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destination for the hero) this critical action takes place, unexpectedly, in a "no-man's land" between human spheres of action. After facing a trial of his mortality there and demonstrating behavior appropriate to human-divine relations, the hero returns to the human sphere changed by his fortunes and elevated in his social standing. This topos relies heavily on the perception and symbolic demarcation of physical space, so let us now examine this in the context of ancient Near Eastern wondertales.
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Students of the formal study of religion (Religionswissenschaft) will recognize this pair from the writings of Mircea Eliade and Jonathan Z. Smith, theorists whose usage of these terms was applied especially to the demarcation of sacred space and ritual.81 For Eliade the "center" is the "locus of reality,"82 a place from which the world is
centrifugally accorded levels of holiness and familiarity. In this schema the "center" may be the actual domicile, the village, the city-state or any other such territory but it is only an abstraction delimited by subjective perception. Ancient peoples recognized other hubs of human habitation beyond the periphery, though these were not regarded with the same familiarity or centrality of one's own home. In folklore these foreign lands are
mysterious or sometimes treated as being fabulously wealthy or having access to unlimited valuable resources. Their inhabitants are referred to as being odd in their appearance or comportment, perhaps even sharing the attributes of animals. In this sense wondertales depicting fantastic foreign lands indirectly serve the purpose of dictating and/or reinforcing cultural self-definition vis-à-vis otherness. "The Other" as a cognitive construct stands in opposition to the subjective self, a philosophical point first articulated by Hegel in his Phenomenology of the Spirit.83 Paul Ricoeur advances this idea by claiming that, ―The selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that
81 Eliade's "center" in the ritual sense was the axis mundi, the "meeting point between heaven, earth, and hell." This city, temple or mountain is the focal point for cosmological signification. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History (trans.Willard R. Trask; Bollingen Series XLVI;
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), 34 ff.
82 Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 68.
83 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (trans A.V. Miller; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
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one cannot be thought of without the other…instead one passes into the other, as we might say in Hegelian terms.‖84
Thus the center-periphery dichotomy need not be a spatial category only.
Imagine, for example, a miniature Volk of factory autoworkers punching into and out of work in their different shifts using electronic punchcards. The workers on the first shift share a unique set of traditions in that they likely have shared "inside jokes" or stories about things that have happened during their shift, but these references have no context to a person on the second shift. Yet all the workers are employed by the same auto
manufacturer, they make the same models of automobile, and they all even have the same type of punchcard. We, as a third party, would be able to read their punchcards
uniformly and without regard to the different shifts and the subtle differences in the social contexts of the workers on each one. Now, a worker from the first shift who transfers into the second shift would immediately have a basic knowledge of this new social context, based on his or her prior experience as a worker at that automobile plant. But social nuances and experiences would be lacking until he or she becomes a fully
participatory member of the new community and regarded the second shift as his or her cognitive center. But if this worker went to work for a new manufacturer altogether he or she would be farther from the base of their experience and would have to, initially, rely only on their most basic technical and social skills in order to adjust to this new work environment. This simple example is meant only to show that 1) the "center" is only a cognitive construct of shared preconceptions, and that association may apply to a group as small as one person or as large as the world, 2) that the bounds of this center are not
84 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (trans. Kathleen Blamey; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 3.
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absolute but rather applied in gradation, and, 3) that reconciling the unfamiliar necessitates the ability to draw metaphors and analogues from past experiences.
When we apply these principles to the cognitive space of ancient Near Eastern geography we see that folk narratives very often capture the concerns and tensions resulting from cultures interacting with one another. Neighboring peoples may have interacted with one another frequently but usually display little direct knowledge of one another owing to the language barriers and physical distance between them. A society usually envisions itself at the center of the cosmos and far-distant lands and peoples at the putative edges of the physical world. Thus, a subjective dichotomy is drawn between
"the known world" (οἰκοσμένη) and those regions beyond "either travel or informed report."85 In the absence of empirical knowledge, the ancients used imaginative
descriptions of the "periphery" as a means to help identify themselves and their place in the world. Certain cultural markers enable identification and differentiation but that is valid only so long as that shared understanding of what those markers are and what they mean is intact. This factor is ethnicity, derived from the Greek word ethnos,86 and is defined by the Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth as a concept entailing, 1) biological self-perpetuation, 2) shared cultural forms and values, 3) having a field of communication and expression, and 4) possessing self-identification, as distinguished by comparisons with other groups.87 In the ethnically pluralistic ancient Near East, space
85 James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 37-38. Romm explains that οἰκοσμένη ("inhabited earth") originates with Herodotus but soon thereafter became a "standard and ubiquitous usage." Though a survey exclusively of classical sources, many of the concepts discussed by Romm about peripheral areas carry over into ancient Near Eastern thought.
86 A social designation usually translated as ―nation‖ or ―people,‖ ethnos can also be applied to smaller units. Much like ethnicity, ethnos is subjective and difficult to define.
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reckoning appears as an indispensible component of group self-identity, and this is conditioned in part by the fundamental distinction in geography between what is the
"center" and what comprises the otherness.
There are a variety of modes in which space may be perceived; we usually perceive space cartographically, as though we envision our position in the world and others as loci on a map with mathematically derived distances between them. The ancients, by contrast, perceived space "hodologically," meaning that space was not measurable in geometric terms. Rather, hodological space involves the perceptions one has of space as they move between two points as a sequence of transition--stages of this movement are taken one at a time rather than as a part of the whole, and the experience involves many facets of social, physical, and psychological perception and interaction.88 This notion of space perception is especially useful for our purposes since these stories involve travel and describe the journeys as stages along a route. These interpretations of ancient spatiality are ultimately constructs of our own creation, but in today‘s context of globalization these heavily nuanced reconstructions of space perception may be a more difficult notion to accept.89 It is easy now to send electronic messages across the world to
87 Fredrik Barth, "Introduction" in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (ed. Fredrik Barth; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), 10-11.
88 The foundations for the anthropology of space and the genesis for the concept of "hodological" space, in particular may be found in the work of the philosopher Otto Friedrich Bollnow. The term "hodology" was actually coined by social psychologist Kurt Lewin. See esp. Bollnow, Mensch und Raum (Stuttgart: W.
Kohlhammer, 1963).
89 In spatial analysis, as in other modes of cognition, there are two levels of perspective--emic and etic, the former term referring to how peoples interpret space and the latter referring to how we, as outsiders, view those peoples' understanding of space. See Jon Berquist's discussion of the precepts of "critical spatiality"
as it pertains to biblical narratives; "Critical Spatiality and the Construction of the Ancient World" in 'Imagining Biblical Worlds': Studies in Spatial, Social and Historical Constructs in Honor of James W.
Flanagan (ed. David M. Gunn and Paula M. McNutt; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 14-29.
Berquist also discusses the trialectic concept of space advanced by Henri Lefebvre and Edward W. Soja, which is of great value in discussing power relations in the center-periphery schema.
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near-instantaneous reception. Yet in a world in which only a few people traveled
infrequently over relatively modest distances and only at great expense and considerable delay, the world seemed like a much bigger and more mysterious place.
Center/periphery is a natural binary for us to reconcile the spatial perceptions of the ancients because not only does ancient literature routinely employ binary pairs as contrasting symbols but we routinely use such binaries in cognition ourselves. When the subjectivity of "The Other" is extrapolated onto land features at the "periphery" we see not only other areas of human habitation but particularly non-human spheres of action, a place I have already referred to collectively as "no-man‘s land."90 Land features such as mountains or bodies of water are natural boundaries or points of reference in the
demarcation of "The Other," and the transgression of these boundaries signifies a symbolic but significant shift in this perceptual association with the "center."