The Rabbit Slaughter by Vincent Crapanzano - Guernica - A Magazine of Art & Politics

2/18/2015
TheRabbitSlaughterbyVincentCrapanzanoGuernica/AMagazineofArt&Politics
The Rabbit Slaughter

By Vincent Crapanzano
February 16, 2015
An anthropologist examines the meanings of sacrifice and slaughterwith his own life as the case
study.
https://www.guernicamag.com/features/therabbitslaughter/
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Lydia Janssen (http://www.susaneleyfineart.com/index.php/Detail/artists/Janssen) , Rabbit Run, 2009. Oil on canvas,

70 68 inches.
I must have been five years old, because we had not yet moved from cottage seven to cottage five.
Cottage five was much bigger than cottage seven. My parents had to wait several years until one
of the larger housesfor some reason the houses were all called cottageshad been vacated
through either the death or the retirement of one of the senior resident physicians. Very rarely
did they leave for another position. My mother used to say they were more institutionalized than
the patients in the hospital. Institutionalized was one of her favorite words, and it must have
been one of the first words I learned, though I had no idea what it meant other than my mothers
disapproval.
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My father was always trying to raise animalsrabbits, chinchillas, chickens and ducks, tropical
fish, and a canary. They all died, the chinchillas because the room they were kept in was too hot
and the tropical fish because the water heater went on the blink and boiled them. The canary just
dropped dead one morning. The chickens and ducks stopped laying eggs, and so we ate them. I
was ten or eleven at the time and held them tightly as Mr. Axelson, our handyman, cut their
throats. Or maybe it was my father who cut their throats. I cant remember. It seems unlikely,
though, because my father always wore a suit and tie and never liked the sight of blood. Once the
chickens throats were cut, I dropped them and watched them flutter around, spurting blood all
over the cellar floor, before they finally died. I was horrified and fascinated but mainly trying not
to throw up. I dont think I was still holding any of them by the time they died and probably
didnt feel the sudden weight of lifelessness. That came later, about ten years ago, when Pico, our
Bouvier, died in my arms.
But did Phil feel the death of the rabbits he had slaughtered, if it was in fact he who killed them?
Phil was one of the patients who worked for us as a handyman when we lived in cottage seven.
He stoked the coal furnace, tended the rabbits in the hutch at the bottom of the garden, and did
the heavy cleaning, but he spent most of the time in his office in a corner of the cellar, reading
comic books and drinking coffee out of a bowl he shared with Gargya gun-shy Spinone that a
hunter had given my father just before I was born. Phil was, as I now remember him, a small,
timid man, perhaps in his thirties, who had a lock of greasy blond hair that was always falling
over his left eye, causing him to lose his place as he read the comics. He had created his office
sometimes he called it his hideawayby blocking the cellar corner with old, rusted gym lockers
that were arranged so that they not only walled him in but also created a secret passageway
that was closed off by two open locker doors that were hooked together with a chain. I had to
know the secret number of knocks for Phil to open the door. The problem was that he kept
changing the secret number without telling me, so I usually had to call out, Its me. Whos
me? he would ask, adding, Im me, and laughed as he unhooked the door. The lockers were
filled with the smelly old clothes and raggedy dolls and stuffed animals that he collected. They
were headless or missing limbs or split at the seams. Ill have to call the doctor, he would say as
he showed them to me and told me their names, but youll have to remind me. Im always
forgetting, and they never cry. I was never sure whether he was pulling my leg or serious.
I loved Phil but was only allowed to go down to the cellar for a half hour before dinner. Phil
thought of himself as a scientist and used to explain how things worked, but when I repeated
those explanations to my parents, they could barely contain their laughter. Phils science was his
and no one elses. I didnt care. I liked his science andI rememberkept a chunk of coal that
Phil had cracked open to show me a fossil. Phil saw a very rare ancient worm in the coal, but I
couldnt see anything. Still, I kept the fossil under my bed until Clara discovered it and threw it
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away. I wasnt upset. In fact, I preferred reading comics with Phil over listening to his science. He
was only supposed to read Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Elmer Fudd to me, but, in fact, he read
Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman. It was our secret, my first real secret from my parents.
Phil was sure that if my mother knew (and I suspect she did) he would be fired. So I never told
my parents. Clara knew because she was always spying on us, but I dont think she told anyone.
There was a conspiracy among the three of us, though Clara did not like Phil and Phil did not like
Clara. As it was Sunday, she wasnt at home when I discovered the dead rabbits. They had all
been strangled and thrown about the hutch and on the lawn in front of it in what must have been
a terrible frenzy.
I had gone down to play with the rabbits, and when I saw
them, I just stood there immobile, entrapped in so intense
a perception that I could feel nothing, neither the horror
nor the grief nor even the violence of the act.
It was, as I said, a Sunday. My grandparents were coming to dinner, as they always did on
Sundays. Just before they arrived, I had gone down to play with the rabbits, and when I saw them,
I just stood there immobile, entrapped in so intense a perception that I could feel nothing,
neither the horror nor the grief nor even the violence of the act. I had had no experience of death
its finality. Five-year-olds cannot grasp finality, psychologists say, but this doesnt mean they
cant experience it. I did for an instant, and it left its mark. I could not cry. I dont know how
long I stood there. I didnt hear my grandparents drive up to the house. I didnt hear anyone call
me, though someone must have. I didnt even hear my grandfathers footsteps as he approached
me, but I wasnt surprised when he put his arm around me, instinctively covering my eyes, though
it was far too late. He didnt say a word. Nor did I. There was nothing to say. He stooped down
and touched several of the rabbits. Theyre still warm, he said aloud but to himself. It must
have happened this morning. I wanted to touch the rabbits, to feel their warmth, to make them
come alive again. I knelt down, but before I could actually touch onealthough my fingers were
close enough to feel their warmthmy grandfather pulled me away, ordering me not to touch
them with a severity I had never before heard. They may have been poisoned, he said. Holding
my hand, he walked me back to the house to tell my parents.
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I dont remember much of what happened then. I wasnt allowed into the living room, where my
parents and grandparents were talking. I listened at the door until my father suddenly opened it,
catching me and sending me up to my room. I dont know exactly what I heard, but I knew then
that my mother was sure it was Phil who had killed the rabbits. My grandparents agreed with my
father, who said it could have been any of the patients in the hospital, anyone, in fact. I lay on
my bed. It couldnt have been Phil. How could my mother accuse him? He was my friend. He loved the
rabbits, and the rabbits loved him. I knew because I had helped him feed them. He had given them
names and talked to each of them as he held out lettuce leaves for them to nibble. They even
waited their turn. Phil had a way with animals, my mother used to say. I could hear them nibbling
and began to cry.
Im sorry I never really felt the rabbits warmth, because then, perhaps, my memory of their
contorted bodies, their heads twisted grotesquely, might have dissipated. Dead, they seemed much
longer and skinnier than when they were alive. Their fur had lost all luster, and I could practically
see their bones through it. But without that warmth, or maybe because of it, my memory of them
has remained cold. Sometimes I do see myself looking at them, but that image is not the same as
my image of myself in my earliest memories. It is a distancing imagea defensive self-scrutiny
that shields me from the warmth I never felt.
My sympathy was with Phil. So was my grief, for I knew that I could never again accept the
affection I had had for him. The next morning, I heard my mother and Clara asking each other
who could have killed the rabbits. Like my mother, Clara was sure it was Phil. I thought of her as
a traitor (though I probably didnt know the word traitor). She had betrayed our conspiratorial
bond. She said that Phil was sure we would give away the rabbits before we moved, that they
would be slaughtered and eaten. He preferred to kill them himself. My mother agreed and used
Claras argumentI was to learn laterwhen she fought with my father about keeping Phil on.
She wanted to dismiss him immediately. My father won, and Phil moved his office to cottage five.
Well, not quite, since my mother refused to let him bring his lockers and his smelly old clothes.
He did manage to bring a robins egg blue clothes bag, which he hung from one of the pipes in
the cellar in front of the little table on which he had stacked his comic books.
It was never the same for Phil. He stopped sharing his coffee with Gargy and didnt much like
talking to me. As he had only one chair, he no longer read the comics to me. He kept telling me
how cottage five was dangerous. Five was his unlucky number; seven had been his lucky one. He
had seen snakes in the garden, and they were going to get us. They didnt want us there. I told
my parents, but they said not to pay any attention to Phil. He was having one of his episodes. He
would have to spend a few weeks in the ward, and then everything would be okay. I knew that
everything would never be okay, but I didnt say so.
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I am not sure if it was the next morning or a few days later that Phil didnt show up. I thought at
first that he wasnt allowed to leave the ward, but there was too much whispering going on for me
to believe that for long. Something more serious had happened, something children shouldnt
hear. Maybe the police had proven that Phil had killed the rabbits. The hospital police had been
called in that day to investigate, but, as far as I could tell, all they did was stuff the rabbits into
burlap bags and haul them away.
Whats happened to Phil? I asked my mother.
Hes not coming back, she said.
Why? Hes done nothing wrong. I miss him. Hes my friend.
Yes, I know, she said with forced sympathy. Wait until your father comes home for lunch.
Well talk about it then.
No, you wont, I cried, and ran to my room.
I was wrong. My parents told me that Phil had died during the night. He had a weak heart, my
father said.
I didnt believe them. I knew he wouldnt come back, but I didnt believe that he had died.
The next day, a new handyman appeared: Mr. Axelson, also a patient. I already knew him because
he had built the bookcases in our old house. He was told to clean out Phils things. I was ordered
not to go near the cellar, but I sneaked through the garden entrance and saw a bottle of
strawberry jam fall through the rotted bottom of Phils clothes bag when Mr. Axelson took it
down. The jam splashed all over. It was moldy and filled with maggots. I vomited. When I was
older Clara told me that Phil had hanged himself. I had no reason not to believe her, but I
preferred to think he died from a weak heart. What other reason would my father have had to tell
me, a five-year-old, that Phil was very young to have died of a weak heart?
It left me with a longing, yes, if I am honest with myself,

to have touched death, the corpse, and the fear, and the
desire to overcome that fear which came with the longing.
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Im not at all sure how I understood the slaughter of the rabbits at the time. Ive never forgotten
it, but I cant say that it has haunted me. I cant say that it traumatized me. It left me with a
resonant but unreachable spacethe space between my fingers that might have felt the rabbits
warmth and the rabbits themselves. It left me with a longing, yes, if I am honest with myself, to
have touched death, the corpse, and the fear, and the desire to overcome that fear which came
with the longing. It also left me with the thought that had I been able to touch the rabbits, they
would have come to life.
I keep returning to a painting of a French king, touching a man who is covered with scrofula. My
mother explained that for centuries it was believed that a royal touch could cure skin disease. I
admired the king. How could he bear to touch such a disgusting lesion? Wasnt he afraid of
contagion? But he did do it. I am quite sure that I did not think of the dead rabbits at the time,
but I wonder if they didnt fuel my fascination. For years I wanted to become a doctor, but after a
long and painful struggle I decided against it.
When I told my wife, Jane, about the rabbit slaughter years later, she reminded me of Julian
Nibble. Marta had given Julian, a fluffy white rabbit, to our daughter, Wicky (now Aleksandra).
Marta was an old peasant who lived with her brother in a single room on the ground floor of a
tower in Bonnieux, in the Vaucluse, where we were spending the summer. Marta owned a
beautiful masa farmsteadabove the village, which even in those days was worth a fortune, but
she refused to sell it despite the many extravagant offers she received. She was childless. Rumor
had it that she had an incestuous relationship with her brother. It is true that they shared the
same bed. Some of the villagers called her a witch. She would wash the sheets and pillowcases
only when the moon was full, because they would be whiter if they dried in the moonlight. Each
day we would take Wicky to see Julian, and on her first birthday, Marta gave her a present. It was
Julian Nibble, skinned and stuffed with rosemary.
There is a fine line between slaughter and sacrifice. Did Phil sacrifice the rabbits? Was it a private
ritual? Can a sacrifice, at least the sacrifice of an animal, be a private affair? I doubt it. Sacrifices
require the presence of a group. Poor, gentle Phil, all alone, unable, I imagine, to give to the
rabbit slaughter that sacral quality that would turn the rabbits into sacrificial victims. Or perhaps
he did, imagining, hallucinating, a public. After all, he was a diagnosed schizophrenic. He was not
a Marta, who could never have imagined our upset when she arrived with Julian in a basket. She
said that way Wicky would have her friend with her forever. Fortunately, Wicky was too young to
know what had happened to her friend. Jane and I did eat Julian. We felt obliged to, for such is
the power of the gift, of the gift giver, but it had lost what taste it had. I couldnt even smell the
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rosemary.
I have seen animals slaughtered, and even more sacrificed. I remember the excitement that
surrounded the slaughter of a sheep when I lived on the Navajo reservation. That excitement was
coupled with hunger, but, while purely secular, it was somehow celebratory, too. There had been
nothing celebratory about my fathers slaughtering the chickens. Nor, I imagine, in Martas
slaughtering Julian Nibble. She was far too practical. She may have lived in a world of
superstitions, but her act did not rehearse the kind of sacred drama that students of religion and
some anthropologists once claimed. Some still do.
Sacrifices are a different matter altogether. I witnessed, and in fact participated in, many of them
in Morocco, where I was doing fieldwork with teams of exorcists in the late sixties. I went with
Youssef Hazmaoui, my field assistant, to buy a sheep for Id al-Kabir, the Great Feast, in which
Muslims commemorate Ibrahims sacrifice of Ismael (Abrahams of Isaac). The market was filled
with excitement. Shepherds had brought thousands of sheep there. There was much haggling.
Everyone was interested in how much everyone else was paying for a lamb, a sheep, or a goat. It
was said that the king would sacrifice a camel. When we brought the sheep back to Youssefs
house, his neighbors came out to appraise its sizeits cost. I had the feeling that they were
calculating the salary I was paying him.
On the Id, as we were going to Youssefs for his family feast, Jane and I were taken aback by the
blood that was literally flowing in the streets. (Muslims, like Jews, do not eat blood.) We had
assumed that when travelers described the streets flowing with blood, they had been speaking
metaphorically. Knowing how poor most of Youssefs neighbors were, we felt we were witnessing
a gigantic potlatch that extended across the Muslim world and were immediately embarrassed by
the thought, since, succumbing to market calculus, we had ignored the sacred quality of the feast.
The Id is a joyous event, unlike the sacrifices that were performed at the Hamadsha exorcisms I
attended. (The Hamadsha was the name of the religious confraternity to which the exorcists
belonged.) There was no joy there, even when the possessing spirits, the jnun, had released those
whom they had possessed. The sacrifices were weighted by obligation. There was always that
sense of imminent danger that accompanies contact with the spirits. Strictly speaking, the
ceremonies were not exorcisms but, technically, adorcisms; for rather than ridding the possessed
of the malign spirits that had entered them, their goal was to convert the jnun into benign,
protective spirits. The French classicist Henri Jeanmaire has suggested that exorcisms which aim
at the permanent expulsion of the demon occur only when the spirits are considered evil (as in
Christianity); when they are considered amoral, then exorcistic rituals seek their transformation,
much as the Furies were transformed into the Eumenides in Aeschyluss tragedy. However
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transformed, the jnun were quick to anger and would punish those they protected if the person
offended them. They acted as a sort of extrapolated conscience.
Women did not mutilate themselves, but they, too,

danced wildly in trance, bent over, their hands, their
loosened hair nearly touching the floor as they swayed
side by side
The ceremonies were long, lasting well into the night. They were bloody affairs, since some of the
men possessed were forced by their possessing spirits, mostly female spirits, to slash their heads
with knives (in the past with halberds), to release the heat, the intolerable pressure they felt as
their bloodthe spiritmounted to their heads. Women did not mutilate themselves, but they,
too, danced wildly in trance, bent over, their hands, their loosened hair nearly touching the floor
as they swayed side by siderepeating the same movement, though far more rapidly, with which
they washed their floors each morninguntil finally they lost control and fell to the floor. I could
not help but think that this ecstatic, at times epileptoid collapse was their only respite from the
burdens of the cloistered world in which they were imprisoned, if not by their husbands than by
the conventions that, unacknowledged by most men, entrapped them as well. The ceremonies
were exhausting to watch. Not even the feast that ended thema meal at which the meat of the
goat or sheep that had been sacrificed earlier that day was servedrevived me. Though I awoke
drained, the Hamadsha who had fallen into trance felt rejuvenated the next day.
As the sacrifices I observed were always performed in the center of a circle of onlookers, I was
never very close to them; that is, until I attended a Hamadsha performance at the annual music
festival in Essaouira in 2002. Essaouiraa fortress town known as Mogador to the Portuguese,
who had built it in the sixteenth centuryis one of the most beautiful cities in Morocco. Each
year it hosts a music festival at which there is both traditional music played mainly by the Gnawa,
a secularized group of exorcists who perform all over the world, and jazz from the United States,
Europe, Africa, and Cuba. Since the Hamadsha participate in the opening procession but dont
perform (for fear, I suspect, that they might fall into trance, mutilate themselves, and thereby
tarnish Moroccos image as a modern nation), I was asked to speak about them to a group of
invited scholarsthe ct intellectuel of the festivalwho were to attend a Hamadsha ceremony
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staged especially for them. Reluctantly I went to the ceremony. I had spent the afternoon talking
to a young Hamdushi (a member of the brotherhood) who was disgusted by the secularization and
commercialization of the rites. They will anger the jnun, he told me with rage, fear, and worry in
his eyes.
I found myself sitting next to the sheep that was to be sacrificed. Trembling with fear, its eyes
bulging, it pressed itself against me. I had never felt such fear. It took possession of me. I could
not distinguish its fear from the fear I was now experiencing. What was even more extraordinary
was that when the sacrificer approached the sheep, he, too, began to tremble. It was as though
the three of us were caught within the fear. I felt no relief when the sheeps throat was cut, its
blood pouring into a pail as it twitched into death. Judging from his expression, I do not think the
sacrificer, who had no doubt performed many such sacrifices, felt any relief either. I wondered
whether his reaction and, by contagion, mine arose from the primordial danger of having
performed a sacrifice for profane rather than sacred reasons. It was a demonstration rather than
an offering. Those gathered were an audience rather than participants in an offering and
recipients of the blessingthe barakathat the ceremony would normally have conveyed. The
Hamadsha who were present were either apprehensive, as was the sacrificer, or disengaged. The
few women who danced and fell into trance did so in a desultory manner. As far as I could tell,
none were possessed. None of the men danced. Under such circumstances, the death of the sheep
was meaningless: a slaughter rather than a sacrifice.
The line between the sacred and the profane is never as clear as we assume it to be. The
performance of a ritual in a space that is not demarcated as sacred does not necessarily render the
space in which it occurs sacred. Rituals can fail not only in terms of their efficacya rain dance
that does not bring rainbut also in consecrating themselves, as I believe the Hamadsha
ceremony I described did. They lose what self-transformative power they have. But what occurs in
hallowed precincts is not necessarily sacred. Cathedrals have often been meeting places for purely
secular activitieschildren playing, dogs running about, women gossiping, and men playing cards
as can be seen in some of the Dutch genre paintings of the 1600sor meeting places for spies
and lovers in countless movies. Still, a sacred precinct can affect the secular. I find it slightly
disturbing when the audience applauds after a concert in a church, especially one in which
religious music is performed. As I have had no religious training, I might be attributing greater
sanctity to a church than does the believer, who by definition responds at least as much to the
sacrament as to its location, but the two are hard to distinguish ceremonially. Elation knows no
boundaries. Or does it?
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Excerpted from Recapitulations (http://www.powells.com/partner/41288/biblio/9781590515938?p_ti) by

Vincent Crapanzano, to be published by Other Press on March 17, 2015. Copyright 2015 by
Vincent Crapanzano. Reprinted by permission of Other Press.
Vincent Crapanzano is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Anthropology at
the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of six booksThe Fifth World of Forster Bennett:
Portrait of a Navajo (http://www.powells.com/partner/41288/biblio/9780803264311?p_ti) , Hamadsha: A
Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry, Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan
(http://www.powells.com/partner/41288/biblio/9780226118710?p_ti) , Waiting: The Whites of South Africa,
Hermes Dilemma and Hamlets Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation

(http://www.powells.com/partner/41288/biblio/9780674389816?p_ti) , and Serving the Word: Literalism in
America from the Pulpit to the Bench (http://www.powells.com/partner/41288/biblio/9781565846739?p_ti)

and has published articles in major periodicals and academic journals such as American
Anthropologist, Les Temps Modernes, The New Yorker, New York Times, and Times Literary
Supplement. He lives in New York City.
(#top)
To contact Guernica or Vincent Crapanzano, please write here. (mailto:editors@guernicamag.com)
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2/18/2015

The Rabbit Slaughter

Lydia Janssen (http://www.susaneleyfineart.com/index.php/Detail/artists/Janssen) , Rabbit Run, 2009. Oil on canvas,

It left me with a longing, yes, if I am honest with myself,

Women did not mutilate themselves, but they, too,

Excerpted from Recapitulations (http://www.powells.com/partner/41288/biblio/9781590515938?p_ti) by

Hermes Dilemma and Hamlets Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation

America from the Pulpit to the Bench (http://www.powells.com/partner/41288/biblio/9781565846739?p_ti)

To contact Guernica or Vincent Crapanzano, please write here. (mailto:editors@guernicamag.com)

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