Francisco Vaz da Silva’s Archeology of Intangible Heritage is a beguiling foray into folk ontology that scrutinizes sources from Plato to modern ethnographies in an attempt to make sense of a series of images and metaphors that dominate conceptions of, well, conception. At its core, the volume is a historical and cross-cultural study of worldview, examining how ideas of procreation and ontology are mapped onto folk practices and belief.
The author’s goal is ambitious and the result is a tangled and complex web of corresponding ideas that cross both space and time. The volume begins with a short introduction that explains the author’s overarching thesis and attempts to connect the sections together. Considering the complexity of his ideas, this introduction is both necessary and useful. The first section of the book, “Physiology,” is divided into three chapters that explore a number of folk models concerning the body and bodily processes, particularly those associated with fertility and conception. The first chapter, “Sexual Horns,” examines beliefs associated with cuckoldry (a term derived from the cuckoo bird, which, in addition to announcing the beginning of spring, also tricks other birds into hatching its eggs), focusing on the idea that the cuckolded husband grows horns. Vaz da Silva determines that horns indicate an abundance of semen, which was thought to be produced in the brain. In essence, semen from the adulterous man is transferred to the cuckolded husband through the mediation of the wife’s body, visualized in the image of waning (in the case of the adulterer) and waxing (in the case of the cuckold) sexual horns. The author ends the chapter by connecting this idea of transferring male vitality to cosmic beliefs about fertility associated with the “horned” moon, the lunar cycle, and the seasonal death and rebirth of agriculture, signaled by the return of the cuckoo. Farmers (or more appropriately, husbandmen) are in fact cuckolded each spring by animals and supernatural beings that come from the underworld and renew the crops each spring.
Chapter 2, “Metaphors of Conception,” continues this exploration of fertility images and begins with the endearing question: “From what point of view might a child be deemed analogous to a cheese?” (33). The author’s answer to this question centers on a belief that conception results when semen (containing the soul) coagulates menstrual blood (containing matter) into life, just as rennet coagulates milk into cheese. Vaz da Silva traces this clotting metaphor through a number of different processes other than cheese-making, including bread-baking (the action of yeast on flour) and sausage-making (the clotting of the pig’s blood). Drawing upon the idea of the sacrificial pig transformed into life-giving sausages, the author concludes that women are capable of drawing life out of death; sausage-making and baby-making are the same process. This strictly female capability to create life is scrutinized further in chapter 3, “Feminine Primacy,” in which the author examines ways that men attempt to appropriate female power. Relying on Melanesian ethnographic accounts, Vaz da Silva shows how semen is thought to be a limited good and that men must guard against women who desire to deplete it. However, based on the notion that semen is refined blood (women’s bodies are supposedly too cold to perform this process), men must secretly consume foodstuffs that symbolically represent feminine blood to restore their semen.
The cosmological implications of these bodily processes are explored in the second section of the volume, “Metaphysics.” Chapters 4 and 5, “Lunar Births” and “Cosmic Cycles,” attempt to make sense of the apparent folkloric correspondences between newborns and corpses, as both are involved in the process of traveling between the worlds of the living and the dead. The author begins the chapter by considering the ambivalent nature of menstruation, in which female blood is considered to be fresh (because it removes impurities each month) as well as poisonous (because it contains these toxins). In doing so, Vaz da Silva explains the image of sexually active women as poisonous snakes, who are regenerative as well as toxic. This belief is then connected to the phases of the moon and a cosmic notion of cyclic death and regeneration. The author presents several ancient and medieval conceptions of a triune otherworld; Dante represents this otherworld as Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Vaz de Silva postulates that these kinds of cosmic cycles, in which souls complete circular routes that correspond to the changing seasons, demonstrate the existence of a folk conception of time.
The final section of the volume, “Transpositions,” is arguably its most compelling. In it, the author examines how these ancient cosmological models have been adapted and maintained in Christianity—the “intangible heritage” of the title. The impetus for chapter 6, “The Madonna and the Cuckoo,” stems from the author’s observation of two statues in a Portuguese sanctuary that feature bird images. The first statue is of Mary holding the Christ child, who is in turn feeding a dove. The other statue shows Joseph, also holding Christ, who is in turn holding a bird the author identifies as a cuckoo. Although the author candidly admits that his evidence for this identification is flimsy (even the locals interpret the bird as a dove), the analysis that results from this identification, faulty or not, is persuasive. In this chapter, Vaz da Silva situates the Holy Family in the context of the concepts discussed in the previous chapters, concluding that the two statues offer dual images of divine conception in which souls are brought to the world by birds (as in the modern folk belief that storks deliver newborns). As a symbol of the Holy Spirit, the dove, rather than Joseph, impregnates Mary, just as the cuckoo, rather than the farmer, impregnates the fields in spring. Joseph himself is a cuckold because he raises a child begotten by another man. The last chapter, “Jesus Christ in the Light of Folklore,” is the culmination of all the others. Vaz da Silva demonstrates how the cyclic ontology, as symbolized by blood, snakes, and flowers, among other symbols, is transposed onto the figure of Christ. The brief epilogue that follows frames the previous discussion in terms of a widespread and enduring cyclical worldview.
Despite the length of this review, it cannot approach the complexity of Vaz da Silva’s ideas, as he offers a text that is dense in the breadth of its evidence as well as in the threads that link the evidence together. Some of this complexity undoubtedly is owed to the sheer mass of diverse materials the author draws upon; however, some is also due to the organizing framework of each chapter. Nearly every argument that Vaz da Silva makes rests upon previous claims; if the reader fails to grasp the author’s claim in even one instance the broader argument falls apart. Because of this, the reader would benefit from more guidance from the author to connect each section to the others and to provide a clearer path through the author’s argument. Consequently, this book will probably be of most interest to scholars who are specialists in cosmology and mythology.
However, the primary failing of this volume is the lack of a clearly defined and consistent methodology. With any comparative study, the onus is on the author to provide a rationale for the inclusion of data from cultures that are unconnected—in this case both temporally and geographically. The author might have avoided this pitfall by drawing only on Indo-European examples, but instead he also relies on evidence from disparate regions such as Melanesia and Central America. In the epilogue Vaz da Silva suggests that the reason for correspondences between cultures may be the universal similarities in life processes. In other instances Vaz da Silva implicates the existence of a collective unconscious to explain similarities across space and survivals to explain similarities over time. Both are controversial theories in studies of comparative folklore. Not sufficiently addressing this concern throws doubt on the validity of the author’s evidence and hence on his entire analysis. Although this reviewer (or any reader) cannot argue with Vaz da Silva’s claim that certain procreative images are pervasive, many of his conclusions as to why these are so common are highly speculative. I found the volume enjoyable for the interesting and diverse texts the author draws together, but the clarity of its argument and methodology leaves something to be desired.
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[Review length: 1393 words • Review posted on February 23, 2009]