2.7 A Jaguar, a Fire, and a Theft: Americas Variations on the Origin of Fire

“The basic shortcoming of Lévi-Strauss’ formulation is that it ignores the sophistication and power of indigenous conceptions both of “nature” and “society” (a term I have preferred to “culture” because the myth so obviously treats social organization as the structural basis of “culture” in the more general sense).” Turner, 2017.

A work of undisputed significance in establishing the role of extant origin of fire myths within the socialisation practices of Ge indigenous tribes both in, and beyond central Brazil, upon publication, Levi-Strauss’ The Raw and The Cooked (1964) was considered the seminal academic reference in relation thereto, and in some academic circles, of the ‘science of mythology’ more generally. However, in the interim between then and now, subsequent decades-long research has evidenced there to be notable bias in Levi-Strauss’ analyses (Turner, 2017; Liebenberg, 2016), the relevance thereof central to the premise of this thesis, to the structuring of its underlying research programme, and the methodologies applied therein.

True to its French structuralist roots, Levi-Strauss’ analyses of the Ge origin of fire myths “had nothing to say” about their ‘meaning’ (Graeber, 2017, p.xxxviii), instead positing the potential of “empirical categories” as “conceptual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them in the form of propositions” (Levi-Strauss, 1964, p.1). Having stated his research could “not be carried out according to the Cartesian principle (Ibid, p.5), Levi-Strauss nonetheless applied a distinctly mechanical, as opposed to systemic approach to his analyses, which sought to support a fundamentally compelling hypothesis: that the structure of mythologies mirrors the cognitive structure and functioning of the human mind, wherein external stimuli [i.e. natural phenomena] are subjected to an essentially ‘algorithmic’ decision-making process in which information is disseminated into units that are thereon assigned to a binary category [i.e. day/night, light/dark, good/bad]: a psychology of dualism. The hypothesis is compelling on several levels, most notably the fact that binary oppositions are predominant in the structures of not merely Ge mythologies, and they of the wider Americas, but of archaic Indo-European, African, and South East Asian cultures. Furthermore, binary oppositions are central to the decision-making modus of analogue, digital and hybrid computing, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, and to innumerable societal administrative and organising structures [i.e. classification systems]. Numerous psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers, and others of whom the research is predominantly concerned with human decision making and its underlying functioning have, and for millennia, identified binary oppositions, and subsets thereof, as integral to how human knowledge is formed. Thus, the basic premise of Levi-Strauss’ Ge mythologies analyses proves not problematic, but useful to this thesis and its aims. However, several aspects of Levi-Strauss’ methodologies and subsequent conclusions are. For example, when discussing both Ge fire and flood myths that bare striking similarities with both living and ancient mythologies from beyond the Americas, Levi-Strauss discussed not the possibility of a common origin thereof, let alone the role of that origin within the Ge myths, and its place within and of the belief system and culture of the Ge tribes. In contrast, contemporary anthropologist Alistair McIntosh (2008) has identified commonalities in the narratives and themes of wide-ranging mythologies that constitute a dialogue between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, or more specifically, Sumerian, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman mythologies of which the storyline involves a ‘hero’ navigating a series of environmental challenges, including but not limited to fire and/or floods.

When speaking of the myths and of their orators, enactors, and listeners, the Ge tribespersons, Levi-Strauss made not any attempt to relate the myths and their role within Ge socialisation practices to wider society past or present, instead discussing the tribespersons as one might animals in a lab experiment. A consequence thereof, be it consciously or otherwise, is that of ‘othering’ the subjects of his study, this being a matter of profound significance given the treatment of the native peoples of the Americas since European colonisation to present. Furthermore, his tone sounds culturally bias, such for example as when he states, “We have seen that the Bororo myths display a remarkable indifference toward incest: the incestuous person is looked upon as the victim, while the offended against is punished for having taken revenge or for having planned to do so” (Ibid, p.81). The bias inherent therein lies, firstly, in Levis-Strauss’ inference that the act of incest is intended to be taken literally, as opposed to metaphorically. Secondly, its occurrence frequent within Indo- European mythologies (Page, 2014, p.60), incest, of which examples include the mythological couplings of Grecian gods and goddesses Zeus and his sister Hera, and of niece Persephone and uncle Hades, and of Egyptian deities, the siblings Shu and Tefnut, Isis and Osiris, and Set and Nephthys, as for there to be nothing ‘remarkable’ about its prominence in the Ge, or indeed any other ancient or living myths. Additionally, Levi-Strauss’ analyses of the Ge origin of fire myths are presented in a spatiotemporal vacuum: myths stripped of their historical context, but for a short discussion on paleoastronomy; of their wider social context, but for highly sporadic references to some Old World mythologies; and, beyond the relation of astronomy to anticipation of seasonal events such as floods, and the occasional commentary on the colouration, behaviour, or habitat of a floral or faunal species, none but superficial observations of the myths’ environmental context. The matter thereof is especially pertinent both given the immensity of the significance of the natural world and its workings both to the peoples of the Ge tribes, they of the wider-Americas, and indigenous peoples worldwide. Hence, Levis-Strauss explored not the possibility that Ge origin of fire myths may exhibit such sophistication in their structure as to simultaneously encode abstract philosophical constructs and commentaries, with the remnants of ancient, but nonetheless once real-world observations on the workings of natural systems [i.e. faunal and/or floral metamorphoses and transitions in the environment more generally]. Might origin of fire myths be the original transdisciplinary works: where the prehistorical roots of the fields today known as the sciences, the arts, and the humanities first-combined? We might never know. Either way, Straussian structuralism’s absence of attention to the meaning of myths, and to the codification of that meaning, renders it an inadequate model to serve the Ge origin of fire myths contextual justice.

As relates to this thesis, the foremost issue of contention with respect to the analyses of Levi-Strauss is his “savage” vs. “scientific” mind proposition. Bringing context thereto, the Oxford dictionary defines ‘savage’ as “an offensive word for somebody who belongs to a people that is simple and not developed”, or “a cruel and violent person” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2018). The labelling of both ancient and indigenous peoples and their understanding of the world as such is as bias intellectually as it is offensive, speaking to a by-gone imperialist era in which one worldview - the Western worldview - reigned over all others: Empire as an act of cultural, economic and social imposition. Put succinctly, The Raw and The Cooked is a case study in disciplinary, not transdisciplinary research practice, and a tome of which the overall tone was ‘of its time’, which may account for why, unlike some of Levis-Strauss’ other works, readership demand is so low the work has not been republished in print in some years.

Anthropologist and human rights advocate for indigenous people, the late Professor Emeritus Terry Turner, spent five decades (1962 – 2014) researching social organisation, kinship, myth, ritual, values, and inter-ethnic relations of the Ge speaking Kayapo peoples of the Amazon basin. While the greater part of his research remains, as yet, unpublished, hailed as “one of the great achievements of anthropological theory” (Graeber, 2017, p.xxxix), Turner’s writings on the origin of fire myths of the Kayapo, finally went to print posthumously last year. The “structural inversion” of the “painfully effete” and “politically conservative” Levi-Strauss, Turner was “academically marginal” and “politically radical” (Ibid, p.xxiv). Where the former produced “static models” the latter produced “dynamic” ones (Ibid), and whereas Levi-Strauss published prolifically, but had limited, if any real political influence, in his lifetime the latter published not a single book, but was a prominent and influential figure in the creation and upholding of rights for both the Amazonian peoples he studied, and indigenous peoples worldwide, both formally, as president of Survival International, USA, and as a founding member of the American Anthropological Association’s Ethic and Human Rights committees, and informally through his influence on the world of popular entertainment through, amongst other affiliations, the Avatar Alliance Foundation [15].

His contributions to anthropology “breath-taking in their scope” (Smith, 2015), Turner’s structuralism drew on notably more disciplines than that of Levi-Strauss. Turner synthesised both Levi-Straussian methodologies with they of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics [16], his intent that of establishing what the Ge origin of fire myths were “trying to say” (Ibid, p.xxxvii). Turner’s analyses operated on not one, but two levels, the first examining the structural relations of a myth’s symbolic elements, the second its subjective meaning – its ‘message’ (Ibid). Turner described his approach as, “a new conception of myth structure as a hierarchically organized system of transformations of a single set of symbolic oppositions that recurs as the basis for each successive episode of the narrative” (Turner, 2017, p.44). His analyses revealed that the structures of Ge origin of fire myths “as wholes” are metaphoric, containing isomorphic, homologous and referential aspects, thus “not context-free”, and critically, in contrast to Levis-Strauss, Turner found that not merely were the myths localised in terms of “the content of their elements” [i.e. points of floral and faunal reference], but more broadly (Ibid). More pertinently still, where Levis-Strauss saw “only static aspects” [i.e. classifications] of the social and cultural world, Turner saw “the processes through which these aspects are produced or maintained” (Ibid, p.45).

“The most radical and distinctive perspectivist claim for the uniqueness of Amazonian cosmologies and epistemological perspectives as contrasted with Western ideas... is that Amazonians do not, after all, conceive of nature, as represented by animals, and culture as mutually distinct and contrastive categories, in the manner of Levi-Straussian structuralism... Culture and humanity are not limited to humanity, but to encompass nature as well” (Ibid, p.222)

As with the Indo-European theft of fire myths, the Kayapo’s are structurally sophisticated stories that speak to the origin of the control of fire by human societies and, for both better and worse, the ongoing consequences thereof. Like their ancient Vedic, Greek, and Roman counterparts, the myths employ culturally-relevant symbols and scenarios to convey how humanity relates to its environment. The contents of the Ge myths collated and documented by Levis-Strauss in combination with the analyses of the Kayapo variants by Turner support the general hypothesis as discussed in 2.6, that being that origin of fire myths having descended from a common prehistoric archetype, the rationale thereof derived from the myths’ common structure, narrative, meaning, and intent [i.e. social context]. In all instances the myths are multi- generational edutainment tools – their purpose not solely that of entertaining, but of educating listeners, which would explain why, fundamentally, no matter their number, the many variations remain one-in-the-same story. Turner’s observations of how and why the contents of the Kayapo myths became modified throughout space and time may help explain how and why origin of fire myths worldwide diversified from a point of common origin. Bringing context thereto, for all its variations, the Kayapo origin of fire myth bares several recognisable hallmarks. Firstly, it describes ‘the theft’ of the control of fire. Secondly, that theft is undertaken by a mortal/s, he/they, being a mortal/s that wrongs a being of immortal status – a jaguar [17]. Thirdly, like its Indo-European counterparts, the Kayapo origin of fire myth attributes humanity’s transition from a state of ‘nature’ to – in the words of Turner ‘society’, in they of Levis-Strauss ‘culture’ – to the theft. Fourthly, that theft comes at a price, which though not as explicitly expressed in some of the Kayapo and wider Ge variants, is nonetheless familiar in others, in which, in consequence of the theft of fire, humanity need indefinitely live in fear of reprisal from the jaguar, in both the dietic and ecological [18] sense. Fifthly, the Kayapo myth is a socio-ecological construct – concerned not only with humanity’s relationship with itself – with socialisation, but with its relationship with non-human world. One might posit that there is much for reflection in the fact that, though the origin of fire myth remains central to the socialisation practices of both the Kayapo and other indigenous communities around the world, it has become all but lost within they of the Global North, where awareness of its variants tends be restricted to academics and others with an interest in Classics.

The analyses of both Levis-Strauss and Turner reveal that within the confines of the Amazon basin any changes to the origin of fire myth are restricted to but a few components [i.e. the matter of whether a boy stole fire single-handedly, or with the assistance of fellow village members]. Expanding the investigative territory further, and from South to North America, and while the structure and message remain the same, yet further components have changed, as evidenced in this extract from the Apache origin of fire myth, “The fireflies pursued the Fox to his burrow and informed him that, as punishment for having stolen fire from them and spread it abroad over the land, he should never be permitted to use it himself”. (Lewis, 2018, p.482). Anthropomorphism being fundamental to Native American cosmology, which “look back to a remote time when the difference between people and animals was blurred, before humans emerged as a distinct race of beings on Earth”, and thus “animal people” were “forerunners” of modern humans (Luthin, 2002, online), may explain why a ‘fox’ and not a primal boy or man ‘stole’ fire in the Apache myth variant. Hence, one might posit that, whereupon, like languages, the origin of fire myth was mapped worldwide, its variations would reflect the migratory paths of ancient peoples, and the ways in which their culture, society and other modes of expression evolved in space and time: a record of the real-world transition from ‘nature’ to ‘culture/society’ to which the myth itself speaks. Furthermore, myths, like languages, make evident that the evolution of human systems mirror they of non-human systems, as their internal logic bearing striking resemblance [i.e. species – be that species plant, animal, language, or myth - adapting by means of making fit for localised purpose].

While Levis-Strauss was correct in his conclusion that Ge myths, including they of the Kayapo, use fire and cooking as an analogy of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, more specifically ‘society’, his interpretation was far too simplistic (Ibid, p.121), for Ge peoples, like Native Americans, perceive not of humans and of their activities as being mutually exclusive from the natural world. Where Straussian structuralism revolves around notions of nature and society in states of perpetual stasis, thus of classifications as remain indefinitely – hierarchies set in metaphorical stone – Kayapo myths describe a world of transitional states, where boundaries are blurred and none less so than they between humans and their environment. Turner’s analyses of the meanings of the Kayapo myths make evident that transformations “play a far more important and dynamic role in mythical thought than structuralist formulations have so far recognised” (Ibid, p.121), which correlates with the analyses on the meaning and structure of Indo-European theft of fire myths as detailed in 2.6 above. In contrast to Levis-Strauss, who essentially reduced the Ge myths’ structures to ‘before’ and ‘after’ scenarios, Turner identified a triadic structure (Ibid, p. 124) that may be described as ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ [“juxtaposition”, “interaction”, and “final reconciliation”], the ‘during’ [interaction] important because it constitutes the conversion [therein ‘link’] from/between one state to/and another. Qualitatively, Turner described the myths’ tri-part modality as “nonlinear”, “cyclical”, expressive of “repetitive time” (p.139), “forming a hierarchy of levels of temporal experience” (Ibid, p.136). Relating Kayapo myth structure to psychology and to the cognitive functioning of the human mind, where Straussian structuralism spoke to dyadic conceptions of reality, Turnerian structuralism spoke to triadic: to cooking not as an ‘end-state’, but as ‘catalyst’. Consequently, though in agreement with Levis-Strauss that the structure of myth and of the mind are homologous, Turner drew this conclusion from reasoning inverse to that of Straussian structuralism, that being both myth and mind as “symbolic structures” that enable sense-making of objects, as representative of external stimuli [i.e. events] (Ibid, p.145). In short, myths as avatars of the mind, which, one might speculate, is a contributory factor to their enduring legacy. The sustained relevance of myth in human societies, and in particular as relates to humanity’s relationship with nature, is evidenced in a creative work closely affiliated to Turner, it being the highest-grossing film [$2,782,275,172>] on record (Box Office Mojo, 2018).

Directed by James Cameron, Avatar, like the Ge and other Amazon basin myths that inspired and informed its script, operates on several levels. Set, in reference to Greek mythology, on the fictional moon of ‘Pandora’, Avatar brought to 3D animated life one of the most contentious real-world issues of both past and present: destruction of virgin habitats and the indigenous communities that inhabit them by mining and extraction companies that work to an imperialist ideology. A myth of myths, in the sense that it drew from multiple mythical sources to author anew, Avatar challenges the idea that, in and of itself, technology will solve the ethical and environmental challenges that stem from humanity having failed to find a way to live within Earth’s resource limits, and with that, within the workings of the natural world. However, a carefully structured critique it may be, but its message is not negative. Having drawn on leading-edge developments from across the scientific and technological arena, and in disciplines as diverse as genetic and biological engineering, biotechnology, biocomputing, biomimetics, and satellite and space communications, together with speculations from leaders in the futurism field, Cameron, like the myths, cultures, and belief systems from which he drew inspiration, created a virtual window into a future world without boundaries between humanity and its environment, but for in the minds of they too ecologically-illiterate to understand the implications of their imperialist actions.

In his review of Levis-Strauss’ The Raw and The Cooked, Deon Liebenberg wrote, “Without this mediating culture humans would be completely absorbed in the world of nature – as happened to that former master of culture, the jaguar, in the Ge myths” (2016, p.24). What Turner’s analyses made evident is that, in their worldview, the Kayapo are, and completely, absorbed in nature. Thus, a mediating role their myths may play, but that role is more complex than drawing definitive lines around human and non-human systems. Myths have, do, and doubtless will continue to become manifest in many guises, and in the process reveal profound insights into the psychology, cognitive functioning, and resulting beliefs, values, and behaviours of their authors, and of the societies of which they are part. Humanity’s relationship with fire, and more specifically, with wildfire, embedded so deeply within the development of our species and its antecedents, both mythological and other anthropological studies provide of invaluable insights into how and why human societies have, do, and may relate to wildfire in the future. Whereupon, as proposed in this thesis, WUI communities, and human society at large were to embrace ‘living with fire’, theirs would be the need to embrace a Kayapo-like relationship with their environment. Theirs would need be the humility to accept that ancient, some still living, cultures and beliefs systems which, for centuries, were touted as being inferior to their own, exhibit a depth and breadth of understanding of the natural world and its workings, and their relation thereto, as became all-but-lost in those of the Global North. Bed-time stories the Kayapo Origin of Fire myths may be, but within and of their society, and their socialisation practices, they are taken every bit as seriously as the ilk of Fire Building Codes by architects, planners, and real estate developers around the world.

Footnotes

[15] The foundation of filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence James Cameron.

[16] His works foundational in the development of the field of hermeneutics, transdisciplinary researcher Schleiermacher drew on insights from disciplines as diverse as philosophy, psychology, politics, pedagogy, aesthetics, ethics, dialectics and more in an effort to evolve Kant’s theory of there being subjectivity interpretation of external phenomena, described in his own words as, “the art of understanding” (Schleiemacher, 1978).

[17] Within the belief system of the Ge peoples, and of the wider indigenous community of South America, the jaguar is sacred. Mirroring they of, amongst other Indo-European fire-related deities, Athena, the jaguar’s mythological attributes include strength, power, wisdom, and strategic skill in warfare. More significantly still, in some Amazonian tribal communities, the jaguar in its dietic form is revered as the god of terrestrial fire, with rituals of worship in honour thereof involving various artefacts representative of fire-captured [i.e. torches].

[18] The Amazon basin’s apex predator, to this day, Jaguar (Panthera onca) pose a lethal threat to Kayapo and other Amazonian peoples (Neto et al, 2011).

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The thesis is also available in PDF format, downloadable in several parts on Academia and Researchgate.

Note that figures have been removed from the digital version hosted on this site, but are included in the PDFs available at the links above.

Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.