I watch nature docs almost every night. With the exception of some recent Attenborough series, with their explicit intent to grab you by the shoulders and shake you, I find them a relaxing escape out of the day’s preoccupations, and as such a pleasant and effective transition to sleep. Because I watch so many, I’m aware of patterns and tropes and conventions common to them—hunt, flee, fight, mate, raise young, eat or be eaten. Occasionally, one will step outside of those familiar patterns enough that I notice, and it will stick with me. One of those is called Living With Leopards. A film crew does what the title suggests, as much as is practicable, keeping enough distance to avoid actually interfering with what the leopards are doing. They film for, if I recall correctly, three years. At the end, after an intense scene in which a mother violently drives away her now-self-sufficient adolescent son, the director explains the behavior, and then observes, in a voice over, that despite the almost-intimate contact with the leopards over such an extended period of time, and despite all that they knew about leopards and their lives and behavior, when it was all said and done and time to go home, there was a significant extent to which the leopards were still a mystery—still alien. The way he put it was deceptively simple: “They are leopards.” By which, of course, he means, “They are not human, and thus we cannot truly understand them because we cannot experience reality as they do.” This isn’t about limitations of everyday empathy; it’s about the fact that we cannot share the subjective reality of another creature.
Clear awareness of that can actually help us understand other humans—and other human cultures. But it’s hard. I read an article recently by a Norwegian archaeologist who was explaining, in cultural terms, why a certain Scandinavian people put representations of land animals on their watercraft and representations of sea creatures on land. I struggled to understand the argument—not because it wasn’t well-written or because I don’t have the ability and experience to read such things, but because this culture, these people’s subjective reality, was so alien to me that it required more than the ability to reason, and the ability to analogize, to understand. The author had spent enough time and thought on the subject that he understood it well—though certainly not the way the subjects had—but his task of conveying some of his understanding to other scholars without his background was a difficult one. I would have failed a quiz on that article unless I read it several times, and then I might have been able to pull a B- at best, depending on how hard the quiz was.
When Robert Eggers (whom I admire) made The Norseman, he set out to make it from the perspective of its principal characters. He would not present it as a 21st-century filmmaker looking through a lens from outside. He would present it as he thought it would have been presented by the people in whose culture it was set, as much as possible. This is why the movie can seem so “weird” at times (though never weird for its own sake). There is no line between the “real” and the “imaginary,” because, in these people’s reality, there was no such line—or, if there was, it was not where ours is. So, what we would call “hallucinations” are real to them. The ascent to Valhalla in the end is “real.” The powers and visions of the sorceress are “real.”
We teach first-year undergrads that reading history written in ancient Greece (and other contemporaneous cultures) is challenging and frustrating because, so often, the authors freely mix the “real” and the “supernatural,” dry observation of the mundane with equally-dry descriptions of fantastic monsters or impossible phenomena, such that it can be difficult to trust these histories to deliver up the “facts” we are looking for in them—or in our ability to discern those “facts” from “fantasy.” This same difficulty is largely what has made the collection of Hebrew and Christian scriptures collated into “The Bible” so destructive over the past two thousand years, despite the fact that there is so much deep wisdom and transcendent beauty in them. Ancient peoples were biologically the same as us, but they did not think, feel, or act the way we do. Their reality was not our reality.
What I’m getting at here is that the truth of what I just wrote goes beyond what we usually assume it does. Subjective reality is a bigger part of overall reality than we tend to think. Delving into anthropology and history makes this obvious. We really have to work to understand other people, other peoples, and their experiences. We have to put in the time. No one reading this needs to be told why cultivating that skill is important.
Leaving the leopards on the savanna with the admission that “they are leopards” in no way suggests that the film crew’s efforts were futile. It’s not an admission of failure. It’s an acknowledgement that no matter how much we learn about another being’s experience of life, we can never know it all. That is actually an important part of acquiring a deeper empathetic ability. We are missing something important when we fail to realize the limitations of our ability to understand—anything. That fact is closely related to the scientific method (to which we try to hold ancient histories and historians, to our detriment); when we fail to acknowledge the limitations of our evidence, we trust that evidence too much. And then we make assumptions that are highly likely to be wrong. If we act on those assumptions, we will be highly likely to make big mistakes.
When we acknowledge the limitations of our ability to understand what is alien to us—regardless of how alien—we’re also much less likely to pass judgment on what we don’t understand by filtering it through our own subjective reality. My wife asked me yesterday at the grocery, after seeing some women wearing hijabs, “What do you think of wearing the hijab?” “I don’t,” I answered. “It’s not my place to think anything about it. It’s not my culture.”
In terms familiar to historians, it is easy enough to describe what you observe; it’s much harder to interpret it. Translation, from one language to another, adds another layer of challenge to conveying the reality of one culture to members of another. But “difficult” does not mean “impossible,” though it does mean “guaranteed not to be perfect.” I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but an anthropology monograph on the Apache of the U.S. southwest, by Keith Basso, was the only book I read for my doctorate that made me weep—not because it was sad, but because it was so deeply, beautifully insightful a meditation on a people whose culture is drastically different from our own—so much so that it throws our own into sharper relief, revealing to us that so much of what we assume, what we take for granted, and consider objective reality is, in fact, subjective reality, and that other peoples’ subjective realities are, as is to be expected, given the diversity of human experience, so different.
Imperfect as his understanding might be, Keith Basso most certainly “understands” the Apache, because he put in the work and the time and he had the intellectual and psychological ability. And he could translate Apache language and reality into modern English beautifully and effectively. That, to me, is about as outstanding an intellectual achievement as there is. It won’t get the TV time that astrophysics does, but there it is, nevertheless. For the rest of us, living our lives, we don’t need to write Wisdom Sits In Places to practice what Basso did on an “everyday” level, to our own benefit and that of everyone else living here.