Notes and Queries in Mesocosmography: Eating and Sleeping

Abstract

Notes and Queries on Anthropology, the handbook the British Association for the Advancement of Science first issued in 1874 and recast in 1892, standardized what travellers were to observe by dividing the human being into two objects before observation began: an animal to be measured and a social and intellectual being to be described. Eating and sleeping, the two processes no human can suspend for long, fell into the gap between them. Diet appears among the medical sections of the first part and food among the ethnographic sections of the second; sleep receives no heading at all, surfacing only as a privation to be endured and a posture to be noted. This article rewrites the handbook from a different starting point. Mesocosmography, the descriptive practice of Living Value Theory, takes as its object the coordination of living processes across five mediations, and it orders its queries not by the domains the nineteenth century inherited but by mesocosmic stakes, the processes whose failure a living being can tolerate only for a bounded interval. Eating and sleeping become the privileged entry points to any human mesocosm because they are urgent enough to force coordination and slow enough to permit it, and because their coordination leaves the densest deposits. Multimateriality and multisymbolization, the poietic mediations, appear throughout as auxiliaries to embodiment, being-with, and dwelling rather than as domains in their own right. What follows keeps the form of the original: prefatory instructions, a definition of the object, and numbered queries for use in the field.

I. Prefatory Note

The handbook this article rewrites was compiled to correct a specific failure. Travellers, its first preface complains, recorded only those customs they chanced to observe, and chiefly those their experience of civilized institutions had led them to look for. The remedy was a set of standardized questions, each drawn up by a specialist, which the traveller was to answer as fully as possible, recording not only what existed but, by special inquiry, the non-existence of what the handbook told him to expect. The remedy worked in the sense its editors intended. It moved the selection of what mattered from the individual observer, whose salience was accidental, to the discipline, whose salience was at least stated. What it could not do was remove selection, and it never claimed to. A manual is a list of questions, and every question on the list stands beside the indefinitely many that were not asked.

This manual accepts that condition and asks a further question of itself: on what grounds are its queries selected. The old handbook's ground was disciplinary. Its headings were the subjects the Anthropological Institute's members had made their own, and the queries under each heading were the questions those members wanted answered. The ground proposed here is different in kind. The queries that follow are selected by the stakes of living itself, by the processes no human being can fail to meet for long, and the manual's claim to have followed rather than imposed rests entirely on that difference. A living being has already selected what it cannot do without before any observer arrives. The observer's task is to find out how that selection is met here, in this place, among these people, and not to decide afresh what is worth asking about.

One thing is carried over from the old handbook without alteration, and that is its form. Numbered queries have a virtue that essays lack. They can be used by someone who has not read the theory behind them, which is why the original could be handed to missionaries, colonial officers, and ships' surgeons and yield records the Institute could use. They have a second virtue that matters more here. Queries expose their author's selections in a way an argument conceals. An essay can imply that its topics chose themselves; a list of questions cannot, because the reader can always ask why this question and not another. A manual written against unexamined selection had better be written in the form that makes its own selections hardest to hide.

What is not carried over is the division that organized everything else. The old handbook split its contents into anthropography and ethnography, and with them it split the human being into a natural object and a cultural one. Its own editors saw what this cost. Introducing the first part, John George Garson admits that some of the medical sections might more accurately have been placed in a different order, or even in the second part of the work, but that it had been thought better to keep them together, in his own words, even at the expense of consistency in classification. The admission is exact and should be taken at its word. The classification was inconsistent because the thing being classified did not have the joint the classification cut along.

II. The Object Defined

The old handbook opens with a definition. Anthropology may be defined as the natural history of man, and it is divided into two main divisions, anthropography, which treats of man from a purely animal point of view, from a structural and functional aspect, and ethnography, which deals with him as a social and intellectual being. Everything that follows in the book follows from that sentence. This manual needs a definition of the same kind, stated with the same economy, and it needs the definition to produce one object rather than two.

Mesocosmography may be defined as the description of how a living being keeps itself alive in coordination with what surrounds it. Its object is a mesocosm, the world at the scale at which living beings perceive, act, and are acted upon, which is neither the molecular scale of the cell nor the cosmic scale of the planet and is the only scale at which anything is at stake for anyone. A human mesocosm is a human being's ongoing coordination with bodies, others, surroundings, made things, and symbols, and these five are not five departments of a life but five mediations through which one life is lived at once. Multisensorial embodiment is the living being as sensing, metabolizing, ageing flesh. Being-with is its coordination with other living beings who respond to its responses. Multiversal dwelling is its coordination with surroundings it did not make: terrain, climate, light and dark, the rhythms of the year, the presence and absence of water, the other species that live there. Multimateriality is its coordination with what has been made from the surroundings: tools, vessels, walls, clothing, fire kept in a hearth. Multisymbolization is its coordination through symbols: names, rules, stories, numbers, prayers, records, theories.

The first three mediations are zoetic, meaning that every living being has them. A sea anemone is embodied, is with others, and dwells. The last two are poietic, meaning that they are distinctly, though not exclusively, human achievements and that they exist by being made. This distinction supplies the rule that organizes the whole of what follows, and the rule can be stated in a sentence. No made thing and no symbol is a mesocosmic stake in itself; each matters to a mesocosmography through the zoetic process it serves, extends, delays, or damages. A granary is not a stake; eating is, and the granary is what allows eating to continue through the months when the fields yield nothing. Writing is not a stake either, but where rations are written it is what decides who eats. The poietic mediations are auxiliaries to the zoetic ones, and they appear in this manual only at the points where they touch a stake.

The consequence for the old handbook's headings is immediate. Clothing, Personal Ornaments, Habitations, Weaving, Basketwork, Pottery, Metallurgy, Fire, Writing, Money, and the rest do not disappear from this manual; they lose their standing as headings. Each will be asked about, but under the stake it serves and in the form of the question what it does there. The same holds for Religion, Laws, Government, Property, and Trade, which are auxiliaries of the symbolic kind and which appear where a stake is addressed to a counterpart held to respond, where its meeting is fixed by rule, where it is guaranteed or denied by those who hold power, and where it is bought. A heading in the old book becomes, in this one, a recurring query.

Two further instruments of description belong in the definition because the queries below use them throughout. The first concerns counterparts. In any process, a living being coordinates with what does not respond to it at all, with itself, and with what responds to its responses. Grain, fire, cold, and darkness are nonrecursive counterparts: they can be engaged, and they must be, but they do not answer. One's own hunger and one's own tiredness are selfrecursive: the body's response to its own state. A co-eater, a host, an infant who will not settle, a dog that will bark at what approaches in the night, an animal that must be kept alive today in order to be eaten next year, are interrecursive: they respond to how one responds to them, and the process between the two is jointly made. The second instrument concerns levels. Any stake can be met without anyone remarking on it, and this is the first level, where coordination is sedimented into habit and goes unnoticed until it fails. It can be felt as misfit before it is said: the meal that is late, the child who is still awake, the guest who has not been offered anything, and this is the second level. It can be spoken about, named, argued over, explained, and this is the third. It can be fixed in rules, roles, timetables, prohibitions, and offices, and this is the fourth. And the fixed forms themselves can be compared, codified, theorized, and operated upon as symbols, which is the fifth. The old handbook's queries addressed the third and fourth levels almost without exception, because those are the levels a traveller can be told about. This manual insists on the first and second, which cannot be asked for and must be watched for.

III. What the Old Manual Did to Eating and Sleeping

The evidence for the diagnosis this manual rests on is in the old handbook's table of contents, and it should be set out before the reorganization is proposed, because the reorganization is an answer to it. The edition used here is the third, of 1899, which reproduces the structure of the 1892 second edition with minor revisions and reprints its preface.

Eating appears twice, on either side of the cut. In the first part, among the medical sections that follow the anatomical and physiological observations, section III is headed Native Dietary and Laws of Diet, contributed by John Beddoe and Noel Paton. In the second part, among the ethnographic sections, section XXV is headed Food and section XXVI Cannibalism. The same mouthful is recorded twice, once as nutrition that a medical man is to assess and once as a custom that a traveller is to describe, and no query in either place asks how the two are one event. Elsewhere in the first part, eating appears only as interference. The instructions for taking body temperature specify that the subject should not have partaken of food for about two hours, and that the typical observation is made when the person is fasting and at rest. The physiological human is measured on an empty stomach so that eating will not distort the constant that is being sought.

Sleeping appears nowhere as a heading, in either part. It surfaces in exactly two places. Under the physiological section headed Miscellaneous, the first query runs: how do they bear privations of food, or drink, or sleep. Under Attitudes and Movements, the first query runs: what is the habitual posture in sleep, and the introductory note reports that the Tibetans are said to sleep by preference on an inclined plane with the face downwards. That is the whole of it. Nothing about when people sleep, where, with whom, for how long, guarded by whom, in what darkness, wakened by what, or what is done with what they dream. The ethnographic part, with its seventy-seven headings covering everything from string to statistics, has no room for the activity that occupies a third of every life it was designed to record. Habitations have a heading of their own; sleep, which is what habitations are for at night, has none.

The reason is not carelessness, and the editors were not careless. Eating and sleeping are the two processes that do not sort. Eating is metabolism and commensality and harvest and vessel and blessing at once. Sleeping is physiology and co-sleeping and nightfall and bedding and dream at once. A classification built on the division of the human into an animal and a social being can register such processes only by cutting them, and the cut has a characteristic effect. The half assigned to nature becomes a physiological constant, present in all humans and therefore not worth asking about except where it fails, which is why sleep appears in the old book only as a privation. The half assigned to culture becomes one custom among many, which is why food appears as one heading among seventy-seven, wedged between Ornamentation and Cannibalism. What was most continuous in a life became least visible in its record. Diet was placed with disease, and sleep with the ability to go without it.

IV. Mesocosmic Stakes and Their Order

A mesocosmic stake is a process whose coordination a living being cannot suspend without a bounded interval ending in damage or death. The definition contains its own ordering principle, and the principle is what allows this manual to arrange its queries without reproducing the ladder the old one served. Stakes differ in the interval of failure they tolerate. Breath fails in minutes. Warmth, in cold surroundings, fails in hours. Water fails in days. Sleep fails in days, with damage beginning well before the end. Food fails in weeks. The care an infant needs from others fails in a day; the care an adult needs from others fails much more slowly, and the difference between those two intervals is itself one of the things a mesocosmography records. The order runs from the fastest stake to the slowest, and it runs identically for every human population that has ever existed.

Because the order is the same for everyone, it cannot become a ranking of anyone. The old evolutionism arranged peoples along dimensions, technology, marriage, government, writing, and read position along the dimension as position in a sequence. This manual arranges stakes along the organism, and what differs between peoples is how each stake is met and never whether it is met, since a population that did not meet its stakes would not be there to be observed. No people can be more advanced in breathing or more developed in sleep. The only comparative question the order of stakes permits is the question of organization: by what coordination across the five mediations is this stake met here, and what would alter that coordination. The order of stakes is a fact about living; the meeting of stakes is what there is to describe.

Within that order, eating and sleeping hold a position that makes them the entry points to any human mesocosm, and five reasons can be given. The first concerns tempo. Breath recurs too fast to be organized: it is met before any coordination with others could be arranged, and it leaves almost no deposit, no vessel, no rule, no story, except in the rare surroundings, altitude, smoke, the diving ground, where it comes under pressure. Reproduction recurs too slowly to be daily. Eating and sleeping recur at intervals of hours, which is urgent enough to force coordination and slow enough to permit it. They are the first stakes in the order for which a human world must arrange something, and they are the last for which the arrangement can never lapse. The second reason concerns delegation. No one can eat for another and no one can sleep for another, and yet no one eats what no one has procured, and no one sleeps where no one keeps watch. Both stakes hold embodiment and being-with together at every single occurrence, and the manner in which they are held together, who feeds whom and who stays awake for whom, is the first thing any mesocosmography has to establish. The third reason concerns dwelling. Eating and sleeping are the two stakes through which the unmade world enters a human life daily rather than occasionally: what the land yields and withholds, and the alternation of light and dark. The fourth concerns the auxiliaries. Fire, vessels, storage, cuisine, dietetics, fasts, feasts, and prices gather around eating; bedding, walls, lamps, locks, timetables, curfews, lullabies, and the interpretation of dreams gather around sleeping. No other stakes attract material and symbolic accretion of such density, and the density is itself evidence of how much coordination they require. The fifth reason concerns the cut. Eating and sleeping are what the division into anthropography and ethnography severed most cleanly. Recovering them as single processes is the test of whether the division can be undone in practice rather than only deplored in theory. A mesocosmography that begins with eating and sleeping begins where every human being begins each day.

V. General Instructions to the Observer

The old handbook instructed the traveller to devote himself chiefly to observations on adult males between twenty and fifty, since it is in them that questions of race, type, mixture, and individual variation are best determined, and it added that women and children were also important, the former to show sexual differences and the latter in relation to the development of the body. This manual reverses the instruction. Stakes are most visible at the edges, where they are hardest to meet. The observer should attend first to infants, the ill, the pregnant, the old, the exhausted, and those who are fasting, whether by choice or by want, because in them the coordination that keeps a stake met is under strain and has to be done visibly, by others, and often by rule. The healthy adult male of forty is the person in whom eating and sleeping have most thoroughly sunk to the first level and are therefore least available to observation.

The observer should follow one full cycle of day and night before recording anything about either eating or sleeping, and one full cycle of the seasons wherever the stay allows. A stake is coordinated in time. A record made at noon on a market day will show a meal and miss the night; a record made in the harvest month will show abundance and miss the hunger season, and it is the hunger season and the night that show how the stake is actually secured.

For each stake, the observer should record what is met without anyone remarking on it, what is felt as wrong before it is said, what is spoken about, what is fixed by rule, and what is done with the rules once fixed. The first two of these cannot be obtained by asking; they are obtained by being present when a meal is late, when a child will not sleep, when a guest arrives unexpectedly, when the water runs out, and by watching what people do before anyone has said anything. The old handbook's method was interrogation; this manual's method includes it and does not begin with it.

For each stake, the observer should distinguish the counterparts engaged in meeting it: what does not respond, what responds only within the observer's own body or the body of the person observed, and what responds to one's responses. The distinction matters because the same auxiliary can serve different counterparts. A fire that cooks is engaged with grain that does not answer; a fire that is kept burning through the night is engaged with the people asleep around it, who would wake if it died.

The old handbook asked the traveller to record the non-existence of customs to which attention was drawn. This manual asks for a different absence. The observer should record wherever a stake is met without articulation, wherever eating or sleeping is coordinated with evident care and no one has a word for what is being done. Such absences are not gaps in the record; they are the record of a stake that has been met so reliably that it no longer needs to be said.

Finally, the observer eats and sleeps in the field. The old handbook never mentions this, and its silence on the point is the same silence it kept about sleep in general. This manual makes the observer's own meeting of each stake the first entry under it, because the observer's own misfit, the strange food, the unfamiliar hour, the noise or the cold or the company of the night, is the first second-level event the observer will register, and it is the surest guide to what the people of the place have arranged so thoroughly that they no longer notice it.

VI. Part One: Eating

The queries under each stake are grouped first by mediation, with the two poietic mediations asked about last and as auxiliaries, then by level and counterpart, and finally by consequential difference. The observer is not asked to answer every query. The observer is asked to notice which ones cannot be answered here, and why.

Embodiment. 1. How is hunger recognized, in oneself and in others, and by what signs: restlessness, silence, the cry of an infant, the look of the old? 2. How is satiety recognized, and who decides that enough has been eaten, the eater or someone else? 3. What is done when the body refuses food, in illness, in grief, in pregnancy, in old age, and who decides whether the refusal is to be respected? 4. Which foods are held to sit well and which to sit badly, and is digestion talked about at all, or only when it fails? 5. What are the signs of having eaten badly, and what is done about them? 6. How does the mouth change across a life, from teething to the loss of teeth, and what is eaten accordingly, and who prepares it? 7. Which senses lead in judging food: smell, colour, texture, temperature, the sound of it cooking? 8. How does the timing of eating stand to the timing of sleep, work, rest, and light: does a meal precede sleep, follow it, or mark the middle of the day?

Being-with. 9. Who eats with whom, and who never eats with whom, and is the second fact stated or only observed? 10. Who feeds whom: who feeds infants, the sick, the old, guests, strangers, and the dead? 11. In what order are people served, who eats first, who eats last, and who eats what remains? 12. Who procures food and who prepares it, and what does preparation cost in hours and hands across a day? 13. Is refusing food a possible act, and what does refusal do between the one who offers and the one who declines? 14. Is eating alone ordinary, shameful, pitiable, or unremarkable? 15. Who is fed who cannot reciprocate, and who among those who cannot reciprocate is not fed? 16. Which animals are fed, by whom, and which are eaten, and do the same hands do both? 17. When is food given without immediate return, and when does the gift oblige one?

Dwelling. 18. What do the surroundings yield, in which season, and what do they withhold, and for how long? 19. Where is water, how far away, and who goes for it? 20. What is eaten when the usual yield fails, what is the hunger food, and who remembers how to find and prepare it? 21. How does eating change with weather and season, in the wet months and the dry, in heat and cold? 22. Which rhythms of the unmade world set the meal: tide, monsoon, harvest, the return of fish or game, the length of the day? 23. Is anything that grows here left uneaten, and is the reason given in terms of the land, the body, or something else?

Multimateriality, as auxiliary. 24. By what made means is food procured, and who holds these means, and can they be borrowed? 25. How is food stored, preserved, and kept from animals and damp, and how long can it be kept? 26. What is done with fire, and who keeps it, and what happens when it goes out? 27. What vessels, hearths, and surfaces are used, and are any reserved for particular people, foods, or occasions? 28. Where is food eaten, in what built space, and is that space used for anything else, above all for sleep? 29. What is done with what remains: bones, shells, peelings, the dregs? 30. Is food bought and sold, with what, and can everyone who is hungry buy? 31. Which of these made things could be removed without the stake failing, and which could not, and how long would the failure take?

Multisymbolization, as auxiliary. 32. What are the words for hunger, fullness, thirst, craving, and disgust, and are there gradations within each? 33. How is food classified: raw and cooked, hot and cold, pure and impure, ours and theirs, food and medicine? 34. What is said before, during, and after eating: blessing, thanks, silence, talk, instruction to children? 35. What is prohibited, to whom, at what times, and is the prohibition explained, enforced, or simply followed? 36. Are there fasts, who fasts, for how long, and what ends a fast? 37. Are there feasts, and what is a feast for, and who is fed at it who is not fed otherwise? 38. Is there dietetics here, expert advice on what to eat and when, from whom, and is it followed? 39. Is food counted, weighed, priced, rationed, or recorded, and by whom, and what follows from the record? 40. Are there stories in which eating is the turning point: the first food, the forbidden food, the food shared with an enemy, the food of the dead?

Levels. 41. What in the eating of this place is done by everyone without remark? 42. What is felt as wrong before it is said: the meal too late, the portion too small, the guest unfed, the wrong person served first? 43. What about eating is talked about, argued over, joked about? 44. What is fixed by rule, by whom, and what happens when the rule is broken? 45. Is eating theorized here, in a dietetics, a scripture, a science, and who holds the theory?

Counterparts. 46. Which counterparts in eating do not respond: the grain, the fire, the drought, the price? 47. Which responses come from one's own body alone? 48. Which counterparts respond to one's responses: the co-eater, the host, the child being fed, the animal that must be kept alive today to be eaten later, the deity who is fed before the family eats?

Consequential difference. 49. If the composition of the diet changed while everything else remained, what in the coordination would change? 50. If commensality changed while the diet remained, what would change? 51. Which conspicuous difference between the eating of this place and of another is, for the process of keeping these people fed, no difference at all? 52. Which unnoticed difference would, if altered, alter who eats and who does not?

VII. Part Two: Sleeping

Two cautions belong at the head of this part, because without them its queries would produce a record too tidy for what they describe. The first concerns the object itself. Sleeping and waking are not always cut apart as cleanly as the queries below must, for economy, presuppose. In many mesocosms the two shade into one another: a person may be described as asleep in body and alert in whatever moves during sleep, or as neither fully asleep nor fully awake, and the line, where one is drawn at all, falls in a different place than the observer's own habit would suggest. The observer should establish where, and whether, such a line is drawn here before answering anything else in this part, and should never import a line from elsewhere in its place. The second caution concerns danger. In a great many of the mesocosms this manual is meant to serve, sleep is not experienced as safe withdrawal but as a state in which something of the sleeper, breath, shadow, name, a part sometimes called a soul, loosens from the body and may travel, be delayed, be waylaid, or fail to return. Where this is so, sleep sits at the point where embodiment, being-with, and multisymbolization meet most sharply, because the measures taken against the danger, who watches, how a sleeper may safely be woken, what is done when someone does not wake as expected, are bodily, social, and cosmological acts at once, and because the specialist called upon to recover what has gone missing often works by entering a state modelled on sleep itself, retracing in trance or dream the path the missing part is held to have taken. These two cautions are not exceptions to be noted once and set aside. They run through every group of queries that follows.

Embodiment. 1. Is a line drawn here between sleeping and waking, and where does it fall: is there a state held to be both, or neither, and what is it called? 2. How is tiredness recognized, in oneself and in others? 3. Who is allowed to be tired, and who is not, and what does it mean to be tired at the wrong time? 4. When do people sleep: at one stretch, in two, in several, by day as well as by night? 5. For how long, and who sleeps longest and shortest, and is either remarked upon? 6. Where in the body is sleep felt to begin and to end? 7. How do infants sleep, and how is their sleep brought about: rocking, suckling, carrying, singing, darkness, silence, or none of these? 8. How do the old sleep, and the ill, and the pregnant, and the bereaved? 9. What is done with the body in sleep: posture, covering, exposure, which side is turned to the wall and which to the door? 10. What wakes people: light, cold, hunger, noise, animals, a call, a clock? 11. Is it dangerous to wake someone suddenly, before their own time, or from very deep sleep, and what is thought to happen if it is done wrongly? 12. Is there sleep by day, who takes it, and is it counted as sleep? 13. Is sleeplessness known, named, treated, and by whom? 14. What is done with dreams: are they told, to whom, when, and does telling them change anything?

Being-with. 15. Who sleeps with whom, in one space, one bed, under one covering, and who never does? 16. Who is kept awake so that others may sleep: the watch, the nurse, the mother, the herder, the guard, the one who tends the fire? 17. Who watches over a sleeper's safety beyond the merely physical, and against what: sorcery, a wandering spirit, the attentions of the dead? 18. In what order do people go to sleep and wake, who is first and who is last, and who decides? 19. Who may be woken, by whom, in what manner, and for what? 20. What is done for someone who cannot sleep, and by whom? 21. How is the sleep of the sick guarded, and the sleep of the dying, and who sits with them? 22. Who may sleep near strangers, and where do strangers sleep? 23. Which animals sleep with people, near people, or on their behalf?

Dwelling. 24. How long is the night here, and how does it change across the year? 25. How cold does it become, and what is the relation between sleep and warmth? 26. What is in the dark: insects, predators, weather, thieves, spirits? 27. Are there places or hours in which sleep is avoided because whatever wanders in sleep is thought to be more easily lost, waylaid, or taken there? 28. Where is it possible to sleep safely and where not, and who decides? 29. How do the ground, the damp, the wind, and the altitude shape where and how people lie down? 30. Do people sleep differently in the wet season and the dry, in summer and winter, on the move and at rest?

Multimateriality, as auxiliary. 31. On what and under what do people sleep, and who made these things, and who owns them? 32. Is there a built enclosure for sleep, and is it also used for eating, work, storage, or animals? 33. What is done to the door at night? 34. What light is kept, and what fire, and by whom? 35. What is done to keep insects, cold, heat, and noise away, and does it work? 36. Is there a clock, a bell, a horn, a call that marks sleeping and waking, and who sounds it? 37. Are there objects that must be present for sleep to be possible: a pillow, an amulet, a weapon, a lamp, a telephone? 38. Which of these made things could be removed without the stake failing, and which could not?

Multisymbolization, as auxiliary. 39. What are the words for sleep, drowsiness, deep sleep, waking, napping, dreaming, and for the one who sleeps too much or too little? 40. What is said at bedtime and on waking: prayer, song, blessing, story, instruction, nothing? 41. Is there a commercial or mass-produced story, song, or programme made specifically to install a norm of sleep in children, and does the norm it shows match or work against what actually happens in this household? 42. Are there rules of sleep: bedtimes, curfews, sleeping rotas, prohibitions on sleeping at certain times or in certain places? 43. Is sleep a matter of expertise here, who claims to know how one should sleep, and what do they prescribe? 44. Is sleep counted, timed, recorded, or sold? 45. Is there a substance or device that produces or suppresses sleep directly, on command, independent of whatever signal the body would otherwise give, and is the state it produces held to be the real thing, a lesser substitute for it, or something of a different kind entirely? 46. What do dreams mean, and who is entitled to say? 47. Is any part of the person, breath, shadow, name, a soul or vital principle, held to leave the body in sleep, and where is it held to go? 48. Can this part be delayed, waylaid, captured, or kept from returning, and what follows for the sleeper if it does not come back? 49. What is done to protect it while it is away: a light left burning, a name withheld, a door left ajar or barred, a substance placed on or beside the sleeper, a mark made on the skin? 50. If it is lost, who can recover it, and does that person work by entering a state resembling sleep or dream themselves, retracing the route the lost part is held to have taken? 51. Is the healer's own dream or trance treated as a different kind of event from an ordinary sleeper's dream, or as the same kind of event put to a deliberate and disciplined use? 52. Are there stories in which sleep is the turning point: the sleeper who missed the event, the dream that foretold, the one who could not be woken, the one whose missing part was brought home?

Levels. 53. What in the sleeping of this place is done by everyone without remark? 54. What is felt as wrong before it is said: the child awake, the snorer, the late riser, the one asleep in the day? 55. What about sleep is spoken of, complained of, joked about? 56. What is fixed by rule, and who enforces it, and against whom? 57. Is there an organized effort here to change that rule itself, arguing that the current arrangement of the stake is wrong, and what alternative coordination does it propose in its place? 58. Is sleep theorized here, and by whom? 59. Once a way of meeting this stake is named as wrong, deviant, or disordered by someone with the power to act on the name, what follows: correction, medication, exclusion, punishment, or nothing at all?

Counterparts. 60. Which counterparts in sleep do not respond: the dark, the cold, the hard ground, the length of the night? 61. Which responses come from one's own body alone? 62. Which counterparts respond to one's responses: the co-sleeper, the infant, the one on watch, the dog, the neighbour on the other side of the wall? 63. Is the part that wanders in sleep treated as still the sleeper, as something that must be called back by name or by rite, or as something only a specialist may address on the sleeper's behalf? 64. Which counterparts are held to intercept or threaten it, sorcerers, spirits of place, the recently dead, and do these answer to the same measures that protect the sleeping body, or to different ones entirely?

Responsibility. 65. Is a person held answerable for what the body does while asleep: violence, wandering, eating, speech, harm to others or to oneself? 66. Who decides whether such an act belongs to the sleeper or is held to have happened to them, or through them, and by what test? 67. Does the answer differ by what was done, by who was harmed, or by whether the person is already known as a troubled sleeper? 68. Is there a remedy short of blame, a watch kept over a known sleepwalker, a lock, a separate space, a rite, rather than a punishment sought after the fact?

Consequential difference. 69. If the enclosure changed while co-sleeping remained, what would change? 70. If the watch were removed, who would sleep, and who would not? 71. If the belief that something may be lost in sleep were absent, which of the protective coordination described above would still be done, for other reasons, and which would simply stop? 72. Which conspicuous difference between the sleep of this place and of another is, for the process of keeping these people rested and safe through the night, no difference at all? 73. Which unnoticed difference would, if altered, alter who sleeps?

VIII. Part Three: Where Eating and Sleeping Meet

Section IV proposed eating and sleeping as paired entry points on the strength of what they share: tempo, non-delegability, daily contact with dwelling, density of auxiliary accretion. That pairing has so far been kept only side by side. Part One asked, once, how the timing of eating stands to the timing of sleep; Part Two asked nothing symmetrical back. But a great deal of what people actually do, and believe, at each stake concerns the other stake directly: what is eaten to bring on sleep or to keep it off, what is avoided before bed and why, what a fast does to a household's whole night, what an infant's feeding does to a mother's rest. This is not a third stake. It is the interface between the two already named, and it needs its own queries because the interface carries its own coordination, its own folk theory, and its own institutions, none of which either part above was built to catch on its own.

Embodiment. 1. Does eating induce sleep, resist it, or do both depending on what and how much is eaten, and is this named here? 2. Is there a recognized after-meal drowsiness, and is it fought, indulged, or scheduled for, as in a set retreat from work at a fixed hour of the day? 3. Does hunger keep people awake, and is a small meal or a snack used deliberately to permit sleep to come? 4. Does thirst, or its opposite, drinking too much before sleep, govern when people rise in the night? 5. Do the very old, the very young, the ill, or the pregnant show a different relation between eating and sleeping than the rest of the household, and is this noticed or provided for?

Multimateriality and multisymbolization, as auxiliaries. 6. What is eaten or drunk specifically to bring on sleep, and what is it believed to do? 7. What is eaten or drunk specifically to keep sleep away, and at what hour is its use no longer thought safe, and is that hour observed? 8. Are there foods, spices, or combinations avoided before sleep, and what harm are they thought to cause: bad dreams, a restless night, an unquiet spirit, or plain indigestion? 9. Is a stimulant substance used here in a manner or at an hour that would elsewhere be thought to prevent sleep, and how is this reconciled locally: by a claimed tolerance, a different theory of the substance, a different theory of sleep, or no reconciliation offered at all? 10. Is there a medicine taken here for some complaint that has nothing to do with either stake, whose known effect on appetite or on sleep is remarked upon, warned against, or simply endured as the price of the cure? 11. Is a medicine's effect on sleep, whether it brings drowsiness or drives sleep off, taken as evidence of whether the medicine is working for what it was actually prescribed to treat, and does the weight given to that evidence differ by who is prescribing and who is taking it? 12. Is alcohol, cannabis, or another substance taken here for reasons unconnected to either stake, and are its effects on appetite and on sleep known and weighed together, or treated as two separate and unrelated facts about the same substance? 13. Where such a substance's effect on one stake is welcomed and its effect on the other is not, which effect governs how much is taken and when? 14. Is fasting paired with wakefulness or with altered sleep in religious or ceremonial observance, and does the fast restructure the sleeping pattern of the whole household for its duration, or only the faster's own? 15. Is there a rule about how long before sleep a meal should end, and is it given as a rule of digestion, of piety, of hospitality, or of household order? 16. Does weaning, or the ending of night feeding, mark the point at which an infant is said to sleep through, and whose sleep is held to change first, the infant's or the mother's?

Levels and institutions. 17. Is the last meal held to end the day, or is sleep held to end it, and which is blamed when the other runs late? 18. Are there occasions that combine eating and sleeping into a single event: a wake, a night feast, a vigil kept with food, a wedding night prepared with both? 19. Does the same room or structure serve both eating and sleeping, in what order across a day, and is that order ever reversed for a particular occasion? 20. What is a person expected to do upon waking, before eating, and how long does that interval last, and is it named?

Consequential difference. 21. If the substances used to induce or resist sleep changed while the folk theory explaining their effect stayed the same, what would change; and if the theory changed while the substances stayed the same, what would change instead? 22. Which belief about a food's or a medicine's effect on sleep is, on the evidence available to the observer, doing no work beyond organizing when something is taken, and which is doing real work in how people actually feel and act afterward?

IX. Part Four: The Further Stakes

The remaining stakes are treated more briefly, and for each the place it occupied in the old handbook is noted, since in every case the same operation can be seen at work.

Breathing and warmth are the fastest stakes, and for that reason they are rarely organized at all. Where they are, the organization is decisive and worth recording in full: the hearth in a closed dwelling and the smoke it produces, the altitude at which newcomers cannot work, the diving ground, the winter in which a night outdoors is fatal. 1. Under what conditions here does breath come under pressure, and what is done? 2. How is warmth kept through the night, by whom, and for whom first? 3. Which auxiliaries, clothing, fire, walls, serve warmth, and which of them is also the means of something else? The old handbook measured respiration in the first part, asked whether the people bore cold well, and placed Clothing at the head of the second part with no connection drawn between the three.

Drinking is the companion stake of eating and is separated from it here only because water is fetched where food is grown. 4. Who carries water, how far, how often, and at what hour? 5. What is drunk that is not water, by whom, and is any of it withheld from anyone? 6. Is thirst named and graded as hunger is? The old handbook has no heading for water, though it appears under Navigation and Swimming.

Elimination is the stake the old handbook confined to the physiological query whether there were peculiarities of the excretory functions. 7. Where is it done, when, and who may see? 8. Who cleans, and what is done with what is removed? 9. Is it a matter of rule, of shame, of health, or of nothing?

Movement and rest are the stakes of labour and the alternation of exertion and recovery. The old handbook measured them under Physical Powers, asking what weight a native would carry, how far, and for how many days without suffering. 10. Who carries what, and who is carried? 11. When is rest permitted, to whom, and who decides? 12. What is the sign that someone has worked past what the body can bear, and what is done?

Birth and the care of the newborn are the stakes at which one being's stakes are met entirely by others. The old handbook split them across Reproduction, in the medical sections, and Marital Relations, Widows, Infanticide, Causes that Limit Population, and Education in the ethnographic part. 13. Who is present at birth, and who is excluded? 14. Who feeds the newborn, and who sleeps beside it, and for how long does this last? 15. What is the interval within which the newborn's stakes must be met by others, and how is the burden of that interval distributed? 16. What is done for an infant that will not feed or will not sleep?

Illness and injury are the stakes at which the meeting of all the others is disrupted. The old handbook recorded them twice, as Pathology, Medicine, Surgery, and Therapeutics in the first part and as Superstitions, Magic and Witchcraft, and Religion in the second, the same sickbed visited by a medical man and by a folklorist who did not compare notes. 17. Who is called first, and who touches the sick person? 18. Who names what is wrong, and can the name be contested? 19. Who feeds the sick, and who sleeps beside them? 20. What is prescribed, and does the prescription concern food, sleep, movement, or company?

Death and the dead close the order. The stake here belongs to the living. The old handbook has no heading for dying and one for Burials. 21. Who stops eating when someone dies, and for how long, and who makes them eat again? 22. Who does not sleep, and who keeps the vigil? 23. Is the dead person still fed, still spoken to, still visited at night, and is the dead person held to respond?

X. Part Five: The Auxiliaries Reconsidered

The headings the old handbook devoted to made things and to symbols have been absorbed into the queries above, and the observer who arrives with the older training will want to know what has become of them. The answer is an instruction. For every material or symbolic auxiliary encountered, ask which stakes it enters and what it does there. Clothing enters warmth, sleep, and being-with, and may enter eating where certain garments are worn at meals. A dwelling enters sleep, eating, birth, illness, and death, and the question of which of these it serves first is the question of what the dwelling is for. Fire enters eating, warmth, and the lighting of the night. Writing enters wherever a stake is recorded, rationed, timed, or promised. Money enters wherever food, water, shelter, or care is bought. Government enters wherever a stake is guaranteed to some and denied to others. Religion enters wherever the meeting of a stake is addressed to a counterpart held to respond, wherever the harvest is prayed for, the sleeper commended, the sick anointed, and the dead fed. None of these is a domain; each is a mode in which stakes are met, and each can be followed from stake to stake.

One caution is essential, because it is the point at which hierarchy would try to re-enter this manual as it re-entered the discipline after the rankings had been abandoned. Auxiliaries can become staked. Money is no stake for the organism, but it becomes one for a person in a world where food is had only for money, and the failure of money is then tolerable for exactly as long as the failure of food. Writing becomes a stake where entitlement to shelter exists only on paper. The clock becomes a stake where sleep is permitted only by timetable and the timetable is enforced. The observer must record wherever an auxiliary has acquired a bounded interval of tolerable failure, and by what means, since the means will always be institutional: a rule, an office, a record, a price. 24. Which auxiliaries here have become stakes, and when: is the change within living memory? 25. For whom was it felt first, and by what institution was it enforced? 26. What happens to the person for whom the auxiliary fails?

A second distinction cuts across the first and should not be confused with it. Some auxiliaries support a stake without touching the organism's own regulation of it: a granary supports eating without altering hunger, a bed supports sleep without altering tiredness. Others substitute for that regulation directly, producing or suppressing the bodily state itself, on command, independent of whatever signal the body would otherwise give. A substance that brings on sleep regardless of tiredness, or removes tiredness regardless of sleep, is not doing what a bed does; it is standing in for the organism's own coordination rather than assisting it, and the same holds for a substance that manufactures or suppresses appetite independent of hunger. The observer should mark this distinction wherever it is found, and should ask further whether the produced state is held locally to be the same as the one it replaces, a lesser substitute for it, or something of a different kind entirely, since the answer is rarely a matter of chemistry alone.

From this follows a rule the old handbook could not have stated. A world with more auxiliaries is not a world in which more stakes are met; it may be a world in which more stakes have been created. The number of made things and the elaboration of symbols are not an index of anything, and the observer should never count them as one. The only measure this manual permits is the one it began with: whether the stakes of living are met, for whom, and at what cost in the coordination of others.

XI. Instructions for Comparison

The old handbook's comparisons were made in London, by people who had never been to the places compared, from schedules filled in by people who had. This manual expects the observer to compare, and it lays down the conditions under which comparison is permitted. Before two cases are set beside one another, the observer must specify which stake is in question and what process of meeting it is to be explained. Only then may the observer ask which differences between the cases would alter that process, which differences would not, and which apparently trivial difference turns out to be the one on which the whole coordination depends.

Five questions precede every comparison. What process is being explained? What dimensions could plausibly alter it? What is being excluded from consideration, and on what grounds? What evidence would show that a conspicuous difference between the cases is, for this process, irrelevant? What evidence would show that an overlooked difference is, for this process, consequential? A sixth follows. Would the comparison have been formulated in the same way if neither case were being treated as the reference point against which the other is measured?

Two rules apply that the old handbook did not need. Compare only like stakes: sleeping with sleeping, the feeding of infants with the feeding of infants. And admit in advance the two findings that a comparison by inherited domains cannot produce: that two places may meet the same stake with different auxiliaries and the same coordination, and that two places may meet it with the same auxiliaries and entirely different coordination. Two households may sleep on identical mattresses under identical roofs, and in one the door is barred and in the other a child sleeps across the threshold, and the process of getting safely through the night is not the same process. Two villages may have nothing in common in what they eat and be organized identically in who eats last. The finding this manual is built to make possible is the irrelevance of the conspicuous, and the observer should expect to make it often.

XII. Concluding Note

This manual cannot do what the old one could not do either. It cannot remove selection. It selects the stakes of living as the ground of its queries, and it claims for that selection only what can be claimed: that the stakes were selected first by living itself, long before any discipline arrived to record them, and that a manual which follows that prior selection has a warrant a list of disciplinary subjects lacks. Rather than telling the observer what a people has, a kinship system, a religion, a technology, and then asking for the details, it tells the observer what every living being must do and asks how it is done here.

The risk the manual runs is the one it was written against. Numbered queries harden into a checklist, the checklist is taught, and within a generation the stakes have become headings of exactly the kind whose history this manual set out to interrupt, with sleep in section VII and the reasons for its being there forgotten. Against that hardening the old handbook could offer nothing, because it did not know it was selecting. This one can offer the instruction that it knows, and that the observer should reopen the manual at the point where a stake in the field does not fit its queries, since that point is where the manual has stopped following living and started imposing on it.