Stigmatic Thoughts

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Stigma is a funny thing.  Almost a superstitious mindset.  Especially when it concerns a non-contagious agent.  When a person becomes a victim of such an agent, the tendency is for others to withdraw from them, as if afraid they might catch it.  One such instance of this is cancer.  When someone is diagnosed, many people either keep silent or distance themselves from the person who received the diagnosis, as if even saying the word might put them in harms way.  Being married to a cancer survivor, I have experienced that firsthand.  Another instance, I recently discovered, is when you’re the victim of a scam.  Not only do you feel bad for your loss, but others tend to step back silently, as if they too might contract scam germs.  In both these cases, and many others, it’s easy to feel isolated.

As social animals, humans long ago learned that shunning is an effective tool in controlling social behavior.  A shunned person leaves a community or withers and dies within it.  As much as we value individualism, it means nothing if there’s no social group to acknowledge it.  Stigmas can lead to a kind of shunning.  A perhaps more lighthearted example is the person who tells others they’ve seen a UFO.  There’s adequate documentation that, beginning in the forties, the US government instituted a policy of ridicule to prevent such reports from proliferating.  It worked.  I remember growing up in the sixties and seventies that anyone who’d claimed to’ve seen such a thing was socially stigmatized with ridicule and claims of insanity.  We crave the approval of others.  Stigma and the associated shunning are among the most effective forms of social control.

As an introvert, I think quite a lot about this.  I’ve moved several times in my life and it takes quite a long time for me to get to know people.  Even now, having lived in my current town for over seven years, I know only four others in town  by name and none of them socialize.  One of the reasons I keep at this blog is that it develops a sense of community.  Those who are really successful on the internet develop followings of thousands, or millions.  My posts tend to be thoughtful (I hope) and often deal with stigmatized subjects.  (Although it’s starting to gain some respect, horror is a stigmatized genre.)  I very much appreciate my readers.  These thoughts are in my head and I let them out to roam on this blog.  I do hope that this post on stigma doesn’t lead to any shunning.  It’s just something I’ve noticed over the years.

Sex and Violence in Ancient Peru

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MSNBC ran a fascinating article yesterday that strangely validated this blog. The Quai Branly museum in Paris is opening a display of Mochica artifacts from ancient Peru. Although I am no expert on ancient Peruvian religion, I do recognize the obvious connection that I have introduced here a time or two: the connection between sexuality and religion. The article states that (but does not show) artifacts of an explicitly sexual nature are among those recovered from the Mochica civilization. Bringing violence (in the form of human sacrifice) and sexuality together, the ancient Moche were just as religious as medieval (and later) monotheistic faiths that assert their right to control sexuality and dole out violence.

The MSNBC article makes clear that the sexual, sometimes violent, images are not representations of everyday life, but religious rituals associated with the death of dignitaries. Emma Vandore, the author of the article, notes that the images demonstrate the social control Mochica religion had on its people. She is clearly right. Religions, while often in the position of providing “theological” rationales for their decisions, are actually forms of social control. Individual salvation aside, your clergy want control over your life.

Tame Mochica pottery from Wikipedia Commons

Because religion is so large and so mysterious, the populace often simply complies. The Mochica artifacts, some of which are reported to be disturbing, justify this interpretation. Even an image search on the web will reveal how graphically cruel religious representations of Hell are; much more compelling in scariness than are feeble attempts in alluring one into an idyllic representation of Heaven. (Heaven is often shown as a garden, and as a sufferer of hay fever, I imagine myself sneezing through paradise.) It is no coincidence that organized religion appears on the historical scene on the coat-tails of civilization itself. The Moche were straightforward about what modern civilization would prefer to hide: religion is more about control than it is about belief.