Ishmael: beyond The Matrix

Unless you have been reading anthropology for a long time (and I haven't) Daniel Quinn's Ishmael can leave you completely surprised. And even if you have, this novel has every appearance of being a golden thread of concerns many anthroplogists should have been thinking about for decades. I cannot comment on whether they have, but Ishmael is so lucidly written and its message so clearly articulated that there is no question about the importance of its contents. Here is not some new method on how to improve your life, or become a better person - this is about something that concerns all of us on earth, and that everyone should know about.

It would be futile to condense all of what the novel does so admirably in 260 odd pages in one or two posts. Instead I will attempt to highlight one noteworthy topic covered - the recontextualisation of the story of the fall in the book of Genesis in the Bible. To do so it is of some use to explain the setting of the novel.

The novel is largely a dialogue of ideas - literally a dialogue. The narrator, an unspecified person who appears to do some sort of freelance journalism for a living seems to have been searching for someone who can teach him (or her - I can't recall the novel ever specifiying the gender of the narrator; so funny that with the constraint in English of having to genderise a referent, gender is suddenly important! there are languages in which gender differentiation is unimportant in this way) about things he suspects are wrong in the world. It seems to be a case that of "when the student is ready the master appears" because he meets a teacher who starts teaching him about ... captivity

Now, incidentally - and to energise the reader's attention with something more generally accessible - this was also the topic of that entertaining trilogy The Matrix. Remember, in the first movie Neo learns that all humans are living in the Matrix - but they don't know it. The world as they know it is the Matrix. It is almost like a simulation, something that could have been designed by someone - which indeed it was, as we find out in the second installment - by The Architect.

The Teacher (Ishmael) teaches the apprentice about the nature of captivity as well - a prison that one could conceive of as a kind of Matrix, and which we are all living in (enacting) without quite knowing that we are a captive audience and entirely captured participants:

Ishmael: I'm telling you this because the people of your culture are in much the same situation. Like the people of Nazi Germany, they are the captives of a story.

But perhaps this is where the analogy of The Matrix has fulfilled its purpose, because Ishmael succeeds where The Matrix does not venture - nor could have, as its roots are in the ultra-postmodernist ideas that are dismantling civilisation's realities and cherished belief systems, but fixed on this unstable set of continuously imploding constructs. In short, The Matrix's premises (if people cared to look) should make people deeply uncomfortable because no certainties or objective vaues are given to replace them.

As in the novel I will briefly set out some of the terms that are frequently used. First up is the notion of Takers and Leavers. Takers make up most of homo sapiens sapiens. They include everyone who has gone along wth the agricultural revolution started around 10000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. Life as most of us know it is entirely dependent on agriculture to allow permanent settlement and population growth. These are some of the basic premises in the story of the Takers. The Leavers on the other hand do not experience consistent population growth - their numbers being held in check by the eco-system they are a part of, just like any species' - and consist of many of the peoples who lived for 3 million years until the agricultural revolution, when things began to change. Today there are few Leavers left - the bushmen in South Africa and the Navajo in North America are some.

Other terms that require explanation by way of definition are:
Story: loosely defined as a story describing man's role in the world and his relationship to the gods.
To enact: in this context enaction means to live in such a way that the story of man as he is related to the rest of the world and to the gods becomes a reality
culture: in Ishmael's words, "culture is a people enacting a story" - i.e. it is the ongoing activity of people enacting their story