Psychological Conceits: What Is A Newar That He or She May Know Bhaktapur

Yeats put it exactly right in "Among School Children": O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?^[10]

Piri's dance and Bhaktapur's dance are greatly different. What about the dancers? The private lives of some of Bhaktapur's people, people whom we believe to be representative in some ways, will be the subject of another volume. There we will consider aspects of the city's traditional life, such as family religion and rites of passage, which are rel-

atively neglected here, as well as what some different sorts of people experience and how they interpret and are affected by the aspects of the civic life presented here. In this volume, as we remarked in the last chapter, we will deal with such personal dimensions at only a very few points where it seems necessary for suggesting the psychological impacts and functions of some of the city's most important symbolic patterns—this is the case, for example, with the discussion of purity and of aspects of the significance to the civic audience of the Nine Durgas troupe of god-possessed performers.

The differences in scale, complexity, and kinds of resources used for community organization have, we believe, direct implications for differences not only, obviously, in people's private experience but also (pace Gellner) for the "mentality" of people in the two communities. These private contrasts are both dependent on differences in community organization and help maintain and motivate them. For our final orienting conceit we will sketch some of these implications, asserting in a condensed, simplified, and idealized form what will be illustrated, argued, and qualified at length elsewhere. We must now look at our contrasting communities' organization once more, but this time not in itself but as it affects and is experienced by the communities' members.

As we have asserted above, much of the psychologically significant order of a traditional Tahitian village lies in its complex construction of what was locally taken to be literal reality, resulting in what William Blake, speaking of another world, called "mind-forged manacles." The heterogeneity of the village is contained within a narrow and relatively consistent set of assumptions, values, and definitions; this, as well as the structure and limits of vocabulary in certain domains, makes critical and philosophical thought and discourse difficult. This shaped experience, reinforced by hierarchies of coherent redundant controls (Levy 1977), results in convictions of the solidity and rightness of local common sense. Incompatible understandings, motives, and feelings are relegated to an unconscious realm, which is in large part derived from dense social agreement on the unthinkable. With the conscious aspects of their understanding constructed in a comparatively simple and direct manner out of the forms of the "total institution" in which they live, Tahitians act in its terms because it is the natural thing to do. An outsider sees the powerful influence of the village-based construction of local reality, but villagers acting from their certainties about the nature of their world, from their solidly constructed selves, feel themselves to

be very autonomous individuals for whom external controls or even advice on correct behavior from others in the village would be both unnecessary and oppressive.

What people know in what they take to be a trustworthy manner seems to them to be based largely on their sensory experience of their concrete world. They believe, for the most part, in what they think they see; in Tahiti, as is general in Polynesia, the word for knowing and seeing is significantly the same. The conditions of their life generate a corresponding epistemology. In contrast, if something with a claim to truth is presented to them through verbal reports or other obviously "symbolic" forms that seem disconnected or disconnectable from direct experience, they are suspicious, it is "only something that they have heard about." Even those claims of religion that are neither directly experienced nor intuitively "natural" are subjects for skepticism. Faith, a category that is essential for the Newars, is problematic for them. They are only dimly aware of differences in different people's subjective realities and have minimal interest in psychological or sociological speculation, the revolutionary viewpoints that enable a transcending insight into aspects of one's own possibly arbitrary reality and that make the very idea of "mind-forged manacles" possible. Living in their taken-for-granted common-sense reality, they are familiar to us as the kinds of people whom reflective intellectuals and sophisticated city dwellers see pejoratively as rural, provincial, naive, and unsophisticated people, rigid and unimaginative in their convictions and certainties and their dismissive encounters with other worlds.

Tahitian villagers live in a resolutely ordinary, daylight, sunny world. It is surrounded by a shadowy, poorly discriminated, and thus uncanny world, which they refer to metaphorically as the "night." They depart from the literalness of their daylight world into imaginative marked symbolic enactments, ceremonies, and rituals only on restricted occasions. Now and (as suggested in reports of the time of first Western contacts) in the past, symbolic enactments are and were used, as they are everywhere, mainly for signaling radical and usually irreversible changes of status, as digital markers of socially significant change of state—for the individual during rites of passage, and for the community for a transition from peace to war or the submission to a new chief. In these cases, where one socially defined object or person or situation is suddenly transformed into another, Tom suddenly becoming Harry, the pattern of the ordinary is not sufficient and something more than common sense is required.

The experience—and the personal consequences of that experience—of citizens of Bhaktapur is different. Like Tahitian villages, Bhaktapur is a bounded, largely self-sufficient, and highly integrated sociocultural system. But in Bhaktapur's complex organization every mature individual is involved in a great number of different culturally defined and validated realities and experiences calling upon and evoking quite different aspects of or even kinds of "self" as he or she moves from one to another.^[11] Experience in Bhaktapur is greatly more complex; multiple points of view are not only possible but forced on people. Living systematically in shifting and contrasting worlds, many citizens of Bhaktapur are forced into an epistemological crisis, forced to the understanding that external reality, as well as self, is constructed, and in some sense illusory, or in the Hindu philosophical expression, maya .^[12] They are now, like Princess Myagky in our introductory epigraph, in position for a kind of skeptical and critical analysis that transcends the ideology of their culture, and they become the anthropologist's potential collaborators in the analysis of their own culture and situation, rather than, as in the case of rural village Tahitians, the passive subjects of analysis.

Able in certain special contexts and conditions to say and know such things as "gods are representations of human feelings and activities," or "we must have untouchables because without them we would lose the caste system and there would be chaos," or "it is not the behavior of others so much as people's images of themselves that makes them accept their positions [in the caste system]," or "there must be shame and embarrassment everywhere in the world, but of course, what people are ashamed and embarrassed about must vary," people, quite ordinary people, in Bhaktapur's society are "sophisticated," in its dictionary sense of "altered by education, worldly experience, etc. . . . from the natural character or simplicity." If sophistication, taken as the index and result of a profound difference from the conditions that nurtured Tahitian life and mind, characterizes the majority (as we have reason to believe)^[13] of the people of Bhaktapur, there is a still further move, a characteristic response to the epistemological shift that makes knowledge problematic that, in turn, distinguishes the citizens of Bhaktapur from representative (or ideal) moderns. For Bhaktapur is precisely as Redfield and Singer characterized the genre, a city of literati (that is, enthusiasts and technicians of marked symbolism) and not of intelligentsia. The insights that the preceding quotations illustrate are generated by minds working over contradictions and contrasts in the cul-

turally proffered certitudes of various sectors and phases of a complex culture, contradictions and contrasts that are potentially subversive to the society and in many ways problematic to the integration of the self. Rather than making the analytic pursuit of these intellectual problems an end in itself, a move that would encourage the formation of a social class of critical intellectuals, of socially destabilizing philosophers and scientists, people seek their most satisfying answers to intellectual paradoxes, mysteries, and threats to solid constructions of "self" and "other" and "reality" in the complexly ordering devices of marked symbolism, and develop, in fact, a craving for such devices, a symbol hunger . The crisis of complexity is met through a kind of enchantment that people accept in spite of or in tension with their common sense through a leap of faith into a commitment to the extraordinary and fascinating forms of the community's coherent and fascinating array of marked symbols. In chapter 9 and elsewhere we will present interview materials illustrating this movement in some individuals' recollections of childhood, adolescence, and maturity, a movement from simple certainties, to intellectual doubts about the family's and city's religious doctrines, to a conversion into "understanding," acceptance, and social solidarity—a conversion arguably associated with some of the personal implications of Bhaktapur's ubiquitous blood sacrifice.

For people living in Bhaktapur, the city and its symbolic organization act as an essential middle world, a mesocosm , situated between the individual microcosm and the wider universe as they understand it. This large aggregate of people, this rich archaic city, uses marked symbolism to create an order that requires resources—material, social, and cultural—beyond the possibilities and beyond the needs of a small traditional community. The elaborate construction of an urban mesocosm is a resource not only for ordering the city but also for the personal uses of the kinds of people whom Bhaktapur produces. Or at any rate has produced. Some of our acceptable cultural ancestors tried to make doubt a method, and finally succeeded in freeing us, as they believed, from marked symbolism, succeeded in making the symbolic "only" symbolic. The people of Bhaktapur are beginning to desert their continent in the great divide for familiar shores.