– Anthropology and Egalitarianism: Ethnographic Encounters from Monticello to Guinea-Bissau (2010)
Several months later I shared another, far more momentous, meal. I was attending an initiation ritual for blacksmiths. Among Manjaco, as in much of West Africa, blacksmiths are special, sacred, and their work is hedged by secrecy, imbued with a magical and at times sinister aura. Blacksmiths deal in occult transformations. They make metal and shape it. They also can curse and cause illness. The food we were eating was meant to signal things about their occult status, and one of the bowls contained the chopped up pieces of a dog they had sacrificed on the blacksmith’s altar. When they passed that bowl around, I took a chunk of it and ate the pungent meat with more or less feigned gusto. I had eaten dog before (in Jakarta, at a Chinese restaurant where I also sampled snake, lizard, monkey, and other exotic meats). I was proud of my gustatory tolerance. I felt like an adventurer. The dog at the Jakarta restaurant, like the dog in the Manjaco village, did not really taste good to me, even though the flavor itself was fine, more or less familiar, but the thought of dogs—barking, jumping, playing catch, being pets—made the taste more or less irrelevant. Again, I felt that feeling of mild repugnance, yet I could pretend otherwise, even to the point of tricking my own taste buds.
As I ate, my companions looked at me in befuddlement. “You like dog?” one old man, one of the priestly officiants at the ceremony, asked. I replied, “Yes,” thinking how clever I was, how much I must be demonstrating my solidarity with them, how much of an insider I was becoming. He looked down at the floor in front of him. “We don’t like dog here. It is too much like a person. It is like eating a person.”
Blacksmiths, I would later learn, undergo an initiation that requires them to do repulsive things. One such repulsive act — like cannibalism, close enough to make the point of the potentially sinister quality of their so on-to-be-mastered occult powers—was to eat a morsel of dog. I had inadvertently demonstrated how Other, how potentially savage and sinister I was. Yet for blacksmiths to share in such a revolting meal was also to make them into a special and powerful society. It tied them together as a moral community.
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