"[chimpanzee] politics"

[Mark Mandel]

If anyone here is seriously interested in why we (i.e., some English
speakers) think of snakes as slimy, I suggest looking for more recent
influence from experience with worms and slugs.

m a m

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 10:21 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

>
> I have her book around somewhere but who knows=20
> where.  Its title is a pun on the (at least then)=20
> widely used locution "The descent of man" for=20
> evolution of humans; her point was that women=20
> played more of a role in this than men did,=20
> prompted by their need to care for infants, which=20
> caused women to spend a lot of time in the water,=20
> keeping the kids out of harm's way.  There was=20
> more to it than that, but it's a fun read as=20
> books on evolutionary biology go and actually=20
> more convincing than I can make it sound here.=20
> She wouldn't have used "primate" to stand in for=20
> "human", but she would certainly have compared=20
> the origins of humans (using the informed=20
> speculation she brings in elsewhere in the book)=20
> with that of other primates--and she also has a=20
> lot to say about elephants, whales, and other=20
> non-primate mammals.
>
> And eels.  To crib from an old paper of mine,=20
> "Eel of darkness, eel of light", discussing=20
> man's, and especially woman's, profound fear of=20
> snakes:
>
> =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
> Morgan (1972: 157) rejects the standard view=20
> attributing this phobia to 'something we brought=20
> down with us from the trees'.  Rather, as befits=20
> our evolutionary lineage as the aqueous ape, it=20
> is not the snake in the grass that gives us those=20
> 'atavistic creeps' but the deadly eel in the=20
> water.  As evidence for her proposal, Morgan=20
> points out that while 'the snake is by an=20
> enormous margin the animal that most people=20
> loathe', further inquiry shows that the=20
> creature's most abhorred attribute is its=20
> 'sliminess'.  Mais o=F9 sont les slimy snakes=20
> d'antan?
>
> Now, an eel is very slimy, but a snake's skin is=20
> as dry as a length of sunbaked rope.  That slimy=20
> snake that haunts our nightmares exists nowhere=20
> on God's earth, except in the backwaters of the=20
> race memory of Homo sapiens.
>        (Morgan 1972: 157)
>
> And it would have been especially the female of=20
> the species, naked in the shallows with an infant=20
> or two in close attendance, who was most=20
> vulnerable to the mordacious ravages of the eel,=20
> and hence the most likely to have translated this=20
> memory into what endures as a vestigial phobia=20
> within the sex-linked collective unconscious.
> =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>
> LH
>

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