Page 51 - Hrobat Virloget, Katja, et al., eds. (2015). Stone narratives: heritage, mobility, performance. University of Primorska Press, Koper.
P. 51
planting, growing and breeding stones
hundred years ago. He brought it from the field because it was entirely different from the local
flints. At the time, it was no larger than two fists. Villagers eventually extended this belief onto
their local stone. Some claimed that picking flints from the fields was useless as new flints will
always grow in the field from previous flints (Evans, 1956). Apparently, Evans was not aware
that he stumbled upon a widely held belief as he focused so sharply on the explanation of it by
the strangeness of the faraway erratic which was pushed to its location by the Ice Sheet in pre-
historic time. Already at the beginning of the century, another folklorist, Charlotte Sophia
Burne (1996[1914], pp. 23–24), reported for Suffolk the following: »One may still meet
with agricultural laborers who believe that stones grow. Suffolk farmers have been heard to
state that the earth produces them spontaneously, and a piece of ‘pudding-stone’, or con-
glomerate, has been pointed out as a mother stone, the parent of small pebbles.«
One would not expect to come across the evidence of stone growing beliefs also in the
work of famous Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget was interested in the child’s conception
of the world through different stages of intellectual development. The technique of interview-
ing he applied to this research should not be mixed with ethnography, of course, but the under-
lying evolutionist assumptions that children and savages share most primitive beliefs is never
far away. To stimulate children, he also showed them the pebbles he collected on the shore of the
Arve River in Geneva. From the interviews, he concluded that many children aged between
4 and 6 think »that the pieces of stone grow like plants. There are stone seeds and stones
grow from them. You plant them and they grow, etc.« (Piaget, 1929, p. 341)
Stones and syncretism
The cases of belief in growing stones that we described above come either from Europe or
from other continents. When taken together, they suggest the belief in growing stones to
be distributed across the continents. They do not suggest that local beliefs might be a re-
sult of an interaction between the continents, with Europe, as an imperialist continent, be-
ing an obvious part of the interaction. To be sure, such interaction cannot be excluded a
priori. With Albert Camus’ experience from Brazil we can take a step further as he takes
us to a terrain of syncretic rituals. In the summer of 1949, Camus was attending a lecture
tour across South America, organized by the French Foreign Ministry. In Brazil, he visited
several places, not all of them part of the official program, to see macumba and candomblé
dances. He wrote about these trips in his journal from the tour (published posthumously
as Journaux de voyage, 1978). He was clearly attracted by them and admitted that he had a
»reverse prejudice« towards the blacks (Camus, 1999, p. 93), but the entries in the journal
suggest that he did not like the macumba and even less the candomblé. He referred to them
as a »mixture of Catholicism and African rituals« and »Catholicism of the blacks here«;
he identified Ogun with »our Saint George« and characterized the candomblé he saw in
Bahia as »Mediocre dances expressing degenerated rituals« (1999, pp. 85, 104–105). In the
town of Iguape, where Camus travelled from São Paulo to attend a big religious procession,
he came across the ritual of carrying a heavy stone in the church:
In front of a grotto, some métis, mulattoes and the first gauchos that I’ve seen wait patiently to ob-
tain some pieces of the ‘growing stone’. In fact Iguape is a city where an effigy of the Good Jesus
was found in the water by some fishermen who came to this grotto to wash it. Ever since, a stone
grows there ineluctably, and people come to chisel off beneficent pieces of it. (1999, p. 124)
49
hundred years ago. He brought it from the field because it was entirely different from the local
flints. At the time, it was no larger than two fists. Villagers eventually extended this belief onto
their local stone. Some claimed that picking flints from the fields was useless as new flints will
always grow in the field from previous flints (Evans, 1956). Apparently, Evans was not aware
that he stumbled upon a widely held belief as he focused so sharply on the explanation of it by
the strangeness of the faraway erratic which was pushed to its location by the Ice Sheet in pre-
historic time. Already at the beginning of the century, another folklorist, Charlotte Sophia
Burne (1996[1914], pp. 23–24), reported for Suffolk the following: »One may still meet
with agricultural laborers who believe that stones grow. Suffolk farmers have been heard to
state that the earth produces them spontaneously, and a piece of ‘pudding-stone’, or con-
glomerate, has been pointed out as a mother stone, the parent of small pebbles.«
One would not expect to come across the evidence of stone growing beliefs also in the
work of famous Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget was interested in the child’s conception
of the world through different stages of intellectual development. The technique of interview-
ing he applied to this research should not be mixed with ethnography, of course, but the under-
lying evolutionist assumptions that children and savages share most primitive beliefs is never
far away. To stimulate children, he also showed them the pebbles he collected on the shore of the
Arve River in Geneva. From the interviews, he concluded that many children aged between
4 and 6 think »that the pieces of stone grow like plants. There are stone seeds and stones
grow from them. You plant them and they grow, etc.« (Piaget, 1929, p. 341)
Stones and syncretism
The cases of belief in growing stones that we described above come either from Europe or
from other continents. When taken together, they suggest the belief in growing stones to
be distributed across the continents. They do not suggest that local beliefs might be a re-
sult of an interaction between the continents, with Europe, as an imperialist continent, be-
ing an obvious part of the interaction. To be sure, such interaction cannot be excluded a
priori. With Albert Camus’ experience from Brazil we can take a step further as he takes
us to a terrain of syncretic rituals. In the summer of 1949, Camus was attending a lecture
tour across South America, organized by the French Foreign Ministry. In Brazil, he visited
several places, not all of them part of the official program, to see macumba and candomblé
dances. He wrote about these trips in his journal from the tour (published posthumously
as Journaux de voyage, 1978). He was clearly attracted by them and admitted that he had a
»reverse prejudice« towards the blacks (Camus, 1999, p. 93), but the entries in the journal
suggest that he did not like the macumba and even less the candomblé. He referred to them
as a »mixture of Catholicism and African rituals« and »Catholicism of the blacks here«;
he identified Ogun with »our Saint George« and characterized the candomblé he saw in
Bahia as »Mediocre dances expressing degenerated rituals« (1999, pp. 85, 104–105). In the
town of Iguape, where Camus travelled from São Paulo to attend a big religious procession,
he came across the ritual of carrying a heavy stone in the church:
In front of a grotto, some métis, mulattoes and the first gauchos that I’ve seen wait patiently to ob-
tain some pieces of the ‘growing stone’. In fact Iguape is a city where an effigy of the Good Jesus
was found in the water by some fishermen who came to this grotto to wash it. Ever since, a stone
grows there ineluctably, and people come to chisel off beneficent pieces of it. (1999, p. 124)
49
