Chapter 3 TOWARDS A THEORY OF EVERYTHING

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Chapter 3
TOWARDS A THEORY OF
EVERYTHING
Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when popular Darwinism
and evolutionism were still much in vogue, armchair anthropologists
invented a rich variety of theories of origin, the assumption being that
one theory would be needed to explain the emergence of religion,
another the origins of law, another the origins of language and so forth.
It was not until the 1930s that the rise of functionalism put an end
to all this. Fieldworkers inspired by Bronislaw Malinowski insisted that
in any given community, the system of cosmological beliefs, mode of
subsistence, linguistic patterns and so forth all intertwine to form a
functional whole, making it impossible to imagine how one component
could exist for a moment without all the others (Knight 1995: 50–
70). The implication was clear: to explain the origins of, say, language,
an adequate theory would have to account simultaneously for all the
other things which presuppose language and underpin its use.
The point is as valid today as it ever was. Taken in isolation, there
can be no such thing as a theory of the origins of language. There can
be no such thing as a theory of the origins of morality, law, totemism,
exogamy, kinship or indeed anything else. To explain any one feature,
we need to explain the whole – a challenging prospect (Dor, Knight
and Lewis 2014: 1–12). For most of the past century, social
anthropologists have responded by avoiding biological and
evolutionary questions altogether, resulting in a situation in which
biological and social anthropologists rarely speak to each other.

Towards a Theory of Everything 85
When physicists today talk of a ‘theory of everything’ (ToE), they
are wondering whether general relativity (GM) theory and quantum
mechanics (QM) might one day be reconciled within a deeper body of
theory underlying both (Ellis 1986; Oerter 2006; Weinberg 1993;
Hawking and Mlodinow 2010). For anthropologists, the closest
parallel might be the hope for an elegant theoretical means of bridging
the gulf between the Darwinian paradigm currently prevailing in
biological anthropology – sometimes known as ‘selfish gene’ theory –
and the radically different, more holistic approaches adopted by social
and cultural anthropologists.
One brilliant armchair anthropologist got tantalizingly close to a
theory of everything in the 1890s. Emile Durkheim argued that a
certain kind of action – collective ritual action – could establish
simultaneously totemism, law, exogamy and kinship in addition to
distinctively human language and thought. Everything began,
according to Durkheim, when a flow of blood periodically ruptured
relations between the sexes. ‘All blood is terrible’, he observed
(Durkheim 1963 [1897]: 83), ‘and all sorts of taboos are instituted to
prevent contact with it’. During menstruation, females would exercise
a ‘type of repulsing action which keeps the other sex far from them’ (p.
75). This was the origin of the incest taboo. As women bled, it was as
if they were wounded game, and since men were related to their own
mother through blood, this triggered the idea that the blood of kinship
united them equally to the animals they hunted. Thus a single
bloodstream ran through the veins of women and animals alike,
suggesting the blood’s ultimate source in an ancestor who combined
human and animal features – the ‘totem’. Once menstrual blood had
been linked in this way with the blood of the hunt, it became logically
possible for a hunter to respect certain animals as if they were his kin,
this being the essence of totemism. Within the group’s shared blood
resided its ‘god’ or ‘totem’, ‘from which it follows that the blood is a
divine thing. When it runs out, the god is spilling over’ (Durkheim
1963 [1897]: 89).
Durkheim’s case was that distinctively human conceptual thought
can be explained on the basis of this one development. Once humans
and kangaroos had been constructed as sharing the same clan blood,
it became logical for a man of that particular clan to identify himself
as a ‘kangaroo’. To think in this way, continued Durkheim, might
seem paradoxical, violating what he termed ‘the principle of
contradiction’. Humans and kangaroos are different species: you can
be one or the other but not both. And yet, continued Durkheim, the
distinguishing feature of human symbolic thought is precisely this:

86 Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis
Is not the statement that a man is a kangaroo … equal to identifying the
two with each other? But our manner of thought is not different when
we say of heat that it is a movement, or of light that it is a vibration of
the ether, etc. Every time that we unite heterogeneous terms by an
internal bond, we forcibly identify contraries.
Durkheim (1947 [1915]: 238) is here pointing out that human
conceptual thought is, above all, metaphorical – an idea which in recent
years has become standard (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Ortony 1993;
Goatly 2007). Statements that are true by definition are circular and
obvious; to think creatively is to discern truth on a deeper level by means
of metaphors – expressions which, interpreted literally, are patent
falsehoods (Davidson 1979). The ability to seek out and discer n meaning
in such falsehoods is the unique distinguishing feature of human
conceptual thought. Whereas other species rely heavily on categorical
perception – allocating objects and events to either/or categories
(Harnad 1987) – humans think conceptually on an additional level by
combining opposites, dissolving familiar categories and in the process
imaginatively creating new ones.
Just as the Victorians hoped to invent one theory to explain the
origins of language, another for religion and so forth, so – until very
recently – the evolutionary emergence of language was subdivided
into the quite separate challenges of explaining symbols and
explaining grammar. The linguist Derek Bickerton, for example,
divides language evolution into two steps, the first establishing a
‘protolanguage’ of grammatically unconnected words while the
second conjures grammar into being (Bickerton 2003). In the same
vein, evolutionary psychologist Michael Tomasello (2003: 109)
suggests that ‘[l]anguage is a complex outcome of human cognitive
and social processes taking place in evolutionary, historical and
ontogenetic time. And different aspects of language – for example,
symbols and grammar – may have involved different processes and
different evolutionary times’.
In contrast to this approach, we endorse Smith and Hoefler (this
volume) in claiming that metaphor offers a single solution to the two
evolutionary sub-problems. The cognitive mechanisms underlying
metaphor, according to these scholars, underpin not only symbols
and grammar but all distinctively human communication, both
linguistic and non-linguistic, from its prehistorical beginnings to the
present. Metaphor is the underlying principle of all that is distinctive
about human language and thought (Lakoff and Johnson 1980;
Smith and Hoefler 2014). Even scholars such as Dan Sperber and
Deidre Wilson – who insist that ‘“metaphor” is not a theoretically

Towards a Theory of Everything 87
important notion in the study of verbal communication’ – do so
because they consider the concept too broad, all verbal utterances
requiring more than literal decoding: ‘We claim that metaphors are
not exceptional, and that the linguistic content of all utterances, even
those that are literally understood, vastly underdetermines their
interpretation’ (Sperber and Wilson 2008: 8). Far from being
exceptional, saying one thing while meaning another is the norm.
A metaphor is, taken literally, a ‘false statement’ (Davidson 1979).
Faced with this, the hearer must try to work out the speaker’s
communicative intention, deciding between possibilities on the basis
of assumed relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986). The simple
metaphor ‘John’s a real pig’, for instance, might be interpreted in
various ways depending on the context: it might mean that John is
very messy, that he is very fat, that he is gluttonous or, more generally,
that he is badly behaved. The metaphor’s less relevant meaning
components – for example having a curly tail – must be ignored for
communicative success to be achieved (Smith and Hoefler 2014).
Durkheim understood this when faced with the Aboriginal
Australian assertion that a man might really be a kangaroo. Instead
of dismissing the idea as irrational, he insisted that it reveals to us the
workings of man’s scientific mind. Durkheim took his illustrations
mainly from Australia, where a group of clan members during an
initiation ceremony might enact, say, the kangaroo dance, jumping or
leaping like kangaroos. With extraordinary insight, he realized that
communal activities of this metaphorical kind lie at the basis of all
symbolic thinking, including modern science.
In Durkheim’s evolutionary narrative, totemism and exogamy
emerge together as the earliest form of ritual and social organization.
Communal participation in dancing, singing and other ritual
performance forges bonds of solidarity while, at the same time, body
and mind are seized by a metaphorical representation of their
existence as a collective. That metaphor – the ‘totem’ – is the creature
whose movements and appearance are acted out in the dance.
Published in 1897, the earliest version of Durkheim’s theoretical
model (Durkheim 1963 [1897]) was strongly gendered, with men
and women facing each other in opposite camps. Women repulse the
other sex with their symbolically potent blood, each dancer’s
menstrual blood being equated with that of a kangaroo or other game
animal. As a result, men jointly perceive their mothers and sisters as
active participants in the sacredness of the kangaroo or other emblem
of the clan. As sacred beings, these women establish themselves as
sexually prohibited, just as meat of the totemic species becomes

88 Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis
prohibited flesh. In this way, a powerful communal metaphor enforces
a unitary principle of exogamy which applies alike to human and
nonhuman kin.
There can be no doubt that Durkheim glimpsed here a theory of
everything – a way of explaining the emergence of human society,
morality, religion and language in one theoretical move. His
ethnographic sources were conscientiously examined and accurately
cited, subsequent studies amply confirming his initial insight.
Durkheim rightly understood that Aboriginal Australian ‘totemic’
symbolic equations flow naturally and logically from an initial
situation in which women’s blood is equated with that of the animals
men love to hunt.
Twentieth-century ethnographers have confirmed that this linkage
is a constant theme in songs, myths and rock art from across the
continent (Berndt 1976; Testart 1978, 1986). An example is David
McKnight’s (1975: 85) discussion of how meat becomes ngaintja –
‘sacred’ or ‘taboo’ – among the Wik-Mungkan Aborigines of Cape
York Peninsula:
Any act suggestive of menstrual bleeding makes things ngaintja. Thus if
blood from an animal falls on a woman’s lap, her father and many other
male relatives may not eat it. If a young man carries meat on his back
or shoulders … so that the blood runs down between his buttocks this,
to the Wik-Mungkan, is too uncomfortably like menstrual blood to be
ignored.
It is not surprising, then, to learn (p. 86) that when men cut up the
flesh of a recently killed game animal,
they make certain that women, especially their daughters, stand well
away. Men will not even take fish from a daughter if she has caught it
with a fishing line and pulled the line so that it falls on her lap. If a
daughter should accidentally sit on her father’s possessions then they
are ngaintja to him… I might add that blood from wounds is also
considered to be ngaintja, though not to the same degree as menstrual
blood.
Menstruation is sacred – even taboo – but as a mark of fertility it is
especially tempting and difficult to resist. Men fantasize about such
women, as these lines from a Western Arnhem Land erotic song-cycle
(Berndt 1976: 61) clarify:
Like blood from a speared kangaroo; sacred blood flows from the
uterus…
They are always there, at the wide expanse of water, the sea-eagle
nests…

Towards a Theory of Everything 89
They are sacred, those young girls of the western tribes, with their
menstrual flow…
They are always there, sitting within their huts like sea-eagle nests,
with blood flowing…
Flowing down from the sacred uterus of the young girl…
Sacred blood flowing in all directions…
Like blood from a speared kangaroo, from the sacred uterus…
Far away in Central Australia, we find similar themes. Among the
most important and powerful figures in Aranda mythology are the
alknarintja women. They are characteristically depicted as
menstruating together. In one song (Róheim 1974: 138–139), the
awesomely powerful women cut their breasts:
On their breasts they make scars.
They slap their thighs…
They are menstruating.
Their flanks are wet with blood.
They talk to each other.
An alknarintja may be recognized in a myth by the fact that she is
constantly decorating herself with red ochre, is associated with water
and is ‘frequently represented as menstruating copiously’ (p. 150).
Alknarintja women possess bullroarers and other symbols of power,
and have solidarity – evoked in one song through the image of a clump
of bushes ‘so thick and so pressed against each other that they cannot
move separately’ (p. 144). The alknarintja are also known as ‘women
who refuse men’. The name ‘alknarintja’ means, in fact, ‘eyes-turn-
away’. From another song (p. 141–142) come these lines:
They say, ‘I won’t go with you’.
‘I will remain on alknarintja.’
They whirl their bullroarers.
They stay where they are.
They sit very still.
The man wants them to say, ‘I will go with you’.
But they remain where they are.
The strength of Durkheim’s origins theory is its parsimony and
simplicity: instead of multiple different theories to explain how symbolic
culture emerged, we are offered just one. Yet it could have been simpler
still. Despite the elegance of his theory, Durkheim offers no simple,
logical explanation for its key feature – the identification of women’s
blood with the blood of the hunt. Durkheim marshals ethnographic
details confirming that across Australia, the blood does have this
symbolic significance, but he does not explain how or why hunter-
gatherers across Australia should ever have arrived at that idea.

90 Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis
Durkheim’s theories were unfortunately never followed up or
appreciated as key to an understanding of how symbolic culture
evolved. In recent years, however, hunter-gatherer ethnographers
have been able to confirm that his insights about blood were essentially
correct. On one level, human or animal blood is just a biological
substance. But for traditional hunter-gatherers across the world it is
much more than that – it is the primary material from which their
most sacred ritual metaphors derive. Anyone familiar with Judaic,
Muslim or Christian traditions – as Durkheim certainly was – will
realize that things have not changed.
Examples of blood-symbolism abound in virtually all cultures
(Buckley and Gottlieb 1988), being especially complex and prominent
among hunter-gatherers (e.g. Berndt 1976; Durkheim 1947 [1915];
Knight 1988; Hugh-Jones 1979; Testart 1985, 1986). But sometimes
a detailed focus on a particular society can shed light on the wider
picture. With this in mind, we turn now to work conducted recently
among the BaYaka Pygmy inhabitants of the forests of the Congo
Basin. The value of this is that it shows how women actively construct
the metaphor of their blood as that of the hunt, thereby turning it into
something sacred.
Among these forest people, older women assume primary
responsibility for teaching younger ones the importance of dancing
and singing, valuing such activity as a primary means of influencing
the behaviour of males. The fact that women and men form
counterposed communities assertively responding to and thereby
shaping one another’s sexual strategies sheds a very different light on
Durkheim’s original argument, from which any hint of conflict or
struggle is strangely absent.
For Durkheim, women’s blood of its own accord somehow ‘repulses’
the opposite sex. What’s missing in Durkheim’s account is an
understanding of women’s active role in periodically defying male
sexual desire. Whereas Durkheim presents menstrual blood as
possessing a force which independently repulses males, his theory
makes more sense when it is realized that women – like the alknarintja
sacred beings of Aranda myth – actively refuse men at the moment
when they are most desired. Only then does it become clear why
metaphorical shape-changing – collectively assuming animal form –
is a logical strategy of gender defiance. And only then, finally, does it
become clear why and how women establish their own blood as
mystically connected with that of the animals men hunt.
To grasp how women achieve this in practice, we may turn to a
special word in the lexicon of the BaYaka forest people which, for

Towards a Theory of Everything 91
them, has a host of meanings. Ekila can refer to menstruation, blood,
taboo, a hunter’s meat, good hunting luck, the power of animals to
harm humans, and particular dangers to human reproduction,
production, health and sanity. As an elderly male informant explained:
A woman’s ekila is with the moon. When a woman is ekila [menstruating]
her husband takes her smell. So he doesn’t go hunting or walking in the
forest with friends. Animals flee when they smell a woman’s mobeku
(ritual danger). The animals smell her on him. If strong animals, like
gorillas, elephants, buffalo, or leopards, smell it they will come, even
from far away, charging towards him in a rage, passing other people by
just to get him. (Lewis 2008: 298)
Another informant explains:
Ekila is the same as mobeku. That’s the name of the medicine God
(Komba) sent women when women put in the moon [menstruate]. The
business of ekila was first with them. It is all about children. You can see
women’s tummies swell up at this time. It’s the wind. They have to expel
their wind as ekila [blood]; this cleans out their wombs… Women’s
biggest husband is the moon.
If I’m a hunter, I don’t sleep around with different women. If I slept
with her, then her, and then her, all the animals would know. They
would smell my smell and know ‘that hunter has ruined his own ekila
[ruined his hunting]’. Some will come with great anger. Others, you
shoot them, but they won’t die. You are very surprised. When you shoot
at an antelope from close range and it doesn’t die, we call this ekila….
(Lewis 2008: 299)
Or again:
If you are mobeku, animals attack you. In big forest full of large game,
having sex is mobeku – a huge ekila. This is because we are in conflict
(bita) with the animals. If they smell the odour of women, some are
frightened and flee you. Others come from far away and follow you,
only you. That’s why women are frightened in the forest. The animals
smell them. (Lewis 2008: 302)
While it is male informants who are speaking here, to understand the
logic we must turn to the female community to find out in greater
detail what Ekila really means.
For women and men alike, collective ritual action is fundamental to
the day-to-day maintenance of ekila. Ngoku is women’s all-female
ritual association, the counterpart of the men’s Ejengi. After her
initiation into the women’s secret society, it is only with the onset of
her first menstrual flow that a girl is suddenly referred to as ekila. This
arouses in her a curiosity to delve deeper into the secrets of her sex,
learning about procreation and related aspects of cosmology (Lewis

92 Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis
2008). Ngoku specifically instructs her in how to use sexual attraction
to control men. Women’s communal singing and dancing establishes
their solidarity so they can band together to resist male violence,
periodically withdrawing sex to exert leverage in achieving key goals.
Central among these is the proper sharing of meat and respect for
egalitarian political norms (Lewis 2008; Finnegan 2009).
While hunters penetrate with their spears and cause dangerous
blood to flow, women’s priority is to control not only this bloodshed
but also their own, rendering it safe and life-bringing to the human
group through a range of strategies which include the controlled use
of fire – a technology which, as Lévi-Strauss (1970) famously clarified,
transforms dangerously raw, bloody meat into desirable flesh (whether
human or animal), now safely available or ‘cooked’. The gendered
rituals of the two sexes balance out and interact, in this way jointly
establishing the core metaphorical equivalences of ekila – between
men killing animals and women birthing children, between the
spearing of animals and the penetration of women’s bodies in
intercourse, between menstrual blood and the blood of the hunt
(Lewis 2008; Finnegan 2013).
Among biologists and evolutionary ecologists, it is well understood
that for primates in general, it is the females whose foraging and
reproductive strategies ultimately determine the direction of
evolutionary change (Dunbar 1988; Hrdy 1981; Lindenfors 2005;
Lindenfors, Fröberg and Nunn 2004; Lind and Lindenfors 2010;
Wrangham 1979, 1980). Regardless of whether or how much they
dominate, the fact that ‘primate males go where the females are’
(Altmann 1990) means that female decision-making is always
paramount. This basic understanding of how things work tends to get
set aside by modern advocates of ‘man the hunter’ (e.g. Kaplan et al.
2000, 2001), but we see no justification for this. Even if dominance in
our ancestors were so extreme that male control over basic resources
characterized all human evolution, as some (e.g. Foley and Gamble
2009) assert, this would not make male decision-making the driver of
human evolutionary change. We need to set out from theoretical
fundamentals. Since we were once primates, it follows that if males in
our case alone came to drive evolution, we would still need to ask at
which particular stage – and through which initially female strategies
– males stopped going where the females were.
In our view, the best way to avoid these difficulties is to assume
theoretical continuity, applying basic primatological understandings
equally to evolving humans. The biological background to the
scenario we favour – not discussed here – is one in which evolving

Towards a Theory of Everything 93
hominin females had long been mobilizing assistance and support to
meet their increasingly costly childcare burdens (Hrdy 2009). They
achieved this through a whole range of strategies which included the
phasing out of external signs of ovulation, residing where possible
with the mother, extending and maintaining female coalitions, raising
male levels of commitment, and co-operatively resisting the strategies
of dominant male philanderers. Finally, it meant finding new ways of
dealing with menstruation which, with ovulation effectively
concealed, had become salient as a cue to imminent fertility. The
eventual solution involved the use of cosmetic substitutes to prevent
real menstrual blood from triggering dangerous levels of inter- and
intra-sexual competition and conflict (Power 2009, 2010, 2014;
Power and Aiello 1997). Against this background, we attribute the
metaphors and equivalences of ekila and its cross-cultural variants in
the first instance to women’s collective action in their own reproductive
interests (see Finnegan, this volume).
All this allows us to complete Durkheim’s ‘theory of everything’ in
a much more powerful and parsimonious way. Metamorphosing into
animal form, bleeding in sympathy with wounded game – such
metaphorical equivalences are best seen as signals of defiance aimed
at male sexual desire. If women are to use sex to control male
behaviour, they must – at the very least – be able to say ‘No’. And what
better way to do this than to form into a defiant mass, resorting to
explicit body language, dancing the way animals dance, bleeding the
way animals bleed? Women’s strategy is to set out from the
fundamental male need for a sexual partner who is female, human
and available and, with that in mind, systematically enact an identity
that is the reverse:
human → animal
female → male
available → unavailable
By ritually denying men in this way, women demonstrate that they
cannot be taken for granted. While welcoming men’s capacities for
shedding blood, they are able to insist that there are limits. Killing
game animals with piercing weapons is not to be confused with using
those same weapons against women, or against rival males.
Establishing such boundaries is in everyone’s long-term interest
because otherwise – if males could resort to weapons at will – the
consequences might be calamitous. Without powerful ritual
inhibitions – without concepts on the model of ekila – community
survival would be placed at risk.

94 Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis
We can now state the stunningly simple mechanism through
which this entire complex is generated. When a menstruating dancer
performs the steps and characteristic antics of a game animal, the
very fact that she is bleeding now constructs that animal as a wounded
one. Metaphorically, her blood is now that animal’s blood.
Paradoxically, it is this very identification of human with animal blood
which keeps the two categories apart. Never laugh at the sufferings of
an animal you have killed, insist the BaYaka – it might turn out to be
your own unborn child. The Hadza have essentially the same idea:
The whole process of hunting big game (male productivity) is
symbolically linked with the whole process of female reproduction
(female productivity). Activities in one process are mystically dangerous
for activities in the other. A man whose wife is menstruating cannot
hunt big game because the poison of his arrows is believed to lose its
efficacy. If his wife is pregnant he cannot walk on the tracks of a
wounded game animal because this will cause it to recover from its
wounds. Reciprocally, if a man whose wife is pregnant laughs at or
mocks the dead but not yet dismembered carcass of a game animal, the
unborn baby will be born with defects which resemble the characteristics
of the dead animal. (Woodburn 1982: 188)
Identifying the blood of the hunt with that of menstruation forces
men to keep their wits about them, using violence with care, aware at
all times that recklessly spilled blood might turn out to be their own.
The blood of menstruation, then, is that of the hunt. Whereas
Durkheim had to add this all-important feature to his model, in our
version it is intrinsic from the outset. Women who mimic an animal at
the time of menstruation are by that fact alone constructing
Durkheim’s Ur-metaphor, the primordial metaphor from which
society emerges as a moral entity. Once this conceptual equivalence
has been established, it triggers a cascade of subsidiary metaphorical
equivalences, as seen above – between men killing animals and women
birthing children, between the spearing of animals and the penetration
of women’s bodies in intercourse, between taboos on menstruation
and hunting taboos. These associations are ubiquitous, and it is not
easy to imagine how else they might be explained.
There is a background to all this in evolutionary biology, beyond
our remit here. Suffice it to say that we routinely expect female
reproductive priorities to conflict in key areas with those of males.
Females cannot afford to co-operate unconditionally with the opposite
sex, any more than males can afford to collude unconditionally with
females (Trivers 1972). So it may seem inexplicable why the males in
our origins narrative should collude with the female tactics described.

Towards a Theory of Everything 95
We cannot assume male moral sensibilities here; in an evolutionary
account, taking primate sociology and psychology as our point of
departure, moral constraints must be explained, not just assumed.
The mere fact that women pretend to be game animals is no reason
why male onlookers should collude with or join in the make-believe –
especially if it means foregoing sex.
It is true that a male could respond to women’s pretence with
violence, but there are good reasons why this might not work.
Although fighting is always an option, it entails risks and costs. A
violent male attacking his female partner and her allies might
unwittingly endanger his own genetic offspring. Apart from that, he
would have no reason to expect his male companions to support him.
After all, if he did succeed in imposing his sexual dominance, they, too,
would have good reason to feel threatened. In deciding whether to co-
operate or fight, we expect the primate male to weigh up the costs and
benefits. Provided the costs of violence are made sufficiently high, it
may make better Darwinian sense (and so begin to feel logical and
emotionally satisfying) for males to nurture their own babies – hence
their own genetic future – by acknowledging female solidarity,
respecting its message, co-operating in the hunt and bringing back
game to camp (Knight 1999). Following this logic, under both pressure
and seduction from females, our male ancestors willingly succumb to
being fully human (cf Finnegan, this volume).
It is clear that wrong species/wrong sex is on one level pure
nonsense. But escaping the confines of literal truth is precisely the
secret of symbolism. Saying one thing in order to mean another is the
essence not only of metaphor but of all symbolic language and life
(Knight 2008; Knight and Lewis 2014). Taken literally, every
metaphor is patently absurd, and claiming to be a game animal is no
exception. The trickster who plays such a prominent role in hunter-
gatherer narratives is endlessly switching gender and species,
transforming himself into his own opposite. This trickster is sex-
resistant, rebellious and ludicrous – yet also a lustful clown, creator of
antelopes and guardian of menstrual taboos. Because trickery is the
secret of symbolic culture, the Kalahari Bushmen seem uncannily
perceptive in considering a trickster figure such as //Gauwa ‘the
central denizen of the First Order of existence’ (Guenther 1999: 96).
Each trick provokes laughter because it is such evident nonsense. But
behind the hilarity is an egalitarian purpose, which becomes especially
apparent when the story is acted out in ritual performance to the
accompaniment of laughter. Yes, it looks like nonsense. But when
women band together and hilariously insist to men that they are game

96 Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis
animals, the implication of this metaphor – ‘No sex’ – comes over loud
and clear.
Our scenario would seem weak if the core metaphor we have
described turned out to be confined to just a small range of hunter-
gatherer cultures. It is possible that on closer examination, it will turn
out to be universal – a core symbolic feature of the hunter-gatherer
lifestyle as such. This can be tested.
So far, we have relied on Durkheim’s survey of nineteenth-century
Australian ethnography augmented with recent work among the
BaYaka. But at the southern end of the African continent, among the
Ju/’hoansi and other Bushmen, we have perhaps the clearest
confirmation of all. Among these groups, the Eland Bull Dance (in
some regions the Gemsbok Dance) was the primary initiation rite,
fundamental to San cultural identity (see also Low, Watts and Power,
this volume).
The dance celebrated a young woman’s first menstruation. As she
began to bleed, her senior female kin would ensure that she entered a
special hut, where she would remain for several days. Inside that hut,
she consorted with – or in some accounts metamorphosed into – the
great Eland Bull, surrounded outside by female dancers thrusting out
their buttocks while holding aloft forked sticks to mimic the horns of
rutting eland cows (Guenther 1999; Lewis-Williams 1981; Lewis-
Williams and Pearce 2004). At this point, as the performance makes
clear, women are consorting not with their usual sexual partner but
with their fantasy lover – the Eland Bull (Power and Watts 1997). It
would be hard to imagine an enactment which more strikingly
confirms the predictions of our model. The women are signalling to
any onlooking male their message of playful yet determined defiance:
wrong species, wrong sex, wrong time. Males must not probe this
signal too closely. /Xam Bushmen warn that staring at a girl during
such proceedings might ‘turn a man into a tree’ (Lewis-Williams and
Pearce 2004: 162).
Yet another example is provided by the Hadza of Tanzania, where
the same logic is found. The girl’s initiation ritual, known as Maitoko,
re-enacts the story of Mambedeko, the ‘Woman With the Zebra’s
penis’ (Power 2015). At the beginning of time, this mythical heroine
would metamorphose into a male zebra, using its penis to have sex
with all the other women – known as the heroine’s ‘wives’. During
Maitoko, women and girls to this day shed blood together in re-
enactment of this story, their legs adorned with zebra stripes. Echoing
the ‘wrong sex’ theme, when a Hadza girl first menstruates, she is
congratulated for having ‘shot her zebra’ (//akakwa dongo – Mouriki,

Towards a Theory of Everything 97
pers. comm. 2015). Stepping into the role of Mambedeko with her
zebra penis, she conveys the message to any onlooking male that she
is not available for sex – she is now the one who penetrates. Once
again, wrong species, wrong sex, wrong time.
As far away as Australia, we find endless variations on these themes.
Testart (1978: 113) perceptively describes the relationship between the
Rainbow Serpent and menstrual blood in Aboriginal mythology as ‘an
association of opposites linked by their very contradiction’. When
women dance while menstruating together, they metamorphose into
an immense rainbow which is also a snake. Recorded in north-east
Arnhem Land, the best-known of all Aboriginal myths – the story of
the two Wawilak Sisters – depicts this immense creature as an all-
swallowing, shimmering skin enveloping menstruating women whose
blood is that of the game animals men hunt. When the snake is aroused
by this blood, speared and bleeding animals placed on a fire defiantly
jump up, come back to life and dive for protection into the pool (Warner
1957: 234–301). The message ‘wrong species, wrong sex, wrong time’
is here conveyed by the terrifying image of an immense creature which
is gender-ambivalent, species-ambivalent, conjured up by women’s
blood – and hostile to both cooking and exogamous sex (Knight 1988).
Here, as across much of the continent, things have got complicated over
time because men have found ways of intentionally subverting women’s
power. Men understand full well that when shedding one another’s
blood during rites of initiation, they are modelling themselves on
menstruating women:
But really we have been stealing what belongs to them (the women), for
it is mostly all woman’s business; and since it concerns them it belongs
to them. Men have nothing to do really, except copulate, it belongs to
the women. All that belonging to those Wauwelak, the baby, the blood,
the yelling, their dancing, all that concerns the women; but every time
we have to trick them. Women can’t see what men are doing, although
it really is their own business, but we can see their side. This is because
all the Dreaming business came out of women – everything… In the
beginning we had nothing, because men had been doing nothing; we
took these things from women (Berndt 1951: 55).
If this indigenous analysis is accepted – and much evidence
supports it – we can treat male ritual power across much of the world
as modeled on a female template, with concepts reminiscent of ekila
playing a central role. This sheds fresh light on Lévi-Strauss’s
extraordinary thesis that the world’s most stubbornly surviving
narratives are ‘One Myth Only’. The stories differ gloriously, but their
grammar remains everywhere intact. This long-term conservatism of

98 Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis
structure is perhaps still more evident in ritual, whose recurrent forms
reflect facts as fundamental as the need to reconcile the priorities of
two polar opposite sexes, only one of which gets pregnant. As Bloch
(1992: 23) explains: ‘It is because the symbolism of ritual is an
attempt to solve problems intrinsic to the human condition and based
on a similar understanding of life that ritual systems are so similar
and produce such similar political results’. Exploring sacrificial
bloodshed as ‘the irreducible core of the ritual process’ across
traditional cultures, Bloch in the same essay goes on to remind us that
the central notion is reversal – as in the two-way metamorphosis
(analysed above) from hunter to hunted and vice versa.
We are brought back again and again to animal metamorphosis as
the world’s first metaphor, endorsing Durkheim’s insightful attempt at
a ‘theory of everything’, first proposed in 1897. We can now see more
clearly than ever how a certain kind of action – collective ritual action
– could establish simultaneously totemism, law, exogamy and kinship
in addition to distinctively human language and thought.
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Chris Knight is best known for his 1991 book, Blood Relations:
Menstruation and the Origins of Culture. A co-founder with Jim Hurford
of the Evolution of Language series of international conferences, he
has published many chapters and articles on the origins of language
and helped edit six volumes on such topics. Now a senior research
associate at University College London, he was until his retirement in
2009 Professor of Anthropology at the University of East London. His
most recent book, Chomsky’s Tower: Language and Revolution, analyses
Noam Chomsky’s impact on linguistics and political activism over the
past half century.

102 Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis
Jerome Lewis is Reader in Social Anthropology, UCL. He studies
hunter-gatherers and former hunter-gatherers across Central Africa.
After researching the impact of the genocide on Rwanda’s Twa
Pygmies, he worked with Mbendjele Pygmies in Congo-Brazzaville on
egalitarian politics, child socialization, play, religion and
communication. This has led to publications on egalitarianism,
language, music, taboo, property and inter-ethnic relations.
Examining the impact of global forces on forest people across the
Congo Basin has led to research into human rights abuses,
discrimination, economic and legal marginalization, and to applied
research supporting conservation efforts by forest people. He is co-
director of the Extreme Citizen Science Research Group, and of CAoS,
the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability.