Forcing the body to speak.

So what is a craniotome? A craniotome is a tool used in trepanation, or in craniotomy. These words refer to a surgery in which a hole is drilled into a person’s skull. I first encountered this phenomenon in an article for Spin magazine (“A Hole in the Head” by Susan Perry, May 1998). The article described New Age adherents who believe that trepanation leads to an opening of consciousness. These New Agers traced this knowledge to a Mesoamerican pre-Columbian religious practice. A very brief Internet search informed me that trepanation is one of the first forms of surgery, and evidence of it has been found in skulls since the Neolithic age. Craniotomy continues today, and is apparently common. While craniotomy may have a legitimate past and present, I still think the people who engage in it are odd. It will always signify frightening people, willing to drill a hole into their heads to attain an otherness that I cannot and will not understand. This is where my own comprehension, where my own morality, will not allow me to go any further. I cannot touch them, I am unwilling to, and this is a space where our common language (English) leaves me bereft.

Craniotome evokes thoughts of Bataille, a man so strange and fascinating that you can't help but be influenced by his thought. While Bataille was not in any way a New Age practitioner, it is clear from his writing that he was fascinated with anthropology. He was fascinated with the specifically spiritual aspects of colonized others. Along the same lines, he was obsessed with Otherness, and wrote extensively on it. Much of his writing spoke of the otherness of the human body and the things the body does (things that are utterly common to us) – an eye, sex, the anus, death. What are the limits of the body? But even further, what are the limits of our own conceptions of our body? One reason I am unwilling to fully conceptualize self-trepanation is because I am unwilling to even think of doing this to myself. Trepanning is somewhere beyond my own reasoning ability and similarly, the embodiment of the practice is beyond my language. Even if these things could be described, I would not want to hear them. These are practices that push at my very own limits of knowing the Other.

This has always been one of anthropology’s projects: attempting to know the Other. From Durkheim, to Mauss, to the reiterations we see in Bataille. However, it goes even further than this. Anthropology is not just about trying to understand the Other, it is about trying to place the Other into a conceptual framework in which it will not fit. To denounce and explain the Other through social theory, through psychology, through a science of economics. Yet, all these theories only make us think that we know about Them. Bataille teaches us that sometimes we come up against something wholly familiar to us, and when the light diffracts against it, it becomes something indescribable and unknowable. An eye, the sun, sex and death. Thus, we do not even fully know things that we judge as banal.

With craniotome I hope to probe these spaces that are beyond comprehension. To probe these spaces where I might not have the language nor tools to decipher. Not everything must be spoken of or explained, but I will embark on this curious journey nonetheless.