Kevin - Vincent Crapanzano PDF

Kevin: On the Transfer of Emotions
Author(s): Vincent Crapanzano

Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 96, No. 4 (Dec., 1994), pp. 866-885
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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CRAPANZANO
VINCENT
CityUniversityof New York,GraduateCenter
Kevin:On the Transfer of Emotions

Un langageignorantla perte qui le fait etre et l'anime,un langageconvaincu
d'enoncer le vraine renverraiten fait qu'a lui-meme.l
-J-B. Pontalis,Melancolie
du langage
I VE BEENDYINGTO TELLYOU one story that happened when I was in the army, and I
must tell it to you before you go," Kevin said at our fourth and what was to have been
our last meeting. "Forme it symbolizes God's involvement in the whole affair. It wasjust
too much of a coincidence."2
He went on, "Iremember how we used to pray for God to protect the farmers. I know,
because the parents of the girlfriend I had when I was in the army had been killed by
terrorists. The farmers were having-I think it was a wedding reception. There were
about thirty of them and their wives in this house, and they were having drinks and
standing around in the lounge. The terrorists had decided to hit the farmhouse and
had cut a hole in the security fence. They crawled through into the garden, and one
guy fired a rocket. It was supposed to explode on impact with a hollow charge and carry
the whole blast forward. It should have blown a hole through the wall and filled the
whole room with shrapnel and killed just about everyone.... But it didn't go off. The
rocket went through the room at about chest level without hitting any of the people
there and out through the other wall into the garden where it exploded. Now after they
had fired the rocket, the terrorists ran out of the garden and waited in the bush to see
what damage they had caused. They came to the realization that something had gone
wrong.... So this terrorist decided to fire another rocket. He promptly fixed another
one [onto the launcher] and fired it, forgetting he was standing in front of the security
fence. Hitting the fence the rocket immediately exploded, killing his three buddies. He
was badly wounded, burnt. We found him there the next day. So, as a result, none of
the farmers were killed and all of the terrorists were accounted for. I suppose with all
the adrenalin and the heat of the moment, he had forgot he was standing in front of
the fence. For me this was a testimony of God's protection of the farmers.... There are
so many of those stories I could keep on telling you," Kevin concluded. "I've even
thought of writing a book."
Kevin is a white Rhodesian who was working in South Africa as a preacher in a
fundamentalist Protestant church when I interviewed him during my study of white
South Africans in the early 1980s. He, his wife Barbara, and their two children live in a
little ranch house in a village near Cape Town. Kevin does not call himselfa Zimbabwean
because he left Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe. A boyish-looking man of 24, he
is of middling intelligence and seemingly little depth. He is tall, heavyset, does not seem
to be able to sit still. He controls a tendency to put on weight by bodybuilding. He has
turned his garage into a gymnasium and covered its walls with photographs of weight-
lifters. "Youcan never beat the iron," he says. "You're always aware of your weakness.
You can always add another weight. There's no sense of pride among bodybuilders.
They're very gentle, humble, friendly guys, and even though most of them are not
96(4):866-885. Copyright ? 1994, American Anthropological Association.

AmericanAnthropologist
866

Crapanzano] KEVIN 867
Christians[that is, born-againChristians],many of them lead a life akin to that of

Christianity." Kevinsees no contradictionbetweenbodybuildingand being a preacher.
He has even thoughtof opening a commercialgymnasium.Despitethe ruleshis church
imposes-no smoking,no drinking,no premaritalsex-he appearsat ease withlife and
with the foibles of ordinarypeople like himself and those in his congregation.With
respect to his parishioners'guilt over premaritalsex-"They feel God hasn't blessed
their marriage because of it"-Kevin says he can't believe God would carryout a
"vendetta"againstthem.
Kevindoes not like pastoralcounseling,though he travelsmore than5,000kilometers
a monthvisitingparishionersand proselytizing.He likenshis itinerantministryto Paul's.
He himselfpreferspreaching.He spendshourseach daypraying,waitingto receivethe
word of God, and though he is as capableof quoting scriptureas any preacherin his
church, he prefersto preparehis sermonsthrough meditationand inspirationrather
than throughstudy.He is, in fact,anti-intellectualand criticizeshis brother,a university
graduatewithwhom he competes,for being bookish.
Kevin'sfatheris an Anglicanpriest,anAfrikanerwho,havingleft the DutchReformed
Church,wasostracizedbyhis family.He movedto Rhodesiaand neverbotheredto teach
his sons Afrikaans.He is a practical,down-to-earthman who does not command
authoritybut is likable.Kevin'smotherhad been a dancerbefore she "tookto her bed"
when Kevin was still a baby. She drank, took drugs throughout most of her sons'
childhood, had "nervousbreakdowns,"and was often hospitalized. She had a very
unhappychildhood. Her motherwasa cruel disciplinarian,beating her until she bled.
"Onceshe tied her up and loweredher into a well."Her fatherwasapparentlya rather
ineffectualman.
Kevinwas raised by Africanservants.I have seen his photographat four yearsold,
surroundedbyabout thirtyblackchildren.He is verymuch themaster.Hisfamilymoved
arounda lot, and Kevinwent to 13 schools.He nevergraduatedfrom secondaryschool.
Duringadolescencehe livedin avillagein "terrorist" territory.Of the 12whiteteenagers
there, Kevintells me with little emotion, 4 of the 5 boyswere killed by terroristsand 1
of the 7 girlshad her legs blownoff. Kevinnever trainedfor the ministryin anyformal
way.He sees himself as a man of action, and despite the "passive" wayhe prepareshis
sermons,preachingis a matterof actionfor him. He gets carriedawaybyit. He is in fact
"a bundle of energy"andjust as his overlydeveloped body seems to burstout of his
clothes, so his "spirit"seems to burstout of his body. He knowshis charmand has lived
by it. His storiesare part of that charm,and he likes to tell them.
In The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming,Freud distinguishes "poets who, like the
bygone creatorsof epics and tragedies,take over their materialready-made,and those
who seem to createtheirmaterialspontaneously"(1963b:39).The latter,more thanthe
former,whose"independence"is limitedto "thechoice of material,"respondto a strong
experience that stirs up a memory of an earlier experience (usuallybelonging to
childhood) and awish thatis fulfilledin the creativework(Freud1963b:41).The result
has elements of both the provokingoccasion and the memories provoked.Here, as
elsewherein his treatmentof literature,and, I would stress,the confidences thatoccur
in the psychoanalytichour-the recountingof dreams,memories,andfantasies-Freud
ignores genre and other literaryand communicationalconventions. The distinction
betweenoriginal,spontaneouswritersand those who makeuse of ready-madematerial
is simplistic,for even those writerswhoappearto be mostoriginalarein factconstrained
by language,expressiveconventions,and literaryheritage.These constraintsare struc-
tural,pragmatic,and axiological.Even the most avant-gardewriteris caught,whether
by acceptance or rejection, in the grammarand rhetoric of his language, in the
communicationalconventionsof his society,and in the literaryand artisticheritageof
his culture. His acceptance or rejection of these linguistic, communicational,and
literaryconventionsis determinedin partat leastbythe attitudeshis societytakestoward

868 AMERICAN
ANTHROPOLOGIST [96, 1994
language, communication, literature, and tradition. Indeed, one could argue that the
"autonomy" of the literary work itself is a cultural artifice-a product of particular
economic and technological arrangements-for the "work" may well be seen as a
(reified or reifiable) instance in a continuous conversation, dialogue, or intertextual
play.
Freud himself placed the literary work in an interactional context. In The Relationof
thePoet to Daydreaming,he asks how a literary work is effective. How does it produce an
emotional response in its readers? He suggests that "the increment of pleasure" (Lust-
gewinn) offered by a literary work releases "yet greater pleasure arising from deeper
sources in the mind." He calls this "increment of pleasure" an "incitement premium"
(Verlockungsprdmie) or "fore-pleasure"(Vorlust).The literary work, then, is an offering.
By converting his fantasies-which, Freud insists curiously, would repel us or leave us
cold-into a literary work, the writer overcomes the "repulsion"we would normally feel
by literary techniques that are "hisinnermost secret." This has to do-Freud's language
is ambiguous here-"with those barriers erected between every individual being and all
others" (mit den Schrankenzu tun, welchesich zwischenjedemeinzelnenIch und den anderen
erheben).Freud's romantic view of the writer aside, he suggests that the ars poetica
accomplishes its end by softening the egotistical character of the fantasy through
changes and disguises and by offering a "purely formal, that is, aesthetic pleasure"
[aesthetischerLustgewinn].Aesthetic pleasure results from "the release of tensions in our
minds.... Perhapsmuch that bringsabout this resultconsistsin thewriter'sputting us into a
position in which we can enjoy our own day-dreamswithout reproachor shame" (Freud
1963b:43).3
Freud's argument is of course an outgrowth of his study of dreams, sexuality, and
jokes. In ThreeEssays on the Theoryof Sexuality (1962), Freud relates the "incentive
premium" to sexual fore-pleasure, or in the slightly earlierJokes and TheirRelationto the
Unconscious(1963a), to the lifting of suppressions and repressions. In his treatment of
jokes, perhaps because they do not have the same aura of autonomy as the literarywork,
Freud considers interlocution in great detail. The telling of a joke is triadic. It requires
a speaker (who may have invented the joke or is merely repeating it), a butt of the joke,
and an audience. Freud's observation is culture-bound. He insists that a joke teller
cannot laugh at his own joke, though (however serious his demeanor) he may take a
certain pleasure in its telling. "Weare compelled to tell our joke to someone else because
we are unable to laugh at it ourselves" (Freud 1963a:155). Telling a joke gives this
someone else the opportunity to discharge tension and derive pleasure from that
discharge. "When I make the other person laugh by telling him my joke, I am actually
making use of him to arouse my own laughter; and one can in fact observe that a person
who has begun by telling ajoke with a serious face afterwardjoins in the other person's
laughter with a moderate laugh" (1963a:156). Freud suggests that telling a joke to
another serves three purposes: (1) "to give objective certainty that the joke-work has
been successful"; (2) "to complete my own pleasure by a reaction from the other person
upon myself'; and (3) "where it is a question of repeating a joke that one has not
produced oneself-to make up for the loss of pleasure owing to the joke's lack of
novelty" (1963a:156). Freud observed that there is then an attempt at renewal or
revitalization in the repetition of a joke, which nevertheless loses its vitality, its novelty,
and its surprise, since the other's surprise becomes expectable. Here, with the joke,
Freud has laid out the complex exchanges that occur, I believe, in every communication.
That the full communicational loop was uncovered through the analysis of the joke,
and not the literary work, suggests the extent to which the cultural evaluation of a
particular speech genre affects its apperception and the way it figures in any communi-
cation. Narrative and other performances that are repeated (Are they not always
repetitions?) have to be understood in terms of the paradoxical effect of repetition as
both life- and death-giving.

However defined, communicational genres and conventions give the speaker and his
interlocutors multiple, seemingly simultaneous positions within any communication.
Freud himself (1963b:41) seems to have recognized this in his observation of those
"modern writers"who "splitup their ego by self observation into many component egos."
The genres and conventions provide, in any event, the parameters of the pragmatic play
by which speakers and interlocutors are situated in an exchange and help determine
the "identifications" speakers and interlocutors make with any of the pragmatically
constituted positions. Take, for example, the following observation familiar to all
analysts: "In a way I have always known that, only I never thought it" (Freud 1959; see
also Crapanzano 1992:70-90). Where does the speaker stand vis-a-visthe several "I"sin
this utterance? Wherein is he a character? He is both within and without the utterance,
and within the utterance he is at once the I of "have alwaysknown" (the free, spontane-
ous I thatwe tend to identifywith the actual speaker) and the I of "neverthought it"-the
I that we tend to understand as somehow the speaker's (the first I's) self-objectification
(an I at the verge of the me, someone the I has, so to speak, to reckon with). The extreme
objectification (or characterization) would be in the little boy's "Ihave three brothers,
Paul, Ernest, and me" (Lacan 1973).
Here I am not making the Lacanian argument that the sujetis constituted by, or
located in, the play of difference within and between signifying chains and chains of
signifieds. I am suggesting that, however constituted, the sujet is dis-played in conven-
tionally limited ways in different speech genres. This dis-play is in fact a self-display, a
display for and by self, and a display to real and fantasized interlocutors who, insofar as
they are engaged by the display, participate in the dis-play collusively. The collusive
participation in this dis-play is what we mean by identification. Insofar as the dis-play is
"exterior" to the sujet, the sujet can collusively participate in its dis-play-that is,
"identify"with any of the pragmatically constituted positions. Insofar as there are genre
constraints on the pragmatically constituted positions and on the style-the "intensity"
and "depth"-of identification with any of these constituted positions, the sujet's dis-play
is limited by the particular genre. He is "protected" by these constraints from the
dislocations of "free"and "formless"dialogue.4
These "speech genres"-the conventions associated with and protection afforded by
them, which have to be taken into consideration in any psychohistorical or ethnopsy-
choanalytic investigationswill vary historically and culturally. They may, however, be
rooted deeply in grammar. Greg Urban (1989) has argued, for example, that there is a
difference between the referential-indexical first-person pronoun-that is, the pronoun
that refers to the speaker of the utterance in which the I occurs-and an anaphoric I
that relates back, like a third-person pronoun, not to the instance of utterance but to
some intratextual nominal or pronominal antecedent. An anaphoric I can occur in
direct quotation, where the /in "He said, 'I am going' " refers back to the heof"he said"
and corresponds to the second and anaphoric he in an indirect quotation of the same
speech event, "he said that he was going." Urban argues (I simplify here) that the
relationship between the referential-indexical land the anaphoric /is in fact metaphori-
cal. With the anaphoric Ithere is an "awareness"that the discourse of another has been
assumed and constrains-dialogically, I would argue-the representation of that dis-
course. "The anaphoric I entails a kind of play-acting on the part of the speaker of the
utterance, who regards himself as momentarily taking on the role of the third person
referent. Simultaneously, the hearer of the utterance is invited to regard the speaker as
engaging in a kind of role playing" (Urban 1989:35). Though Urban uses examples in
which the subject of the main clause is in the third person ("he said"), his argument can
be extended to those instances in which the subject of the main clause is in the first
person ("Isaid"). In "Isaid, 'I am going' "or "Isaid that I am going" (and again I simplify
by not differentiating the two types of reported speech), the /in the embedded clause
refers back anaphorically to the /in the main clause, which can function as a referential
index or an anaphor or both in a speech genre, which is "reported." In fact, I would

870 ANTHROPOLOGIST
AMERICAN [96, 1994
argue,at least in the case of "loose" speech genres like Kevin's stories, that this second
Ioscillates between a referential index referring immediately to the actual speaker
(Kevin)and an anaphor referring to the discursively constructedI. In Urban's terms,
perhaps,this would be thedequotativeIof the discourse or story("Kevin"),meaning
an I that refers to the speaker not with respect to his everyday identity but to the
intradiscursiveor intratextual identity he has assumed. Such oscillations are dialogically
facilitatedand determined.5
Kevintold his story of the terrorists and the wedding reception toward the end of a
long,free-ranging interview in which we had talked about his family, his perceptions of
SouthAfrica, and, just before the story, his experiences in England. I had asked him to
tell me about a particularly happy or sad event in his childhood. Kevin does not talk
about his childhood. He claims not to remember it very well and tends to dismiss his
experiences as "the normal experiences of a boy of..." His childhood does not provide
himwith a repertory of experiences with which to explain or metaphorize his present
circumstances. He is unable to turn them into stories with which to charm me or his
other interlocutors.
"I think the most significant event in my early life was going to England: the
excitement of the boat trip and the subsequent trauma of going to school there." Kevin
had alluded on more than one occasion to the difficulties he and his brother had in
England. His father had been an urban missionary in the slums of London and had sent
hissons to a local school where they were bullied so badly that their parents had to fetch
them each day. Finally they moved their sons to another, kinder school, but neither
Kevinnor his brother adjusted. They missed Rhodesia; they felt displaced, caught in too
smalla space. At the end of a year, the family moved back to Africa.
"Howdid your mother like England?" I asked him.
"Shelived at Covent Garden."
"Shewas in better shape then?"
"Ithink she was in pretty good shape because she was totally involved in the ballet."
"Wheredid she study dance?"
"Idon't know. I think in South Africa?It's funny, I've never really spoken to her about
that. There's a lot about my parents I don't know anything about. When they're gone,
I'll probably ask myself why I didn't get to know them better."
I told Kevin I felt that way about my father, who died when I was 13.
"Youwere in your early teens probably when your dad's most important. I'm sorry I
went to boarding school because so much of my life was spent away from home really.
I suppose that's why Rhodesian kids are so mature, because they're awayfrom home so
much."
Kevin paused. He was tired, and just as I was about to say goodbye, he started to tell
me with renewed energy about the terrorists and the farmers. The story ordered what
had been a conversation drifting around in a series of painful memories, a conversation
that had no "spiritualpurpose" and over which Kevin had little control.
From our first meeting, Kevin told me stories. "Story"was his category: a sort of
personal parable, intensely, exuberantly autobiographical but alwayswith a moral-at
least a didactic-purpose. "Inevery case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his
readers,"Walter Benjamin (1969:86) remarks. Kevin's stories were like the testimonies
parishioners in his church learned to give. Modeled on the Biblical parable, often spiced
with Biblical quotation, they were at once personal, so as to be "relevant,"and transcen-
dent in purpose. They figured in his proselytizing. Where they made reference to the
Bible, they were at once literal in their interpretation of scripture and, to me, promis-
cuously figurative in their relationship to his own experiences. But to Kevin, perhaps,
they were not figurative but inscriptive. Susan Harding (1992) has put it this way:
"Fundamentalists are still writing the Bible, inscribing it in their lives, endlessly gener-

ating a third Testament in their speech and action. Their Bible is alive, its narrative
shape enacts reality, infills it with form and meaning." Where Kevin related his personal
experiences to scripture, the Iof his story sometimesbecame, in Urban's words, "dequo-
tative"-a sort of cultural, religious, impersonal, and transcendent I, the Iof scripture.
For the fundamentalist, according to Harding (1992), event and story have not been
torn asunder. "Their stories do not represent history, they are history." Not always, I
would argue, certainly not for Kevin, though perhaps some of the time.6
Though Kevin never sought explicitly to convert me, he hoped at times, I believe, that
his stories would convert me. But as I explain below, his hope covered over the structural
impossibility of his converting me, for with my conversion, he would lose the interlocu-
tory"space" for his stories.
"I was raised as an Anglican and went to a Roman Catholic school. The Anglican
church was really dead. I found, as Jimmy Swaggert said, 'Dead preachers preaching
dead sermons to dead congregations.' The church had no attraction for me whatsoever.
... I believe God creates each one of us with a vacuum in our lives, which only He can
fill. And so in my search to fill this vacuum, I sort of tried everything. I went to smoke
and drink and pot and girls and pop groups. By 17, I had tried all the drugs.... I had
left home already and was living in Salisbury.
"I came home one weekend. I went up to the mountains-we lived in the most
beautiful mountainous area-and up there in the mountains was a hut and in the hut
was a log book in which people recorded their stay. One chap had quoted from Psalm
121, 'I will lift up mine eyes onto the hills from whence cometh my hope. My hope
cometh from the Lord.' As I read that, there dawned upon me a tremendous knowledge
and feeling of the presence of God.... I could sense his presence, you know, in a real
way.... I wasn't sure about Jesus, but I knew there was a God."
Kevin's parents introduced him to a friend, Nigel, a born-again Christian who spent
a lot of time with them because he had been "ostracizedby the rest of that beer-swilling
community." "My parents thought it was good for me to meet Nigel," Kevin says,
"because they were worried about all my bad things." Nigel invited Kevin camping in
the mountains with a group of young people. "Now I'd just come down from the
mountains and thought it would be fun. Maybe there'd be some girls. So I went along,"
Kevin says ingenuously, laughing. He often boasts of his teenage conquests.
"I thought they were going to have a mountaineering program, but it turned out to
be a religious camp." And then, preaching, he goes on, "And theseyoung peoplewere
absolutely fantastic. Theywerereallyin lovewith theLord.Theyhadjoy; theyhad peace;theywere
born-again;theywere in love with God; they had love.What really attracted me was this
charismatic love they had for one another. And for the Lord. I'd tried living in
communes but somehow it turned sour. Whereas for the first time I could see there was
real unity here. I'd never seen anything like it. I'd never heard people say 'Praise the
Lord' or speak in tongues. I felt awkward and out of place. I rather regretted having
come. So I walked out of the first meeting. They were really worshipping the Lord, and
one chap stood up and prayed, 'LordJesus, we really love you, and we can't wait for you
to come back to earth and come and receive us.' I was sort of sitting there and I suddenly
realized that, well, for me, the second coming of Christ was like Doomsday. It was the
last thing I wanted. And I began to pray, 'Lord, don't listen to that guy.' "
Kevin laughs nervously and continues: "Youknow, I had the horrific feeling this guy
was actually getting through to God.... I was filled with unexplainable terror.... I
realized then that if Jesus were to come back, I wouldn't be ready for him. I would be
one of those people who would run away in terror instead of gladly receiving him."
One of the campers came out and preached to Kevin how sin had created a barrier
between him and God. "I suppose I had heard it all before in the Anglican church and
in the Catholic one," Kevin said, "but it was sort of historical. Now for the first time I
really heard the gospel and was challenged to either accept or reject Christ. Right there

872 AMERICAN
and then I made a quality decision: to accept Christ into my life. I went back into the
tent and knelt down and prayed. It was an emotional experience. I'm quite an emotional
person. There was crying and laughing at the same time. It was as if waves of liquid joy
were running under me. An incredible sensation. My one thought was 'Jesus is alive. He
rose from the dead. And it's real. What these people are saying is real. It's true. I know
that I know that I know that it's real.' And at that moment a wonderful phenomenon
happened: a light began to shine at the top of the tent. It had been really dark. I thought
at first it was the moon shining through a hole in the tent, but this light began to shine
brighter and brighter and brighter. All of us saw it so it wasn't something I just saw. I
just remember feeling. I don't think I felt fear. In fact, I can't remember what my
emotions were. It was so bright that I had to get out of the tent. We all felt it and had to
get out. And as I got up, my legs collapsed under me. I actually crawled out of the tent
on my hands and knees. I remember looking into the sky and saying, 'Well, Lord, this
is it. Ijust want to serve you for the rest of my life.' I can say from that day on ..."
Kevin stops abruptly, and just as abruptly he startsto tell me about his street preaching
in Salisbury. "I found myself a member of the family of God, of a real fellowship, part
of the body. My whole life was radically changed. It says in the Second Corinthians that
if any man be in Christ, he's a new creation. Well that's exactly my situation. I can
honestly say, I tried it and found it to be real. I had tried many other things and found
them to be dead-end streets.... Many things confused me, like,Jimi Hendrix, who I
alwaysregarded as a tremendous guitarist. The night before he died, playing in a rock
concert, he threw down his guitar and cried out, 'Can anyone help me?' And no one
could help him. The next day he drowned in his own vomit, from an overdose of
barbiturates. So these things were continually happening to me. I realized the empti-
ness. I thought life had no meaning. Life is emptiness. Life is empty. I saw a girl jump
off a building. This sort of thing. I realized, well, how different my life had been. For
the first time I was totally at peace with God, with man, with myself, and I realized my
purpose and my destiny in life.... It wasn't to get rich or know more. I was created by
God and for God."
Kevin quit school and became a street preacher. He returned to his parents and
preached in their village for about six months. In a later interview, he told me regretfully
that he broke up with his girlfriend because he had pressed her too hard to become a
Christian. "Looking back now I really destroyed her life in the process. She tried to
commit suicide several times and began sleeping around." I was appalled by his
assumption, his consummate narcissism. Kevin went to an Anglican priest who "well, I
won't sayhe scorned my experience but he brushed it aside by saying, 'Look, you'll grow
"
out of it.' Kevin decided to become a priest, but when he learned that he could not
be ordained until he was 23, he joined his present church and became a minister-trainee.
Kevin told me this, his first story, at our first interview. We had been discussing the
organization and affiliations of his church, and, though cooperative, he seemed bored.
I had met him before at his father's house. He had been quite hostile and rather boorish.
He knew I had been interviewing his family and was clearly piqued by my not having
asked to talk to him. As he told me his story, he stopped rhetorically once or twice to
ask me if I minded his telling me "all this, in such detail." He knew I didn't, since I had
been encouraging him to go on. I find conversion stories fascinating and distasteful.7
It is tempting to interpret Kevin's story in terms of some sort of (bodily or embodied)
revitalization through an ambivalent fusion with the group, with God, with the symbolic
father. There is certainly evidence for this in the story:Kevin's desire to fill the "vacuum
God had created in him"; his experiments with drugs; his isolation from the campers;
his sense of emptiness, of meaninglessness; his associations withJimi Hendrix's suicide,
with the girl who jumped from a building, their surreal quality; the intensity of his
experience of the presence of God, of the campers' charismatic love, their unity; his
"unexplainable terror"at the very possibility of receiving Jesus, the light he (not alone)

saw,his collapse, the immediate decision "to serve the Lord for the rest of my life"; and
his return to his father's home.
Before such an interpretation can be made, however, it is necessary to consider the
genre, the mixed genre, in which Kevin was speaking and its effect on our relationship.
It has its social determinations, which may resonate with and even help formulate
Kevin'sbiography, but the story also has to resonate with me-to afford me "fore-pleas-
ure"-to be successful. Constrained by genre and convention, the story is also con-
strained by my response and cannot be interpreted without considering the
interlocutory dimension.8 Despite its roughness, Kevin's story had a d'ja raconte quality
(in fact, I had heard part of it from his father). It is his version of a stock conversion
story with much of the conventional imagery: a sense of emptiness, meaninglessness,
isolation, sinfulness; experiences of the presence of God, of holy terror, plenitude, and
illumination; and feelings of love, community, and purpose. Kevin is very much in
control of the narrative-indeed, a fixed character in it, comfortable within it. Even
when his story begins to fall apart, when he talks about Jimi Hendrix and the girl who
jumped from a building as somehow illustrative of his "dead-end street" experiences,
he does not lose control. He is carefully positioned in his story, protected from earlier
biographical experiences with which it resonates (such at least would be the psychoana-
lyticassumption) and contemporary situational factors that it metaphorizes (Stromberg
1993).9
Positioned in the story, Kevin positions himself to me through the story. He is at once
the storyteller, there in his boyish exuberance before me, and a character in the story,
in fact, at least two characters: the controlling, "internal"narrator and that narrator's
subject. He, the storyteller, can play, humorously even, with the narrator's anxiety at
reporting the narrated subject's prayer thatJesus not heed the camper's request to speed
His return. Kevin, qua narrated subject, is thereby protected from the wrath of God-but
not as completely as Kevin the storyteller would like, for he laughs nervously. Narrational
splitting, however sanctioned, can never offer full protection because the splitting is
never complete; there is alwaysan internal dialogue between them (Crapanzano 1990;
Mecke 1990).
As Kevin's interlocutor, I was drawn inevitably into his story. Aside from whatever
symbolic role I may have played-as father, for example, I participated collusively in it,
affirming its dis-play of the pragmatically constituted positions of speaker, narrator,
narrated subject, and their interlocutory equivalents--the splittings by which, I believe,
Kevin protects himself.
Like all stories, Kevin's is an attempted seduction. He will have me where and how he
wants me. He flirts with converting me, with drawing me in, but for whatever reasons
he does not push his proselytizing. Perhaps he is afraid of losing me. I can always run
away in terror rather than "receive"him. More likely he must keep me an outsider to
support the narrativepositions he seeks in order to be able to tell-to repeat--his story,
to protect himself from the fusion his story declares manifestly to be his desire.
And I?
I ask Kevin what his father thought of his conversion.
"He was totally against it. Not totally against it, but-I was very belligerent and very
aggressive-we had a lot of arguments about doctrinal issues, which are really just not
that important, but at that stage I thought very important because I thought the Anglican
church had led me up the garden path. They were placating me with pious platitudes,
sort of lulling me to sleep. Just saying, 'It's okay. Just carry on the way you are. You're
doing fine.' Meanwhile I wasn't doing fine. I thought I was going to hell, and no one
was telling me."
By asking Kevin what his father thought about his conversion, I gave him the
opportunity to extend his story beyond its conventional, repeated limits. He situates his
father impersonally with respect to the story and his experiences. Then, having de-
scribed their "doctrinal"confrontation, preserving himself, as it were, from fusion, he

874 AMERICAN
tells me that God worked through his mother. (The sick, bedridden, distant mother is
able to mediate the son's relationship with the father by sharing the son's ecstasy!)
"I thought I was going to Hell," he said, repeating an evangelist cliche, "and no one
was telling me." Without specifying who the "they"is, he goes on to say: "Ifelt they [his
parents? the Anglican church?] were failing in thatway. But, anyway,God began to work
through my mom. I think she realized the change that had taken place in my life. She
was a very neurotic, hypochondriac sort of person with innumerable diseases. She lived
on whiskey and chain-smoked. She carried around a suitcase of pills. You wouldn't have
believed it was my mom. She spent her whole life in bed. Ever since I could remember,
she was bed-ridden. She used to lie awake at night, and she used to take tranquilizers.
She had ten nervous breakdowns.... Then one night she prayed. 'Lord give me this
experience.' She woke in the middle of the night speaking in tongues. She awoke.She
just woke up and was filled with the Holy Spirit. From that moment her life was absolutely
changed. She was healed. She never smoked again. She never drank again. She didn't
need pills again. She was cured of incurable diseases. She was just totally healed,
completely changed, so that she is the person you see today."
"Well, that is incredible," I say. "I never would have imagined ..." But before I can
finish my sentence, Kevin interrupts me. Perhaps he is afraid that I will have observed
that his mother still spends most of her time in bed, takes a lot of pills, and seems on
the verge of a breakdown. I have seen her.
"Mydad was talking about divorce. He didn't know what to do because the pills were
costing so much that he was having trouble making ends meet. She was suffering. She
had malnutrition. Her hair was falling out.... Then slowly she drew my dad into this
renewal experience. It took my dad a long time. He had a lot of hang-ups. It wasn't
instantaneous, like for me and my mom. So this is where we find ourselves today with
only my brother-I don't know how he views me. You've probably interviewed him."
(The mother draws the father back into her ecstasy, restoring the "appropriate"
family. The son who has shared, indeed given, the mother ecstasy, wonders what the
brother, with whom he competes, thinks about his ecstasy. He does not ask what the
father thinks, though he had doctrinal arguments with him. Is the father's judgment
displaced onto the brother? Through me? Onto me? I am drawn, at any rate, into the
family.)
I tell Kevin I have not talked to his brother about conversion. There was no need to
ask him. The brother's position is clear: it's an illusion. I ask Kevin what his father was
like.
"He was always a nice chap. He used to take me fishing, and we used to go shooting
together.... My memories of him are as being a very loving, patient, good father. But
he wasn't a spiritual man." (He could not share his son's ecstasy!)
Kevin goes on to show me slides of Rhodesia, and as he prepares them, he tells me
about his hippie days and his homesickness in England. "Mymemories of Rhodesia were
of long, warm, sunny days, of big gardens and fishing ... of servants and horseback
riding. It is really the most beautiful place to grow up."
Kevin shares his idealized view of Rhodesia with many of the white Rhodesians who
resettled in South Africa. They are called "when-we's,"because they are alwaysreminisc-
ing about "when we" were in Rhodesia. Invoking his memories of England, he also
describes his actual feelings about Rhodesia. "This is the real Africa,"he said toward the
end of our interview. "It's got a particular smell. The acacia tree has a particular smell,
which they call "The Smell of Africa."
Our second interview began in a desultory fashion. After discussing an automobile

accident I had been in several years earlier, I ask Kevin about his experiences as a
minister. He relates the accident to his conversion and proceeds to tell me "stories"
about his first months as a preacher. On returning to Salisbury, he met another

born-again Christian who was his age, and together they traveled about preaching to
anyone who would listen.
"We became sort of John the Baptist kind of figures. We used to walk around the
streets preaching, handing out tracts, and praying for the sick."Here I think of Flannery
O'Connor's Wiseblood. Kevin and his friend joined up with a black evangelist and began
an itinerant ministry. Each of his stories about it demonstrates God's presence, his
miracles. How, for example, He provided gas coupons and money and a car so that they
could travel to eastern Rhodesia, how He enabled them to cure the sick, how He turned
sour apples sweet when they had nothing else to eat.
"Now this may seem strange to you," Kevin remarks, detecting my disbelief, "but these
were the miracles that were happening all the time. As far as I was concerned this was
normal Christianity. It was the way it was in the Bible. This is how it's suppose to be."
Indeed, as Kevin describes his travels, the landscape becomes allegorical. They traveled
unscathed through terrorist territory, along roads planted with landmines, through
torrential rainstorms that turned jungles into swamps and roads into rivers, to forlorn
missions. At one of them, Peter, the African, prayed and managed to cure everyone in
a 200-bed hospital-refugees from Mozambique suffering from "malaria, leprosy, ty-
phoid, tetanus, cholera, elephantiasis, beriberi-you know, the works."
Are we to understand these tales as delusions of omnipotence? Kevin seems strangely

removed from them as he relates them. Yes, he is enthusiastic, exuberant even, but
somehow he is only a (dequotative) character, a passive witness in a story that, once
launched, proceeds inevitably, extravagantly, without regard to verisimilitude, without
regard to its audience. Like his preaching, as I observed it, it effects enthusiasm. This
efficacy depends less on engagement, less on dialogue with an interlocutor, than on
bombast, on the bombardment of image after image, episode after episode, each
different in detail but essentially the same. This repetitive, disengaged discourse, an
assault really, forces the interlocutor into an "alien" position he can only accept or
refuse. He cannot negotiate. There is no room here for subtlety. He cannot take refuge
in some intratextual position, for all the positions are fixed. Kevin's story produces in
me, at least, a claustrophobia, a terrible boredom, a desire to burst out-a constellation
of feelings and sensations that might well trigger off enthusiasm and trance in the
believer or those prompted to belief. As there is no engagement, its effect is-or at least
it appears to be-contingent: miraculous. Being autonomous, the story can affect the
storyteller as it affects its audience, but perhaps like the joke, its effect on the storyteller
can occur only after the audience is affected. (I can only speculate here.) Kevin, like
other preachers in his church, was subject to enthusiasm when he preached; but on the
several occasions when I observed him, his enthusiasm was light, at times strained, and
occurred only after other members of his congregation had received the Spirit. I never
observed Kevin to speak in tongues, enter a deep trance, or collapse.
Yet here, as in his conversion story, Kevin cannot afford, so I believe, to preach-to
let his story produce its effect. He needs space to narrate, to be narrationally split, to
resist fusion.
"I'lljust tell you this story,"he says at one point. "It may sound ridiculous to you, but
this is just the way it happened." His evaluation of the story, like his invocation of me,
is more than rhetorical. It distances him from his story. Later, as though the spoken
word cannot do justice to his Rankean claims, he says, "I've got this all written down in
a diary that I kept at the time, and it's all well documented." Then he adds, "Allof these
things can be supported with the testimonies of these people."
I assure him I believe him, though I do not. I justify affirmation on professional
grounds. I have agreed to so much I don't really believe in during these months of
research with white South Africans. I do not want to break contact. I recognize his need
of me and, at a level I cannot fathom in the immediacy of our exchange, my need of
him-the "forepleasure"his stories, his presence, his narrational presences offer me.

876 AMERICAN
ANTHROPOLOGIST [96,1994
I stop him. I ask him if he saw his parents while he was an itinerant preacher. He has
already told me he has. He nods and goes on-his stories have pushed him to this
conclusion.
"God is starting a new race of people, you know. Whether we're now black or white,
male or female, slave or free man, rich or poor, we're all one in Christ, you know. And
He told us, God, about this new race, you know, and this new cause. It was really the
most wonderful cause to fight for, you know. But, ugh, anyway so I started off now...."
He is preaching, forgetting himself, beside himself, enthusiastic, a visionary, yet
preserving through the repetitive (paradoxically almost ritualized) "you know" a mini-
mal interlocution, a minimal separation, his/my alterity. He cannot sustain the tension
between preaching and conversation. He distances himself/myself through the past
tense: "Itwas really the most wonderful cause." He returns to his narrative: "But, ugh,
anyway so I started off now." So carried away was he that as he emerges from his
enthusiasm, he does not know where in his story he was. He says he was living at the
YMCAin Salisbury and then, getting his bearings, he goes on describing his career.
Depleted, he tries from time to time to recapture his enthusiasm but fails. His story
is self-reflective, filled with doubt, regret, sadness. It saddens me, at least. It reveals the
tedium behind his religious enthusiasm. He does not have the patience to prepare for
the Anglican seminary. He takes a correspondence course in theology but finds it
"faith-destroying."
"I had to write a whole assignment on mythology in the Book of Genesis. I didn't
believe they were myths. I thought they were true stories." Note the past tense.
"Wellperhaps I didn't understand the true meaning of the word 'myth' at that stage."
He receives his call-up papers and enters the army. On his second day he gives testimony
at chapel, is nicknamed "Padre,"and is ostracized.
"I had no real friends. So much of my time in the army was spent alone. I was very
much a loner, you might say, because of-well, I won't say 'persecution,' well, it was
probably a mild persecution, in a way."
Here, as in his other military stories, he is a loner. He resists fusion. He does not
identify with the group. He admires no leader. His relationship is with Jesus.
"I saw evil, I think probably for the first time. Real evil. I think the devil is perhaps
most at home in a war situation. Jesus said, 'The thief, because of the devil, comes only
to steal, to kill, and to destroy. But I come that you might have love.' I began to
understand that. I think it matured me. I was at the stage of your life when you're turning
from a boy into a man. So there were a lot of changes that took place in that year [in
the army].... Perhaps when I left the army I wasn't as enthusiastic as when I went in.
There was probably a lot more depth. Perhaps the intoxication, if you like, of my early
Christian experience was gone. The froth and bubbles."
The army is a maturing experience. (The male, paternal world reduces his initial
[Oedipal?] ecstasy but gives it depth.'?) Note again the self-reflective expressions that
split the speaking I from the narrated I. Note also the impersonal locutions: "So there
were a lot of changes that took place in that year" and "There was a lot more depth."
The narrated I, a character-to-be-observed, is not, however, fully disengaged from the
narrating I. I detect in Kevin's voice a longing for that intoxication that in his "depth"
he can no longer have. Nor can he (re)create it in his stories. They are repetitions in
another register. Sundered through time by memory, they reflect the allomatic (to use
Hofmannsthal's term) pull between the present, narrating I and the narrated I of the
past. The nostalgia, the longing, the melancholy are becoming familiar. Are they a
symptom of the interdicted maternal fusion/ecstasy that was perhaps never experi-
enced? Can it ever be? Are they the sign of the inevitable failure of language, as Pontalis
(1988:194) would maintain? "Carle langagen'estpas pris: il ne saisit rien de la substancedu
reel...." Certainly, Kevin's words oscillate between the two moods distinguished by
Pontalis, by which consciousness responds to the emptiness of language (la vacuite de
langage):"manic triumph" and melancholy. "Maisla melancolierevelesa nature [la nature

du langage], la manie seulementson effort."Perhaps. But what Pontalis fails to consider is

the interlocutorynature of language. Kevin's stories are effective. His mania, his
bombardmentof images, the enthusiasm of his stories, are more or less successful
attemptsto position me as he would have me, outside his stories,subjectto their effect.
His melancholy drawsme into the stories, forcing me to seek escape, and thereby
offering him the possibilityof escape from their inevitablefailureto reproducewhat
they represent.Lacan (1973:49)remindsus that repetition (Wiederholen) is not repro-
duction (Reproduzieren).
Kevingoes on talkingapatheticallyabout his earlyministry,mirroringthe depression
and loneliness he felt at the time. He was "almostdestroyed"by his first post as an
assistantto a bigoted "no-lipstick-in-church"minister."Godwasn'tseeming to answer
myprayersanymore."He prayedfor a paralyzedwoman,and when nothing happened,
hisfaithwas"justabouttotallydestroyed."Finally,he wastransferredto another,happier
parish.He met Barbaraand married."Wehad a lovely time there."But he needed a
change--to liveand workin a place "wherenobodyknewme or mypast,whereBarbara
and I could startagain."He does not explain why he feels this way.He prayedfor a
transfer and was sent to South Africa where his parents were living. Barbarawas
homesick,and so washe.
"Buton the whole, I missedthe army,I think, oddly enough. And the bush and the
wayof life in Rhodesia.It wasso totallydifferentthere:warmand sunnyand easy-going.
Thingswere cheap."He sharesthese memorieswith the other whiteRhodesiansI met
in South Africa.
Kevindevotes the remainderof the interviewto comparisonsof Rhodesiaand South
Africa,whose racialpolicy he criticizeson "Christian"but not political grounds. His
comparisonsare banal,depressing,interminable.I stayon, reallyoverstay,in the hope
thatKevinwillbreakout of his/my melancholy,perhapsbyrevealinga "causative" truth.
Perhapsall I cando iswaitforanotherstory-the forepleasure-with whichI can engage
and engage Kevin.
I begin our next meeting by askingKevinabout his militaryservice.We are relieved.

He has storiesto tell, though theywilllose their allegoricaldimension.He failed to get
a clergyman'sexemptionfrommilitaryserviceandwassent to a miserabletrainingcamp
where he got only twoand a half hours of sleep a night. "Therewasn'teven any toilet
paper in the toilets."To get out of this camp, he signed up as a regularsoldier in the
elite SpecialAirServices(SAS),whichwasmodeled on DavidSterling'sDesertRats,and
was sent to a trainingcenter with "beautiful,modern barracks,rolling green lawns,
swimmingpools, and beautifulfood."Kevin's"aestheticism" is idiomaticamong whites
in southern Africa,where the adjective"lovely"can qualifyjust about everythingand
you say "pleasure"for"you'rewelcome."
Though "beautiful" the trainingwas "incrediblyhard"-but Kevindid
and "pleasant,"
not seem to mind. "Wehad this one sergeantwho wasa bit psycho,"Kevinbegins one
of his stories."HeknewI wasa Christianand reallyhated me. Hisintentionwasto break
me down completely."
The sergeant took the recruits to a bush camp where, in the October heat
(October is one of the hottest months in Zimbabwe), they had to skirmishall day
long without rest and water:"Wehad to dig what they call a hastydefense. So we dug
a trench about six feet long, three feet wide, and six feet deep. We had 14 minutes
to do this. We had blisterson our hands. We were exhausted. We had been running
around with a pick and a shovel and a pack. We'djust about finished digging this
trench, killing ourselvesdigging it, when [the sergeant] said, 'Right,fill it in. We've
got to move on by.' "
Kevin is excited, laughs a lot, and seems to be reliving the events he describes. I
am converted into a "buddy."His stories have lost their moralizingpretense.

878 AMERICAN
The recruits were punished because one of them had tried to drink water from a
stagnant pond. For five days they had to live in the trenches without water and with
almost no sleep: "Guyswere collapsing on their feet."
Kevin's story is now hyperbole, and he knows I know but doesn't seem to care. "We
really didn't get any water for five days. Guys were being taken to the hospital. My tongue
was black, and I was seeing red dots in front of my eyes. It was absolutely amazing. You
can't eat anything because you haven't got the saliva to swallow."
Kevin is special in his story. Of 700 volunteers for SAS training, Kevin tells me, 50 were
chosen and 20 managed to get through it. Twelve went on to commando training and
four of them, including Kevin, to a special selection course. The others in this course
were mercenaries. Kevin shows me a picture of one of them-an American-which he
had clipped from a magazine.
"Killedin action," he reads. "So that was when old Ned got killed," he adds with little
feeling.
For over an hour, Kevin describes the five-day selection course. An initiation, but he
takes it as an adventure-a show of prowess, an escape, I think, from the tedium of his
everyday life. (Does it reflect the process of substituting "depth"for "bubbles and froth"
ecstasy?There is a violence, the threat of breakdown, a new ecstasy, and, as we shall see,
a final identification with Christ, which marks perhaps his Bildung.)
On the first day, groups of five recruits each had to carrytwo heavy logs 20 miles over
mountains and across ravines. Kevin had to carry two heavy rocks, also, because he
hadn't shaved and cleaned his rifle. "So I started off with a pack weighing 13 kilos, and
now it weighed 50!" Kevin's team fought among themselves, got lost, and three of them
quit. But Kevin and Ned, the American mercenary, made it. On the second day, Kevin
had to go on by himself to another goal and was so tired that he was about to quit when
he managed to "hijack"an African bus that got him as close to his goal as it could get.
He spent the night in the garden of a deserted holiday cottage: "Itwas verywild up there.
I could hear this leopard making noises, and I thought to myself, 'If I go to sleep, this
leopard's going to get me. If I don't go to sleep, I'll die of exhaustion.' Ijust decided to
go to sleep and fortunately nothing happened."
It is not until Kevin describes his third day that he mentions divine intervention. To
achieve the goal set for that day, he has to run 18 miles across rough terrain, and as he
runs he sings a Christian hymn.
"Then I remembered what the Lord had done. My pack was going bang, bang, bang.
I don't remember anything. I don't knowwhat happened. I really don't. Ijust remember
I felt the Lord was with me and that if He wanted me to pass the Selection Course, He
would help me. I must have gone into a trance. The next thing I remember was flying
through the air and falling and hitting my face. It was a terrible shock. I must have
tripped and fallen. I got up and was way ahead of all the other guys. [He had been the
last to start.] The finish was in two hundred yards. So I'd actually run 18 miles and
couldn't remember any of it. I started to walk to the finish and then one of the other
guys overtook me and came in first."
God was with Kevin on the fourth day too. Still carrying the rocks, he managed to get
to his goal in record time because, unlike the other recruits, he had found a fire break.
"All the officers thought it was amazing that I was in one piece, but I didn't realize
how amazing it was until the other guys began coming in about three hours later. They
were cut and covered with mud, and their clothes were torn. They had to go through
swamps.... One guy had broken his ankle and was hobbling along with a stick and poor
old Ned had to walk backwards, twenty miles backward, because his metal toe caps were
eating into his toes. The blood was actually oozing out of his shoes."
Kevin and the other men thought they had completed the selection course, but then
they were given new logs and told to advance to a camp two or three miles away. It was
the toughest part yet, because they had to cross five rivers. "Ijust remember-it may
seem silly to you-the thing that kept going through my mind was, I convinced myself

that I was the Lord carrying the cross. I was carrying this huge cross, and if I didn't carry
it, I was going to lose my salvation. I convinced myself that this was really a life and death
matter."
Despite references to divine intervention, to Christ and the cross, Kevin does not turn
his story into a religious allegory. Its significance lies elsewhere-in the confidence his
selection had given him, his Bildung. (In his identification withJesus, with the father? )
At the end of the course, without having time to change, the men who had been
successful were taken to a fancy hotel where, among guests dressed in evening clothes,
their officers treated them to "a meal with French wine." Kevin laughs and laughs.
Kevin had another 18 weeks of training and would then have had to go through
another confidence course where, were he captured by the "enemy," he would have
been tortured. "Theypush match sticks under your fingernails and all this kind of thing."
He did not complete the course, however, because the last phase was postponed for
three months and he could not bear waiting. He wanted to see action. (To achieve a
new, paternal ecstasy?)
Kevin did see action. On his first day, the truck he was riding'in was blown up by a
landmine. "Iwas sitting on top of a canteen vehicle, which was filled with crates of coke
and beer, dozing off, when suddenly there was this terrible bang. Bang! The next thing
I remember I'm flying through the air like Superman with coke bottles going past me.
I landed on the road and cut my hands and looked back and saw the vehicle overturned
and the driver lying on the road with his arm at a grotesque angle. That was my, our,
very first day, and afterward we went on."
Kevin was on antiterrorist patrol for eight months. His time was spent either watching
for terrorists from kopjes or destroying villages that provisioned the terrorists.
Kevin's first stories are truncated, harrowingly impersonal, without emotion. He is
hardly in them: "The sirens would go off, the choppers would start up, and you would
run and jump into one of them, and they would fly you to wherever the village was and
drop you on top of the terrorists. Whereupon there was a fight and then afterwardsyou
would put all the bodies into these big plastic bags, load them into the helicopter, fly
back to base, and wait for your next call."
But as he continues, he becomes a character in his story. A terrorist runs out of a hut
and gets caught in a blanket hanging from a wash line: "The next thing I knew I wasjust
firing into the blanket.... The terrorist never came out from behind the blanket. Now
there was a Stop Group right behind the blanket, and I had fired right into the middle
of them. You know it's like chaos. You know I shot a terrorist and almost killed some of
my own guys.... This contact lasted from five in the morning into twelve that night. It
was just bullets flying all the time. It was just amazing. We were outnumbered. There
were 40 of us and 140 of them. Plus they had women and children. Anywaythese guys-I
came to realize then that in war there are no goodies and baddies. Everyone's just as
bad as everyone else. As the Bible says, 'The heart of men is desperately wicked.' I
realized then that man without God is a monster. Because they [?] shot women, children,
dogs, cattle, chickens. We just destroyed the place. The only thing I shot was that one
terrorist behind the blanket, but the other guys were going wild."
Kevin goes on to describe the massacre and pillage of the village: "Butwe had to search
these huts, and guys were stuffing their pockets with all kinds of souvenirs. I got a whole
lot of things, funny little things, a little grenade the size of an egg. I had never seen one
like it before.... It was actually quite pathetic because in some of these houses there
would be a picture of a guy with his family, a wardrobe with his clothes. You'd just have
to burn the stuff. And while these houses were going up, ammunition was exploding in
the fires and bullets were just going all over. We killed every single thing, burned and
killed. And then the choppers came and got us.... One of the guys had got a stereo.
He ran up to the chopper with a speaker under each arm. It was really weird."
I asked Kevin how he felt after the massacre.

880 ANTHROPOLOGIST
AMERICAN [96, 1994
"Therewas always this ritual of putting these bodies into body bags. It had to be got
through.It was my first contact. Ihad to put the bodies into the bags, and some of these
bodies had been lying in the sun for several hours and were bloody. It was the most
horrifyingexperience in my whole life. I don't know whether all human beings are like
thator just Africans. You grab a guy's arm to pull him and his skin comes off in your
hand. And his bowels would be loosed. It was really terrible. And these dead bodies
wouldhave really weird reactions. Like one would just sit up and puke all over and fall
back.... I think. I had a migraine headache and was very thirsty."
Kevinconcludes with, "That was my first baptism into the war situation." He had not
toldme that he was telling me about the first man he had killed. I ask to make sure, and
heanswers enigmatically: "No, that didn't worry me at all. Even to this day that doesn't
botherme at all. I had a much more frightening experience. For me, for evil to be really
evilit has to be spiritual. I remember-A lot of these terrorists were sinister characters.
Theyused to wear charms-They really looked evil. They had matted hair with beads
init and looked like witch doctors.... One guy used to go around to all the villages and
ripoff people's lips with a pair of pliers and make people eat them."
Kevinshows me a book with a picture of one of the terrorist's lipless victims: "He
forced this man's wife to cook and eat his severed lips and ears."12Kevin takes out a pile
ofold magazines to show me pictures of other terrorist incidents and tell me about them.
Withlittle remorse he points to one man, who had saved his life, and says he was killed.
Whatfrightened him the most-he moves back into a personal mode after his "respite"
ofimpersonal anecdotes-was the way the terrorists invoked the aid of ancestral spirits.
The terrorists "actuallydivided up Rhodesia into different districts, each named after a
demon or spirit,"and tried to convince the locals that the spiritswere fighting with them.
In spiritual retaliation, the Rhodesian soldiers kept a hyena on a leash to confuse the
locals, for they believed the hyena was an incarnation of an ancestral spirit.
"TheAfricans have a way of singing and banging their drums that is really terrifying.
You can sense the spirits of Africa-as the moon shines through the branches of the
thorn tree. It's primitive. That night I could have been in Africa a thousand years ago.
Irealized I-Europeans-didn't belong there. I felt an evil presence so thick you could
run your finger through it. That was the most frightening night in my life because it
wasn'tjust the terrorists but the spirits of Africa pressing us. The next morning the
vehicle that came to pick us up hit a landmine."
Kevin is caught in a Conradian moment, which, though I was expecting him to, he
does not convert into an encounter with Satan. His stories become more and more
grotesque. They are emotionally flattened by their quantity. I am both horrified and
fascinated. Kevin tells me that he was not able to sleep at night because of the cries of
the tortured coming from the interrogation center next to his barracks. He refers to the
"alwaysvery subtle pressure of the landmines," knowing they are there but not where. I
have to interrupt him. I cannot bear any more stories. "Didyou ever talk to a terrorist?"
My question does not stop his stories but redirects them. It is a way of taking charge.
"Yes,but funnily enough, the only ones I ever met were really young, 12 or 13 year olds."
On his days off, it turned out, Kevin listened to broadcasts from the helicopters to
find out when prisoners would arrive so he could minister to them. "They'd unload the
wounded. There'd be guys with a leg blown off or a few holes in his head. They'd just
dump them on the grass. I tried to minister to them. I thought they were Christians and
showed them love. It was incredible. They were so alien. It was so alien, I mean, for a
white soldier to show a black terrorist any kind of care."
I ask him how they responded.
"With amazement. They couldn't believe it. It was almost too much for them to
comprehend. Here's a guy trying to regain them. They didn't treat me with suspicion.
... Actually the only thing was, I found that most of them didn't seem to be able to talk.
I don't know why. I suppose a guy with his leg blown off-I just don't know why they
didn't respond."

I feel myself more involved in Kevin's stories than he himself is. Who were the
terrorists for him? What was his relationship to them? He must have asked the same
question, for he tells me about near contact with them in the bush, about conversations
shouted across enemy lines, about being wounded.
Finally, he stops. I am relieved. I should like to write that he is drained or that he is
excited, but he is neither. He is removed from the experiences he has recounted. They
are stories in which he is a witnessing character. Yes, he has described fear and terror,
at times with emotion, but no sooner has he entered into emotional contact with the
experience than he begins a new, detached story. Fear and terror become rhetorical
figures. At one point, without amazement, he says, "Looking back on [my military
service], I get sort of nostalgic about it."
The stories facilitate Kevin's detachment. They are designed, like testimonies, to
produce an effect in their interlocutors-and then, perhaps like Freud'sjokes, in Kevin
himself. Unlike his testimonies or the story of his conversion, they engage me in ways I
do not like and force me to play a role I do not fully understand. They are too controlled
to be cathartic for Kevin-at the time they are told, at least-perhaps because he
occupies multiple, changing positions in them. But perhaps because they do not offer
me so many positions, they produce a fear and terror in me less of the events than of
my fascination with them. Fear and terror are Kevin's gift to me, perhaps, and the fear
and terror-catharsis-I experience, my experience, is my gift perhaps to Kevin. I have
argued formally elsewhere (1992:229-238, 1994) that emotions have to be understood
dialogically, as in an exchange in which a game of "who has the emotion" is played.
The interview meanders. This time Kevin does not want it to end. It would be too
abrupt a reentry into his world of family, church, and gym. I ask him how he felt when
he was discharged. He describes a church service "with well-dressed people singing
hymns": "I thought these people were living in a dream-world because the real world
was out there where people were dying." He adds, "I myself am part of that unreality
now.... I get bugged if my parking meter runs out."
I ask Kevin if he suffered flashback experiences. He says that for a while he jumped
for cover whenever he heard a car backfire, and goes on to tell me about sleeping in
the bush (I don't understand the association): "You'realwayssleeping out in the open.
The wind is clear in Rhodesia so you don't talk.You may only be 50 yards from a village.
So sometimes you go for ten days without talking.... You're just like an animal. You
have to glide through the bush. You sit and learn to listen and learn to be with yourself.
... Guys always used to say you shouldn't use deodorant or brush your teeth with
toothpaste because the terrorists can smell you. It seemed ridiculous but it's true....
The main issues are life and death. There are a lot of subtle fears like hyenas. They have
a horrible habit of biting people when they're asleep. With one bite they can remove
half your face.... One night I woke up with a hyena standing over my face.... And the
terrorists too would watch where you go to sleep and then come across and shoot you.
... So there was the added fear of sleeping alone.... But so when I got married, I used
to get recurring nightmares. An African would be knocking, tapping, at my window, and
in my nightmare I would go out and I would-They were so realistic that I often thought
I had been really-I go and draw back the window, and there would be this black face
staring at me through the window. I would, I would-It wouldn't go away. It would just
carryon stating at me. And on one occasion I dreamed a brick had been thrown through
the window, and I went, and there through the broken glass was this face that kept on.
And this nightmare just kept coming back and back and back, every night ... and
eventually I decided I just had to leave Rhodesia because there was such a spirit of
possession.... Africans, even when they're educated, are primitive.... I know they're
innocents, like a child, and want playmates and everything. They're savages really, you
know.... An African was cleaning a man's car and then one day he took the man's baby
by its foot and smashed its head against a wall. They really are savages, but I realize, you

AMERICANANTHROPOLOGIST [96, 1994
882
know,perhaps we aren't so far from these savages ourselves. But up there there was a
primitivekind of terror that justseemed to sink deep into our souls, and coming down
herethat lifted off me."
Theterrorists, the terrorist at thewindow resonates with the savage, castrating father,
whodeprives the son of maternal protection, fusion, by making the son sleep alone. His
savageryoffers theson savagery in turn.
Kevingoes on to tell me about the terrorist bombing ofWoolworth's in Salisbury. He
describes the mutilations he saw and, narratively less constrained, he seems more
emotionally involved in this description than in those of war. Is it the effect of telling
mehis nightmare? Is it thesecurity of being in South Africa in fact and in story?He may
havegiven me one reason for moving to South Africa, but I still wonder why he said
earlierthat he had moved in order tostart a new life where he was not known. Knowing,
likeseeing, alwaysincludes being known, being seen.
Afterreviewing thechronology of the events he has related, Kevin tells me with regret
thathe married too young. "Ifelt like an old man. My desire to travel, to have parties,
tolive life was just gone. All I wanted to do was settle down and live quietly for the rest
of my life, with someone to share my life."
(Inhis new-found depth, he has found paltry substitutes for his substituting intoxica-
tions:adolescent promiscuity, his initial enthusiasm, the ecstasy of war.)
"Andwe moved down here. It was a totally different atmosphere.... After a while you
begin to feel the call of the bush again. I began to look back on the army as a really
fantastic time.You forget the horror of it. You remember the beauty of the bush, the
sunrises, the stars, the smell. They're so beautiful, and in the middle of it, you're doing
things you despise."
Kevinis mellow and reflective, as though he has passed through his stories back to
maturity,to his accommodation to reality. I ask how his parents reacted to his military
service. He does not remember what he wrote them. They were disinterested. No one
wasinterested, and that disappointed him. "Youknow," he saysangrily, "therewere guys
Like
up there who died and went through incredible things, and no one was interested."
the regret he expressed earlier, he can now express anger. He tells me I am the first
person to be interested in his experiences. I refuse to accept his gift, cruelly. I say, "The
experience is yours. It's never going to be anyone else's no matter what you do." He
laughs: "I think the only person I ever wrote the truth to was my brother. But then I
alwaysused to write the truth to him and then read it and tear it up."
So I am bullied. I am the inadvertent brother, the deflected father, I think, to whom
he has not torn up the truth. I have refused the experience, but he knows that despite
my refusal I have accepted it emotionally. I'm writing about it today, with resistance; its
framing, has, I suppose, to be understood in terms of that refusal and that acceptance.
Like the joke, perhaps, Kevin's stories, his story, has to be retold: to pass on its effect,
its affect, so that I, like Kevin in his retelling, can experience the effects and the affect
of its repetition. It is through engagement with the other, I believe, that repetition
approaches reproduction.
But of course my story does not end here. Less than a week after our fourth and
supposedly last interview, Kevin calls me. He has decided to join the army again. He
cannot join the Zimbabwean army; he does not want to join the South African army.
Nor the Canadian, nor the English. He wants to join the American army! I am not
surprised. I am not even surprised at my lack of surprise. "Ina way I have always known
that, only I never thought it." I do not discourage Kevin. I tell him to call the American
consul. He does and learns that the United States army will not accept a foreign citizen.
Disappointed, he calls me. We see each other one last time. Kevin is depressed. The
interview rambles. He tells me how disappointed he is in living in South Africa, where
life "seems to revolve around supermarkets and things like that." He misses Rhodesia.
"Myhomesickness still manifests itself in, for instance, my impulse to go over and join

the American army." He tells me how hard it is for him to be a minister "because so
much of it involves getting behind a desk, studying, preparing sermons. I like doing
things all the time, and the army would be just about perfect because you're constantly
doing things." He tells me that, unlike his wife, he prefers a "gypsylife": "Idon't regard
myself as a South African, and I don't regard South Africa as my home. I've ceased to
regard Rhodesia as my home really, and so I don't feel at home anywhere. It'sa kind of
weird feeling. I don't want to get sentimental about it.... In fact probably one of the
reasons I want to go over to America-It would really be great to actually have a career,
to have a country, to have a place where one can really settle down and watch your career
grow. I just don't know if South Africa is where I want to do that."
Pretentiously, I think of my responsibility for Kevin's desire. I am an American. I have
disrupted him, opened him up, shown him an imaginary freedom, and given him the
chance to repeat but not to reproduce, not to relive. I suggest he join another army. He
sayshe is thinking about it, but it is too cold in Canada, too damp in England. I have
heard these characterizations many times from other South African whites contemplat-
ing emigration. Kevin will not join another army, I know, and he knows. The meeting
is painful, and we are both grateful to Kevin's four-year-old son, who interrupts us and
finally puts a stop to it. We depart.
Mystory still does not end. A year later Kevin writes to tell me he is coming to America
and would like to visit me. He has received a traveling fellowship for a Bikers-for-Christ
rally in Oklahoma. I can see him bulging out of a black motorcycle jacket, praying in
ecstasy for Christ's Second Coming. I am in Paris when Kevin comes to America.
VINCENTCRAPANZANO isDistinguishedProfessor,TheGraduateSchooland UniversityCenter,CityUniversity

ofNew York,33 West42nd Street,New York,NY 10036-8099.
Notes
1. Ed. tr.A languageignoringthe loss thatgives it life, that animatesit, a languageconvinced
of declaringthe truthwould, in fact, only revertto itself.
2. I have adopted the following conventions in my transcriptionof Kevin'swords.A dash
indicatesKevin'sinterruption.Suspensionpoints indicatea deletion I havemade.
3. Among manycriticismsof psychoanalytic approachesto literaryresponse,see Iser 1978.
4. Even those dialogues thatpretend to freedom and formlessness,like the psychoanalytic,
are neverfree from constraint.Indeed, "freeassociation"has now become a standardgenre in
certaincirclesand has no doubt lost therebysome of its "efficacy." An anonymousreviewerof
this articlesuggestedthat conversionnarratives/experiencescould also be understoodin these
terms.Is it possible that the dramaticrepetitionsof the conversionnarratives(in witnessing,in
testimonials)aswellas the frequent"reconversions" thatoccurin thelivesof manyPentecostalists,
are related to the standardizationof the narrativeand experientialgenres in which they are
caught? The dramaticquality of these repetitions in narrativeand in life (visions, trance,
speaking-in-tongues)canperhapsbe relatedto the deadeningeffect of repetitionwhere thereis
hope for renewaland revitalization.
5. Urban'sanalysisis apparentlybasedon relativelyrigidgenres and genre performances.He
has not given sufficient attention to those speech events in which the speakerslips from or
between one I use to another. Nor has he considered fully the role of the interlocutor in
determiningparticularIusage.
6. Hardingtends to generalizethe Fundamentalists'hermeneuticof faithand the wayit plays
into their narratives.In those stories I heard in South Africarelating personalexperience to
Scripture,thereseemed to be considerablevariationin thewaytheywere recounted,interpreted,
and-to me-manifestly experienced.There were times,particularlyduringtestimonialsand or
when I wasbeingwitnessed,thatthe experientialpresentand the Scripturalpastcollapsed.There
wereothers-one mustnot forgetthe Falland its textualrepetitions-when thedistancebetween
the twowasemphasized,producingeven a terribleirony.Mostoften, Biblicalquotationseemed
to me to be decorative,habitual,simplymarkingan identity and rhetoricallyplayingon that

884 AMERICAN
marked identity and its entailments. Once doubt has arisen, the hermeneutic of faith, like all
hermeneutics, whether invoked implicitly or explicitly, always has a rhetorical side. One could
argue with Stromberg (1993:12) that the canonical (the Scriptural, the Pauline conversion story)
and the immediate, which are somehow brought into contact with each other through ritual (that
is, the conversion narrative, its telling), "are both likely to manifest themselves as constitutive
phenomena." For Stromberg, the conversion narrative is the central element of conversion-and
not simply a recounting of an event in the past. Still, whether understood in Hardy's or
Stromberg's terms, one has to be careful not to generalize how conversion narratives work. I am
certain that Kevin's conversion narrative "functioned" differently when he told it to me, when he
preached, when he witnessed someone, and perhaps when he thought about it in the privacy of
his study or on the road.
7. Susan Harding (1991) discusses the way in which the Fundamentalists are represented in
modernist discourse as a cultural other, antithetical to modernity, repugnant even to the
modernist sensibility. I am, I suppose, not immune to this position. What strikes me as sympto-
matic of the urgent definitional function of the Fundamentalist as "cultural other" in modernist
discourse is that many "modernist" scholars are willing to acknowledge publicly, in print, their
negative feelings about the Fundamentalists. They are far less willing to express negative feelings
about "more distant"-traditional-others (the native peoples of Africa, Asia, the Americas). Are
these more traditional others less threatening? Are they less intrusive? Do they inspire a
definitional indifference? Or are they framed with such tact as to preclude any (public) negative
evaluation? We have to recognize, I believe, the way in which we use the notion of otherness-
abstractly, as a generalization, with disengagement, comprehensively, appropriatingly, with little
subtlety. The other is a cultural category-one we like to export.
8. Insofar as psychoanalytic interpretations focus on the individual's psychic makeup, they
underplay the interlocutory dynamics or, when these dynamics are taken into account, as in the
traditional consideration of transference and countertransference, their interpretation rearticu-
lates interlocution around the individual and his biography. They are one of several strategies by
which I reposition myself with respect to-within-the conversations with Kevin. They allow me
(so I understand them) to "escape" the performative intensity of his words and to overcome my
"loss"within the interlocutory space thatwe have both created and that he has sought to dominate.
To call attention to the way in which such interpretations rearticulate an interlocution in terms
of its individual participants, I have placed all such psychoanalytic interpretations in parentheses.
They become illuminating allegories that probably reveal as much about me as about Kevin.
9. Stromberg (1993) insists that the unacknowledged conflicts that come to be articulated in
canonical terms through conversion do not disappear. The outcome of my conversations with
Kevin (as he himself recognized) would seem to confirm Stromberg's observation.
10. Waud Kracke, one of the reviewers of this article, suggests a pre-Oedipal rather than an
Oedipal account of this ecstasy. He emphasizes grandiosity and self-cohesion-a narcissistic
ecstasy:"the ecstasy of warded-off fragmentation of the child's discovery of a deceptive cohesive-
ness in the mirror image, the first other." I have retained my own Oedipal understanding
(problematized as it is) not because I am in disagreement with Kracke's interpretation but
because my Oedipal understanding figures implicitly in my conversations with Kevin and their
representation. It is curious that several readers of this article (I except Kracke here) have
concentrated on the validity of my psychoanalytic interpretations despite my insistence on their
having to be understood within the conversational and representational dynamics of my ex-
changes with Kevin. I could, I suppose, had I had the mind to, have made use of any of a number
of other theoretical paradigms or set of images-say, astrological. I am not denying the value of
psychoanalytic interpretation nor even the validation of any single interpretation; I am trying
simply to convey its rhetorical function within immediate conversation and the representation
of that conversation. Clearly, by psychoanalytic standards, I have only enough "material"to make
a "wild"interpretation. The point is that such "wild"interpretations figure in certain milieus in
conversation and representation.
11. Kracke suggests that this "identification" withJesus is a mergerwith the omnipotent father,
not a strengthening of Oedipal identification.
12. My anonymous reviewer remarks: "Tearing off and eating people's lips and ears should,
perhaps, not go uncommented on. It certainly has stomach-turning shock value for an unjaded
reader. We have passed from 'forepleasure' to some other form of eroticized pleasure or
'fascination of the abomination.' " He goes on to make reference to Georges Bataille. No doubt
there is a change in the "pleasure" offered, but there is nothing in Freud's use of "forepleasure"

to preclude from it "fascinationof the abomination" and the "pleasure"it might afford-or the
"pleasure"of its negation. Kevin's description reminds me of the brutal and terrifying fantasms
of alterity-of the Indian, the sorcerer-that European settlers in the Putumayo had (Taussig
1987). I encountered similar fantasies among white South Africans. I was regaled with them by
drunken, British ex-colonial officers in Tangier bars.
References Cited
Benjamin, Walter
1969 Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books.
Crapanzano, Vincent
1990 On Dialogue. In The Interpretation of Dialogue. Tullio Maranhao, ed. Pp. 269-291.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1992 Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire: Essays on the Epistemology of Interpretation.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
1994 Reflexions sur une anthropologie des emotions. Terrain 22:109-117.
Freud, Sigmund
1959[1913] Fausse Reconnaissance ("Deja Raconte") in Psychoanalytic Treatment. In Col-
lected Papers 2. Authorized translation under the supervision of Joan Riviere. Pp. 334-341.
NewYork: Basic Books.
1962[1905] Three Essayson the Theory of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books.
1963a[1905] Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious. New York: Norton.
1963b[ 1908] The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming. In Character and Culture. Pp. 34-43.
New York: Collier.
Harding, Susan
1991 Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other. Social
Research 58(2):373-393.
1992 The Gospel of Giving: The Narrative Construction of a Sacrificial Economy. In Vocabu-
laries of Public Life. Robert Wuthnow, ed. Pp. 39-56. Harper Collins: Academic.
Iser, Wolfgang
1978 The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Lacan,Jacques
1973 Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil.
Mecke, Jochen
1990 Dialogue in Narration (the Narrative Principle). In The Interpretation of Dialogue.
Tullio Maranhao, ed. Pp. 195-215. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pontalis,J. B.
1988 Melancolie et langage. In Perdre de vue. Pp. 193-196. Paris: Gallimard.
Stromberg, Peter G.
1993 Language and Self-Transformation: A Study in Christian Conversation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Taussig, Michael
1987 Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Urban, Greg
1989 The "I"of Discourse. In Semiotics, Self, and Society. Benjamin Lee and Greg Urban,
eds. Pp. 27-51. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.


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Kevin: On the Transfer of Emotions

Author(s): Vincent Crapanzano

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Kevin:On the Transfer of Emotions

96(4):866-885. Copyright ? 1994, American Anthropological Association.

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Christians[that is, born-againChristians],many of them lead a life akin to that of

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Our second interview began in a desultory fashion. After discussing an automobile

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Are we to understand these tales as delusions of omnipotence? Kevin seems strangely

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du langage], la manie seulementson effort."Perhaps. But what Pontalis fails to consider is

I begin our next meeting by askingKevinabout his militaryservice.We are relieved.

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VINCENTCRAPANZANO isDistinguishedProfessor,TheGraduateSchooland UniversityCenter,CityUniversity

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