Last week we had reached the stage where
all preparations had been made for the matança (pig
killing) and a day of hard work was ahead for the extended
pagès eivissenc (Ibicenco peasant) family and other
invited guests. For readers new to this website we are at
the moment dealing with the importance of the pig in traditional
Ibicenco culture and looking at the (still continuing) annual
pig killings (matançes in the eivissenc increasingly
rare sub-dialect of the eastern Catalan language spoken on
the island). If you have missed the previous articles about
pigs here on Eivissa/Ibiza I would kindly suggest that you
look at this column in the three previous issues of this weekly
paper. Before we get into the matança proper, though,
I think we should have a brief look at pigs in general.
'Half wild and wholly tame'. Pigs have,
it seems, certainly received a 'bad press' in many parts of
the world over an extended period of time. The word is often
synonymous with 'dirty', 'greedy', 'lazy', 'gluttonous' and
more in that vein. Judaism and Islam have strong religious
prohibitions against pigs. 'Pig' even became an insulting
term for certain kinds of police in the US from the late 1960s.
But, as human history goes, such a lowly position for the
pig is relatively recent and human attitudes to pigs are really
culturally (e.g., religiously) determined and therefore vary
greatly around the world. In Melanesia (the area comprising
West Papua/Irian Jaya, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands
and Vanuatu *) in the South-western Pacific, an area containing
over a quarter of the world's languages and cultures, pigs
are of great cultural importance, not just for food but for
ancient and present-day ritual. The peak of this 'pig cultural
complex' is reached in the Republic of Vanuatu; an archipelago
of 83 inhabited islands possessing twice as many different
indigenous languages and cultures as the whole of Europe.
In Vanuatu pigs are the sacred animals and no important event
can take place without the involvement of pigs in some way
or another. There, depending upon the culture, pigs can have
a language (which a few humans are trained to speak), a personality
and often a soul. In fact aspects of ritual pig manipulation
there are so essential that in some cultures in Vanuatu humans
cannot attain life after death in The World of the Dead without
it. At one level of analysis, in certain cultures in Vanuatu,
being called a 'pig' can almost be considered a form of compliment
(well, that of course depends upon the type of pig one is
called: not all pigs are equal and, as amongst humans, there
are individuals of high and low status, so it is amongst pigs).
Certain types of pigs there are a form of sacred currency,
their use oiling the links of the chains connecting the past,
the present and the future. A world without pigs there would
be considered impossible. When I began my anthropological
work there in 1973 (Vanuatu was called the New Hebrides in
those days) one of the first questions I was often asked in
isolated traditional areas of the country was 'What island
are you from and how many pigs do you have?' In England one
might politely ask (after the proper introductions, of course)
'Where are you from and what is your job?' - it is very much
the same.
In ancient times 'pagans praised the pig
from Iceland to Israel and to the Indus'. The pig was very
much part of the ancient cultural system in many areas of
the world, even in the Middle East before the development
of Judaism and (later) Islam. A common cultural phenomena
around the world, when a new religion develops or penetrates
new areas, is to denigrate or proscribe/prohibit important
aspects of the previous culture/religion. Sometimes this has
local variants: pigs are considered relatively 'OK' by Christian
cultures, but not so by many white Christian missionaries
in Vanuatu, who have tried, relatively unsuccessfully over
the last 150 years, to persuade the indigenous inhabitants
that pigs are dirty animals and are 'creatures of the Devil'.
Certain Ni-Vanuatu (indigenous inhabitants of the country)
subjected to these ideas are sometimes therefore rather surprised
if they find out that 'White Men' overseas often have pigs.
Some missionaries there have (in the last decade) found themselves
in a rather awkward predicament when, after delivering a long
harangue against pigs in some remote corner of Vanuatu, the
chief politely shows them a photo of the famous statue of
Sant Antoni des Porcs (Saint Anthony of the Pigs) in the church
of Santa Agnès in north-western Eivissa. 'Why can the
White Man be against pigs when they even have a special Saint
to protect Pigs?' I have carefully distributed copies of photos
of this statue around Vanuatu since 1992.
In certain ancient Irish and Welsh myths
the pig was almost considered as a god. The famous scholar
Sir James Frazer linked the pig in parts of Ancient Europe
to the sacred corn/barley spirit. He theorized that the ancient
Greeks mythologies the pig into the god-figures of Demeter,
Adonis and Attis and pointed out that for the ancient Egyptians
the pig was associated with Osiris. The cult of the pig -
or, more rather, the boar - in northern Europe possibly reached
its height during the time of the ancient Celts, by whom it
was considered the cult animal par excellence, at least in
Celtic Britain. The rise of Christianity in northern Europe
erased its cultic/religious/spiritual role and is probably
responsible for the slightly negative view of the pig held
today by many European Christian cultures. I am not yet sure
of the early cultural position of pigs in certain areas of
southern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula but it is possibly
safe to assume that pigs were of cultural importance amongst
early populations of this part of the world as well. Many
European archaeologists today might find pig bones in early
excavations but not necessarily recognise their real importance
- there is sometimes a sort of unconscious assumption that
this just indicates that pigs were a part of the traditional
diet. Maybe yes, but it depends upon the culture. In the mid-1980s
I was pleased to introduce the Swedish megalithic specialist
and archaeologist, Dr Goran Burenhult, to certain aspects
of living megalithic cultures in Vanuatu. He, of course, noted
the importance of pigs (especially pigs with specially elongated
tusks) in many of the rituals there. Upon returning to Europe
he began re-analysing many of the archaeological remains from
certain early cultures in northern Europe and noted that many
of the early human burials contained pigs tusks, a fact that
had been rather over-looked or minimised beforehand.
Pigs are of the family of the Suidae, belonging
to the mammalian order Artiodactyla, the even-toed ungulates,
and of the lineage of the Suiformes, whose other two families
are the Hippopotamidae (hippos) and Dicotylidae (peccaries).
Traditional European pigs were descended from the European
Wild Boar, Sus scrofa. These creatures can withstand an amazing
array of temperatures and climates ranging from minus 50 degrees
centigrade (aided by their huddling and nestling behaviour)
up to plus 50 degrees centigrade. The main northern limit
to their area was not necessarily temperature but snow depth,
Wild Boars finding it extremely tiring to travel through snow
more than 40-50 cm in depth. Their main enemy was/is wolves
- and one needs to be able to move fast during a wolf pack
attack! Wild boar of the Sus scrofa type may have been in
Europe since the beginning of Middle Pleistocene times, approximately
700,000 years ago, replacing an earlier type of prehistoric
pig (Sus verrucosus). Early pigs in the western Mediterranean,
its islands (e.g. Corsica, Sardinia) and parts of Portugal
and southern Spain (excluding Barcelona) were of the type
Sus scrofa meridionalis, which may have been a dwarfed insular
form of the northern Sus scrofa. Humans over history have
interacted with these forms of Boar and over millennia developed
the numerous special breeds of domesticated pigs that thronged
Europe until approximately only a century ago. It may be a
bit of a shock - to maybe the one reader of this column who
is actually interested in pigs - to note that almost none
of the pigs in Europe today are pure-blooded descendants of
these original breeds. From the latter half of the 19th century
onwards the traditional domestic European pig population was
changed completely with the introduction from Asia of the
Sus indices and highly modified pig breeds especially from
China. The 'China Pig' (often called the 'China White'), so
familiar to us today - large, fat and white - is now considered,
in its many forms, to be the 'normal' pig. Well, it is not,
at least not in Europe - it is a new interloper that was rapidly
crossbred with existing traditional breeds in Europe from
about the 1850s onwards, producing the pigs we know in Europe
today and extinguishing other pig types that did not crossbreed.
By 1900 almost all the major pure early European pig breeds
had disappeared. This process of `breeding out' (? Or 'breeding
in') did not really begin, though, on Eivissa/Ibiza until
around the 1950s, but since then the stocks of traditional
porc eivissenc (Ibicencan pig) have almost completely disappeared.
But who mourns the passing of the real European
pig? Almost no one except a few elderly Ibicencan peasants
who well remembers this island's form of them. Certain areas
- e.g. Mallorca - have fought a successful struggle to re-breed
or re-introduce their traditional pig types, but such examples
are few and far between. Famous British pig breeds such as
the Essex, the British Lop, the Berkshire, the Middle White,
the Gloucester and the Tamworth are not really ancient traditional
breeds at all but are the mixed-blood descendants of possibly
older pig types with relatively recent doses of the 'China
White' or its variants. One can sometimes, however, find almost
pure-blooded descendants of some early European pig breeds
in certain isolated former 'outposts of empire' overseas.
I came across examples of early southern Spanish pigs amongst
an isolated community of Indians in northern Colombia in 1992
- obviously offspring of pigs brought to the New World ages
ago by the Conquistadors. A nearby northern Colombian 'colon'
community had examples of a rare pygmy 'bulldog-faced' type
of pig. It should be noted that pigs were non-existent in
the Americas before the arrival of the White Man. There is
a similar example from another animal species, the cat. The
famous tailless Manx cat from the Isle of Man is not really
from there at all. It was originally a rare accidental form
of cat from one area of Spain but arrived on the Isle of Man
after a Spanish Armada ship possessing a small collection
of them was wrecked off the island. The type has since died
out in Spain.
Physiologically, pigs are very similar to
man and we share many of the same genes. George Orwell's famous
last sentence from 'Animal Farm' almost sums it up: "The
creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to
pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible
to say which was which". Personality-wise, pigs are intelligent
and fascinating animals, with many human attributes. A group
of Australian scientists in Canberra announced in 1994 the
results of a 15-year study into aspects of pig personality.
They found pigs to be intelligent sensitive creatures who
are easily susceptible to stress. This explains the famous
incident of around 1997 when a plane carrying a large cargo
of live pigs had to cut short its trip temporarily after going
through some rough weather. The turbulence unfortunately unnerved
the lively cargo so much that their resulting massive flatulence
made it impossible for the pilots and crew to continue flying.
Inhabitants of certain areas of northern Vanuatu in the Southwest
Pacific would not be surprised at 'European' scientists telling
them how similar pigs are to men: according to the traditional
belief system in parts of the Banks group of islands in that
area the creator god, Qat, created men and pigs at the same
time. Pigs walked upright on their hind legs and spoke. Eventually
men felt that the pigs were overlording things a bit and asked
Qat to reduce their status; Qat complied by making pigs walk
on all four legs but their other attributes remained the same.
Pig extracts have been used in diabetes treatment for decades.
In 1992 the UK-based Cambridge Company Imutran produced the
first 'transgenic' pig, a pig implanted at the embryo stage
with a human gene. It is hoped that eventually descendants
of this type of 'transgenic' pig will be useful for transplanting
pig organs (e.g. heart, liver) into humans without the fear
of transplant rejection. Such 'xenotransplantation', it is
hoped, will be successful as the system could trick the human
body into seeing pig cells as human and therefore not rejecting
them. Of course there are certain ethical and religious problems
here, but I am just trying to point out how important pigs
are and how close we really are to them.
This has come a bit of a long way from matançes
eivissencs, Ibicenco pig killing, and I think Gary Hardy is
putting some more of his matança photos in this issue.
I thought I would try and give readers a bit of a world-wide
historical and cultural look at pigs at this time so that
you can more fully appreciate Eivissa/Ibiza's traditional
approach to pigs without looking at it in a vacuum or through
purely English bacon/ham consumers eyes. Ibicenco pig killing
is part of an ancient cultural complex that cannot be fully
understood without other cultural or historical references.
So look at the photos carefully. It is not just pig killing.
We will return in more depth to this stage of the matançes
in next week's issue
* Melanesia also includes the islands of
Kanaky (New Caledonia), but ancient pigs never arrived here.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
All pictures © Gary Hardy (January 1991))
|
Kirk W Huffman
| |