. See in this connection the interesting work of R
Williams, Notes on the Underground . An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination, Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1990, who shows how in the eighteenth and nineteenth century visiting real depths, such
as caves and mines, as well as metaphorical ones, such as the ‘underworld’ in one’s own society, became
popular activities among the members of the ‘upper classes’ in search of ‘delightful’ horror.
20
Hampson, ‘Frazer, Conrad and the ‘truth of primitive passion’,’ p. 177. In a footnote Hampson remarks that
the imagery used by Frazer and Russell was rather common around the turn of the century and tries to make
this clear by quoting a certain Rutherford who (in 1884) said: ‘Our civilization seemed nothing but a thin
lm or crust lying over a volcanic pit, and I often wondered whether the pit would not break up through
it and destroy us all’ (p. 189). But see Williams who points out that the volcanic eruption (and hell) became
associated, already at the end of the eighteenth century, with (the res of) industry and how, throughou t the
nineteenth century, the volcanic pit gured as a key-image in the iconograph y of the sublime: ‘Such images
of subterranean eruption were by that time well established as examples of natural sublimity arousing a
‘pleasing horror’ in distant observers’ (p. 89). See also R Davenport-Hines , Gothic. 400 Years of Excess,
Horror, Evil and Ruin, London, Fourth Estate, 1998, p. 246.
21
There also is a close relationship between these fantastic folk images and the idea of the homo duplex that
has been current in the social sciences for more than a century. See S Mestrovic, The Barbarian
Temperament . Toward a Postmodern Critical Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
22
FE Mascia-Lees, ‘The Anthropologica l Unconscious, ’ American Anthropologis t 96(3), 1994, p. 654.
23
See HL Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1996, who writes: ‘By the turn of the century, Joseph Conrad, James Frazer, and Sigmund Freud each
turned to the cannibal tradition as a sensational means of exploring the private, hidden nature of the
European …’ (p. 122).
24
See B Malinowski, Sex, Culture, and Myth, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1962, pp. 268– 283.
25
See Thornton, ‘ ‘Imagine yourself set down …’ Mach, Frazer, Conrad, Malinowski and the role of
imagination in ethnography’.
26
R Firth, ‘Introduction: Malinowski as Scientist and as Man’, in Man and Culture. An Evaluation of the Work
of Bronislaw Malinowski, R Firth (ed), Harper Torchbook , New York: Harper and Row, 1964, p. 6.
27
See GW Stocking, ‘The Ethnographer ’s Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropolog y from Tylor to Mali-
nowski’, in Observers Observed. Essays on Ethnographi c Fieldwork, GW Stocking (ed), HOA, Vol. 1,
Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983, pp. 70 – 121. Stocking remarked of Malinowski’s
dairies: ‘[they] revealed to a far- ung progeny of Marlows that their Mistah Kurtz had secretly harbored
passionatel y aggressive feelings towards the ‘niggers’ among whom he lived and labored—when he was not
withdrawing from the heart of darkness to share the white-skinned civilised brotherhoo d of local pearl shers
and traders’ (p. 71). Stocking also compared Maclay and Kubary, two early anthropologist s whom
Malinowski admired, with Kurtz. See GW Stocking, ‘Maclay, Kubary, Malinowski: Archetypes from the
Dreamtime of Anthropology ’, in GW Stocking (ed), Colonial Situations. Essays on the Contextualization of
Ethnographi c Knowledge, HOA, Vol. 7, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, pp. 25, 63.
After Stocking several others have written on the close correspondenc e between Malinowski and Kurtz. See,
for example, J Clifford, Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography , Literature, and Art.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, and D Porter, Haunted Journeys. Desire and Trans-
gression in European Travel Writing, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 263. See also
345
JOJADA VERRIPS
Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 99, and Richards, p. 196. See G Obeyesekere , The Apotheosis of Captain
Cook. European Mythmaking in the Paci c, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 11– 12, for a
comparison of Captain Cook with Kurtz.
28
Clifford, Predicament of Culture, p. 99.
29
Clifford, Predicament of Culture, p. 112. See also Showalter who remarks: ‘he (Malinowski—
JV) … experienced the gap between the serene and enlightened self of his ethnographi c persona, and the
Kurtz-like hostile and threatened self of his personal diaries’, Sexual Anarchy, p. 99.
30
B Malinowski, ‘Introduction’, in JE Lips, The Savage Hits Back, New York: University Books, 1966, p. vii.
31
’Malinowski’s demons do not suffer the same fate as that recommende d by Conrad’s Kurtz; his solution is
not to ‘exterminate the brutes’ but to ‘write’ them. Malinowski divides himself, as homo duplex, between
the demonic chaos of the Diary and the primitive dominium of Argonauts, and Malinowski’s demons are
made to forfeit their demonic character by the exegesis of functionalism. Just as Argonauts writes out the
presence of the colonists, so Malinowski writes in the natives as accommodate d demons—accommodate d
to a functionalist model of harmony as their society is a balanced equation of basic needs and satisfactions
provided for by an elaborate ecology of charters and institutions’ (Richards, p. 198). Compare this with
Stocking’s observation: ‘… if the Kurtz in Malinowski could at moments ‘understand ’ … [colonial]
atrocities, those recurring Kurtzian impulses had no place in the mythic charter he would write for the
‘revolution in anthropology ’. Like the ethnography it introduced, that charter was very much a product of
the romantic primitivist side of Malinowski’s persona’ (1991, p. 63).
32
The same holds true for Bartra in spite of the fact that he observes with regard to the work of Conrad and
Thoreau that the blank or empty spaces on the map or the ‘wilderness’ they talk about stand for ‘a space
within … civilization’ or ‘the savage condition that nests within the heart of civilization’, Arti cial Savage,
p. 275.
33
P Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft. Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa, Charlottesville and
London: University Press of Virginia, 1997.
34
Next to the numerous writings on Apocalypse Now published in the traditional way, one now can also
consult special sites on the Internet. They offer a wealth of information down to minute details in the movie
(see, for instance, http:// lm.tierranet.com/ lms/a.now/). Via the electronic highway one can also get the
original screenplay by John Milius.
35
See U Brunotte, ‘Helden, Cyborgs und Rituale: Inszenierunge n der Männlichkeit jenseits der
Geschlechterspannung ’, Paragrana , 7(1), 1998: 197– 214. She makes a similar kind of comparison, this time
of Rambo, who according to her represents the power of the state, and the wild man (p. 204).
36
Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 102. Coppola’s Kurtz is associated with re in several aspects, whereas
Willard is associated with water (he travels on water, he emerges from water shortly before he kills Kurtz,
and it starts raining almost immediately afterwards). The end of the lm is full of symbolism and references
to myths, legends, and literary works. That is why one can consider it to be a rather complex variation of
age-old (folk)tales that still speak to the imagination. In this connection see the fascinating piece Arthurian
Parallels in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now on the Internet (http://www.highalaska.com /cg/papers/
arthur.html). See also H Heuermann, Medienkultur und Mythen. Regressive Tendenzen im Fortschritt der
Moderne, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuc h Verlag GmbH, 1994, pp. 133– 134.
37
What Kurtz tells Willard about horror(s) is fascinating: ‘I’ve seen horrors … horrors that you’ve seen. But
you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that … But
you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not
know what horror means.’ Kurtz here refers to the impossibility to put into words what we like to call
‘horror’. Exactly in this impossibility lie the chances for imagination and fantasy; it opens one of those
existentially relevant spaces that ask from us, again and again, to be lled it up because no words and images
suf ce to really grasp their essence. See B Thoden van Velzen, ‘Into the Labyrinth: The Study of Collective
Fantasies’, Focaal, 24, 1994, and ‘Revenants That Cannot Be Shaken: Collective Fantasies in a Maroon
Society’, American Anthropologis t, 97(4), 1995, 722– 732. See also M van de Port, Gypsies. Wars & Other
Instances of the Wild. Civilisation and its Discontents in a Serbian Town, Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 1998, p. 30.
38
Eventually, Coppola released Apocalypse Now with different endings: ‘FFC lmed two different endings
(pro-war apocalyptic ending with bombing of Kurtz’s base (VHS and TV version); anti-war ending where
Willard drops machete and leaves (70 mm and LD version)’ (see http://chomsky.arts.adelaide.edu.au /person/
DHart/ lms/ApocalypseNow.html) . See also Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 102.
39
R Otto, Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen,
Breslau: Trewendt und Granier, 1917. One can also draw a parallel between the wild man and the ‘stranger’,
who also evokes horror and fascination at the same time. See D Sibley, Geographie s of Exclusion. Society
and Difference in the West, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 51, and A Oldendorff , De Vreemdeling,
Utrecht/Antwerpen: Uitgeverij Het Spectrum, 1956, pp. 6– 7.
40
See J Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Transl. by S Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 1994, who suggests that Apocalypse Now can be interpreted as an ‘extension of the war
through other means’ (p. 59).
346
41
On the other hand, there is no lack of literature in which the dubious role played by anthropologist s during
colonial times is severely criticized and little hesitation is shown in pointing an accusing nger toward
politicians without scruples and their scienti c henchmen .
42
But see the following passage from the seminal work of M Horkheimer and TW Adorno, Dialektik der
Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuc h Verlag GmbH, 1979 ( rst
edition 1947): ‘Unter der bekannten Geschichte Europas läuft eine unterirdische. Sie besteht im Schicksal
der durch Zivilisation verdrängten und entstellten menschlichen Instinkte und Leidenschaften . Von der
faschistischen Gegenwart aus, in der das Verborgene ans Licht tritt, erscheint auch die manifeste Geschichte
in ihrem Zusammenhan g mit jener Nachtseite die in der of ziellen Legende der Nationalstaaten und nicht
weniger in ihrer progressiven Kritik übergangen wird’ (p. 207). Related to this, see Z Bauman, Modernity
and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989, for a razorsharp analysis of the way in which the stainless
bureaucratic machinery of Nazi Germany led toward the holocaust. Mestrovic is one of those sociologists
who recently ercely pleaded against accepting postmodernis m with its apocalyptic themes and for taking
up again the thread which was lost after Durkheim, Freud, Veblen and Simmel: ‘The central insight of this
lost trajectory is the horrifying idea that enlightment cannot contain the forces of barbarism that the will is
stronger than rationality’ (p. 278). See also Modernität und Barbarei. Soziologisch e Zeitdiagnose am Ende
des 20. Jahrhundert s, M Miller and H-G Soeffner (eds), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996, and J Verrips,
‘Op weg naar een antropologie van het wilde westen’, Etnofoor, VI(2), 1993, pp. 5– 21.
43
M Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. A study in Terror and Healing, Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 4.
44
J Zulaika, Basque Violence. Metaphor and Sacrament, Reno and Las Vegas, NV: University of Reno Press,
1988; J Zulaika, ‘Further Encounters with the Wild Man. Of Cannibals, Dogs, and Terrorists’, Etnofoor,
VI(2), 1993, pp. 41 – 59; J Zulaika, ‘The Anthropologis t as Terrorist’, in Fieldwork under Fire. Contempor-
ary Studies of Violence and Survival, C Nordstrom and ACGM Robben (eds), Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1994, pp. 206– 224. Van de Port, 1998. See also A Feldman, Formations of Violence. The
Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland, Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1991; G Bowman, ‘Xenophobia , Fantasy and the Nation: The Logic of Ethnic Violence in
Former Yugoslavia’, in The Anthropolog y of Europe. Identities and Boundaries in Con ict, VA Goddard,
JR Llobera and C Shore (eds), Oxford: Berg Publishers Ltd, pp. 143– 173; M Bax, ’ ‘Killing the Dead’ in
Surmanci. About the Local Sources of ‘the War’ in Bosnia’, Ethnologia Europaea, 26(1), 1996, pp. 17 – 27;
M Bax, ‘Civilization and Decivilization in Bosnia’, Ethnologia Europaea, 27(2), 1997, pp. 163– 177; J
Verrips, ‘The Thing Didn’t ‘Do’ What I Wanted’, in Essays in Honor of Jeremy F. Boissevain, J Verrips
(ed), Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1994, pp. 35– 53; J Verrips, ‘The Consumption of ‘Touching’ Images.
Re ections on Mimetic ‘Wildness’ in the West’, Ethnologia Europaea, 26(1), 1996, pp. 51– 65; J Verrips,
‘Killing in the Name of the Lord. Cases and Re ections Regarding Reli-Criminality in the Western World’,
Ethnologia Europaea, 27(1), 1997, pp. 29 – 47.
45
The inclination to underexpos e and even suppress the potential ‘wild’ sides of Westerners is, to put this
mildly, strikingly present among the (Dutch) epigones of the sociologist Elias.
46
In the lm, a mirror plays an important role. Just before he starts his upriver quest, a rather drunk Willard
watches himself in the mirror of his hotel room in Saigon and discovers some of his Kurtzian traits,
something that later on will enable him to accomplish his atrocious mission in a smooth fashion. Coppola
got the idea for this scene in a dream (see the documentar y Hearts of Darkness. A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse
made by his wife). One is reminded here of Lacan’s ‘the mirror stage’ that is, the phase during which the
ego of a child is formed (in a negative as well in a positive sense) by the image of the other as mirror. See
P Julien, Jacques’s Lacan Return to Freud. The real, the symbolic, and the imaginary, Transl. by D Beck
Simiu, New York: New York University Press, 1994, p. 30.
47
See S Babuta and J-C Bragard, Evil, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988, pp. 54– 59. Heuermann
writes: ‘Das Reiseziel ist … jene lichtlose Region im Chaos, der Dschungel, der als Schlüsselmetapher
drohende r seelischer Verdüsterung und moralischer Verwahrlosung des Menschen dient. (…) Der Sucher ist
potentiell der Gesuchte, der Ankläger der Angeklagte und umgekehrt’ (p. 133). And O Bartov, Murder in
Our Midst. The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996,
writes: ‘Kurtz’s ‘penal colony’ in the jungle is precisely that ‘black hole’, that ‘anus mundi’ which has
become the perpetual potential of our civilization’s mix of hope and despair, good intentions and violent
means’ (p. 160). Finally we read in R Safranski, ‘Das Böse oder Das Drama der Freiheit’, in Faszination
des Bösen. Über die Abgründe des Menschlichen, KP Liessmann (ed), Wien: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1997:
‘Die Wildnis ist in Kurtz eingedrungen und hat in ihm die eigene barbarische Wildheit wachgerufen und die
zivilisatorischen Grenzen gesprengt’ (p 28). See also S ZÏ izÏ ek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and
the Critique of Ideology, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 262, no. 47.
48
Especially in the nineteenth century when the industrialization was in full swing, this kind of voyage played
an enormous role in literature: ‘The nineteenth-centur y tradition of literary realism incorporates a powerful
mythological tradition: the story of a journey to the underworld in quest of truth. In realistic literature, the
pilgrim descends into the social depths in search of social truth’ (Williams, p. 154). Conrad’s Heart of
347
JOJADA VERRIPS
Darkness can therefore be considered as a variation on an old theme, this time applied to a quest in a dark
world which was needed more and more to get rid of what was produced in (and by) the western
‘underworld’ or (industrial) ‘hell’. Evidently, authors and lmmakers know better than anthropologist s how
to use the ‘underworld’. Notice also the movie Underground by Kusturica which deals with the insanity of
the wars on the Balkan and has been compared with Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. For a splendid example
of a children’s book in which the kind of voyage I mean is portrayed, see Sendak’s Where the Wild Things
Are (1963).
49
ER Wolf, Anthropology, New York: WW Norton and Company, 1974, p. 12.
50
For the quest for sublime experiences in the (recent) past see Williams (p. 250, no. 3) and S Piët, De kick!
Een zoektocht naar de essentie van de topsensatie, ‘s-Gravenhage: Uitgeverij BZZTôH, 1991.
51
The sociologist AC Zijderveld has emphasized the importance (of the study) of the demonic component in
‘our over-rationalized culture’ in his essay ‘Über das Dämonische in der Kultur’, in Von Weizäcker Doctor
Honoris Causa Erasmus Universität Rotterdam, Utrecht: Uitgeverij Lemma BV, 1991: ‘Whether there are
still angels I do not know. But I am sure that there are demons in each and every culture endowed with the
capacity to start haunting in a particular way, especially at moments when people try to deny their existence,
neutralize or encapsulat e them’ (pp. 23 – 24).
52
In his article ‘Tijd en tragiek. De relatieve autonomie van klassieke romans en drama’s’, De Gids, 137(9/10),
1974, A Blok has pointed out that classic novels and plays (especially tragedies) can be perceived as
prototypical descriptions of social life (p. 705). As such, I would like to add, they can be very helpful in
showing us the road toward the relevance of the wild, dark, irrational, transgressive and, last but not least,
destructive sides of human relationships.
53
S ZÏ izÏ ek, ‘Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach’, Journal for the Psychoanalysi s of Culture
and Society, 1(2), 1996, p. 79.
54
I realize that what is considered to be positive and negative depends on one’s position and perspective.
55
C Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Story of Asdiwal’, in The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism, E Leach (ed),
London: Tavistock, p. 30.
56
I would like to emphasize that it here concerns two variants which both go back to one and the same product
of the imagination.
57
See S ZÏ izÏ ek, ‘Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead’, New Left Review, 183, 1990, pp. 50– 63 and Looking
Awry. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
58
What I deem particularly relevant here is that ZÏ izÏ ek mentions the sensorial experience of the Other, his
(bodily) smells and sounds. I think that such experiences should play a much more prominent role in
research on both violent and non-violent inclusion and exclusion processes all over the world. See also
Sibley, pp. 57– 58.
59
There is no lack of studies which deal with these phenomena . However, what we urgently need now are
anthropologica l studies in which an interest in the contexts mentioned is coupled with an interest in fantasies
and in the ways fantasies possibly form part of the deeper drives and motives of people who engage in
severe discrimination and even elimination of fellow human beings. This might contribute to the develop-
ment of what Shapiro called ‘a comparative ethnology of modern societies in search of differing levels of
acceptance of inner disorder’. MJ Shapiro, ‘Warring Bodies Politic: Tribal versus State Societies’, Body and
Society, 1(1), 1995, p. 122.
60
See, for instance, the work of the Katz, who tries to understand the ghastly behavior of the perpetrators of
the Holocaust, FE Katz, Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil. A Report on the Beguilings of Evil,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
61
Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, p. 135.
348

The - Golden - Bough - and - Apocalypse - Now - An - Other Fantasy

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The - Golden - Bough - and - Apocalypse - Now - An - Other Fantasy

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The - Golden - Bough - and - Apocalypse - Now - An - Other Fantasy

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article was downloaded by: [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ]

On: 10 December 2014, At: 07:51

The Golden Bough and

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790120102688

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

The Golden Bough and Apocalypse

anthropology as an empirical science, oriented towards delivering ‘true’ studies

Frazer– Conrad– Malinowski

as a standing menace to civilization. We seem to move on a thin crust which may

inhumane way, on a small or a large scale. I am interested in both variants,56 but

violence we will have to pay attention to such important matters as (global)

You might also like