魔兽与母亲--灾难的象征论

The Monster and the Mother: The Symbolism of Disaster

1991年10月发生在奥克兰地区的大火灾造成25人丧生,6000多人无家可归。幸存者用各种方式表达自己对这场灾难的认识,其中凸显了有关自然与文化、有序与无序、时间与空间以及传统的男女性别区分与生死等二元结构,尤其是对作为自然象征的母亲与作为灾难象征的魔兽二者之间的对立显示了自然与非自然力量的对比。人们为了解释灾难的去而复来,甚至认定灾难的发生是早已注定的、循环的,从而肯定了上帝对于自然灾害发生的控制权,由此,毁灭者也是创造者。奥克兰大火中隐含着如建筑材料的不当使用和居民区的不合理规划等技术性因素,因此其可部分归结为技术性灾难。而由于技术性灾难产生于一个文化的竞技场,而不是自然自身的,在这种情况下,能满足人们心理需求的合乎情理的灾难意象或隐喻非常少,因此,技术性灾难不会流变为神话,而是作为永远的历史而存在。综观上述过程,灾难被重新界定为"创造性的毁灭",从而被赋予了一种令人敬畏的美。尽管并非所有的文化都会以上述方式去象征地表达灾难,但所有的文化在描述与解释灾难时,象征都将会是他们行动的一部分。这些象征的建立缓解或消解了灾民对于灾难的恐惧,这也可以部分解释为什么灾难多发区的居民大多不愿意搬迁。

Whether a society encompasses few people or multitudes,whether its landhold is remote and its records without letters or its reach global and its renown etched in ink,disaster contradicts its members ’ definitive knowledge. No matter if the disaster stems from nature or errant technology,is experienced or merely expected,no one,neither sage nor scientist,preacher nor president,can wholly tell the why or the where of a calamitous event. And so,no matter what place in the world it occurs, what form it might take, whether singular or chronic,peoples’explanations of disaster tend to rely on creative,often mythological,imagination. The belief systems of people experiencing or expecting calamity are rife with symbols dealing with their situations,and their cosmologies are vibrant with metaphor. Like all symbols and metaphors,those dealing with catastrophe reflect the mental processes of a collective people,and the fruits of both creative impulse and sense making reasoning. They give an ethnological picture of how disaster is seen,interpreted,and utilized prior to,after,and in preparation for an event. Some scholars have proposed that symbolic values have a cathartic effect for cultural modification （ Turner 1974; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Laughlin 1995; Prattis 1984; Campbell 1949） ,but the cathartic value of disaster symbolism is even more primary. The imagery surrounding disaster implements cultural and personal survival. It provides a compass of orientation on how to think about calamity and gives an orbit of persuasion on how to cope with and survive it . Behind the symbols lies a logic that classifies the e-vent and gives it cause. Once ordered and given reason,a calamity can be given context,content, emotion,and meaning,all of which figure significantly in understanding the cultural response to disaster. There is,after all,a point to communication even when it is denotative. In the case of disaster,that point is double tined： Disaster symbolism enables the conservation of a sociocultural world,and also its transformation. The author states that she has titled this article ＂The Monster and the Mother ＂ because the same sort of dualism many people characteristically evidence in their symbolic schemes often surfaces in disaster symbolism. As one would expect,the dualistic schemes frequently overlap with those already present for environment,and mirror those bespeaking the opposition,where it occurs,between nature and culture. Because of the circumstance,however,the dualistic schemes surrounding disaster commonly appear in new guises,and bring up subtle features not otherwise manifest. Frequently,they take on special embodiment. Cyclical schemes,including both grand and implied allegories of beginnings and ends,apocalypses and revivals,also arise in disaster symbolism,and the author will touch here on both the formal and informal sort. Then,the author turns to technological disaster because they bring forth particular,convoluted,and chilling symbolic issues. This article relies primarily on the author’ s experience with and research on the Oakland Berkeley firestorm of October 1991. The author also incorporates material from other disasters. The author found that what the Oakland firestorm survi-vors underwent and how they behaved does not differ greatly from survivors of other disasters. All display much the same sort of symbolic expression and metaphoric solutions,as do people who live in zones of chronic calamity. With the aid of symbolic thought,the Oakland firestorm survivors formed a fiction to deal with and＂defang＂their environment. Utilizing oppositions,embodiment,and metaphoric description,they swept aside the hazards about them and, in the days and years following the firestorm,spun the chimera again. The author deals largely with their postdisaster symbolism,as the prior was inert. The actions, utterances, palaver, rituals, writing,and art that fiery Sunday initiated＂outed＂ it. The cultural distinction drawn between humanity and its obverse,animality,or between the safe and orderly and its antithesis , the wild, gives rise to a fundamental opposition between nature and culture,an operation that Levis Strauss argues is latent in all peoples’attitudes and behavior （ 1963a,1966,1969,1973） . Others disagree,positing that this schematic division is not universal （ Strathern 1980） . Still,many people do employ it,especially those involved in any version of Western society,which so pervades globally today. Even among those who do construct this opposition,who abstract matters cultural from matters natural,,the physicality of life behind the cultural remains at some level is undeniable （ Levi Strauss 1963a,1966,1969,1973 ） . To overcome the logical paradoxes that exist when nature is divided from culture,and to reduce dialectic tension,people use symbolic codes. At the time a calamity occurs or threatens,be the people industrial or not,they inevitably already have in place a plan that arranges and explains the world to them. It is by and large this blueprint,or elements of it,that emerges in the presence of calamity. The emblems representing catastrophe overlap with cosmological and environmental symbols. This was certainly the case in Oakland. In all manner of terminology and representations,in ceremony and behavior,the survivors of the Oakland firestorm resurrected deep environmental precepts to paint a symbolic portrait of their misfortune. Without a grid of totems,the images expressed were nonetheless reducible to nature and culture and to the fundamental division between the two. To begin with,the survivors of the firestorm immediately cast the fire as a phenomenon from nature’ s sphere. The fire was characterized as wild and uncontrollable. It was further instantly posed as oppositional to culture. Some cultural causes were cited,but they were contextualized on a nature culture slide rule. Other dualisms emerged in survivor imagery and action as well. The struggle to recover was portrayed as a trip ＂upward＂,while the disaster was painted as a ＂down＂ fall. A schism between male and female with older,traditional gender behaviors resurfaced （ Hoffman 1998） . Death versus life also came into play. Victims sketched the disaster in chiaroscuro,as＂a dark episode＂and＂going through hell. ＂The climb to renewal was portrayed as the ＂light at the end of the tunnel. ＂ Oakland firestorm survivors evoked yet another symbolic operation. As with all people in a new situation,they had only so many symbolic tools at hand,and,in their extremity,they utilized the symbols already in the schematic corpus,and applied them to epitomize alternate applications. Most notable,they shifted the constitution of content and meaning behind the basic nature culture dualism. They performed this tidy slippage by employing embodiment. The symbolic repertoires of all peoples incorporate some, if not considerable, embodiment. When embodying a symbol,a people can bedeck ideas with distinction and persona. In Oakland the firestorm victims came into the fire’ s aftermath with an image of nature already in place,namely that of a gentle and nourishing mother. On the one hand,they cast the storm as an aspect of nature and depicted nature as wild and uncontrollable; onthe other,they took the mother image and shifted nature almost entirely into it. Nature was quickly again referred to as fostering. People removed nature from blame and forgave it. Amending nature back into something cultured,survivors then had little choice but no transform that which was wild and uncontrollable about the physical world into something other. They appropriated something figurative and illusive. They seized upon a monster. In short,the Oakland firestorm survivors bifurcated nature and fleshed out the firestorm with body and unbody. Along with dualistic systems,disaster symbolism arises within ideologies in which time forever rotates in cyclical fashion. When and where such temporal schemes prevail,disaste